Kirov's Assassination and the Case for Stalin's Moscow Trials

On the 1st of December, 1934, top Soviet leader and Stalin's right-hand man, Kirov, was assassinated by party member Nikolaev.

It is this murder that becomes the catalyst for the investigations and trials that would uncover a conspiracy so treacherous that it could have rewritten the entire outcome of World War II.

In 1932, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, having failed to build any popular support for their opposition movements within the Central Committee, merged their separate plots into the only option they had left, an illegal underground network rife with terror tactics.

In a letter to his son, Sedov, Trotsky wrote, quote, "The proposal for a bloc seems to me to be completely acceptable," to which Sedov replied, "The bloc is organized."

It was members of this bloc who had ordered Nikolaev to assassinate Kirov.

Trotsky's plan had been to take advantage of a future war with Germany to foment revolution within Russia and overthrow Stalin.

Soviet official Reingold would later testify that the bloc's, quote, "fundamental aim was to remove by violence the leadership of the CPSU."

When war didn't immediately come, Trotsky's terrorist formation took matters into its own hands.

Operating through Soviet military traders as high up as General Tukhachevsky, the Red Army's second-in-command, they established contact with the Nazi General Staff and offered to sabotage Soviet defenses in exchange for Nazi and Japanese backing to seize power.

In September 1936, a Soviet newspaper published the following article by Krupskaya, Lenin's wife.

Quote, "Trotsky is now standing on the path of organizing terrorist attacks against Stalin.

Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their entire band of killers acted together with the German fascists and entered into a pact with the Gestapo."

The trial saw fifty-four Soviet officials confess to an elaborate counter-revolutionary plot, which included the planned assassination of Stalin and senior party leadership. Quote, "In the message, Trotsky developed the idea that it was necessary to assassinate Stalin."

The defendants confessed to active collaboration with Germany and Japan and the industrial sabotage against critical infrastructure.

Quote, "I know from my own experiences that a good deal of industrial sabotage was going on all the time in Soviet mines."

They also confessed to the organization of an armed insurrection intended to cede Soviet territory to foreign powers in exchange for political authority.

The Western narrative is that these were forced confessions.

Not only is there zero evidence to support this, it also completely ignores that many of the people arrested were moved to a special commission for exile due to insufficient evidence, and that defendants like Bukharin, who had advocated for Stalin's assassination as early as 1920,

confessed to some crimes while profusely denying others.

It ignores that both Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan were actively trying to destabilize the Soviet state from within.

It also ignores that even American Ambassador Davies, who attended the trials, concluded, quote, "The state had unquestionably proved its case.

To have assumed that the proceedings were staged as political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of Shakespeare."

If we have the evidence, why does the show trial narrative persist?

Well, because if the trials were legitimate, then the evil Stalin, thus evil communism story collapses and the trials become what they actually were, a government expelling traitors before facing the greatest military invasion in history.