Sergey Kirov
Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary (1886-1934) · Russia · On the map · Politicians · Died at 48
Shot dead in his Leningrad offices in 1934, his murder gave Stalin the pretext for the Great Purge - a wave of show trials and executions that consumed the Soviet state.
Sergey Kirov is read about 1,175 times a day, in 58 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 12 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 117 days, one point a day.
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About this person
Born Kostrikov on 27 March 1886, he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as an early revolutionary in the Russian Empire. An Old Bolshevik and personal friend of Joseph Stalin, he rose through Communist Party ranks to head the party organization in Leningrad and win a seat on the Politburo. On 1 December 1934, Leonid Nikolaev shot and killed him at his offices in the Smolny Institute. Nikolaev and several alleged accomplices were convicted in a show trial and executed less than 30 days later. Stalin used the assassination as the catalyst for the Moscow trials and the Great Purge that followed.
