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UPI Archives
Thursday, Dec. 6, 1934
Soviet firing squads kill 66 as terrorists
MOSCOW, Dec. 6, 1934 (UP) -- Sergei Kirov, veteran and well-loved Bolshevik leader, was given a hero's funeral today as the bullet-torn bodies of 66 government enemies, including a woman, attested the government's determination that his assassination was not to be followed by others.
The woman was Zinaida Buligina. She and the others were convicted of being Terrorists. They were tried in secret, before military courts without right of appeal, under the emergency , "dictatorship of the proletariat" -- The Red Terror -- proclaimed after the assassination of Kirov, one of the Soviet Union's "Big Ten" and chief government agent at Leningrad, by Leonid Micoliev. They were executed at once.
The 66 were not charged with complicity in Kirov's murder. That seemed to be the result of a personal grudge Micoliev, a former communist official, held against Kirov.
But they died, while at Leningrad surgeons worked to save Micoliev from death by a self-inflicted bullet wound and injuries inflicted by the guards who seized him after he shot Kirov. They died to express the government's determination that Micoliev's act should not be a model for others, and Micoliev's recovery was sought so that he might be questioned and shot officially.
A few hours after the shattered bodies of the 66 dropped before the rifle volleys of their executioners -- 37 at Leningrad and 29 here -- Kirov's body was taken from its state catafalque in the Hall of Mirrors and cremated.
The thousands of workmen who had filed by it, day and night, since its arrival from Leningrad, went home to sleep and will return this afternoon for his funeral service.
Kirov was given a Red hero's funeral. His ashes were taken to the great Red square. Josef Stalin, Russia's ruler, Kirov's friend, co-worker and fellow member of the all-powerful Political Bureau, and all the other leaders of Bolshevism in Moscow gathered before the tomb of Nicolai Lenin in the Red square fronting the wall of the historic Kremlin which has been said to typify old Russia with its grim vast bulk.
In this officially religionless country there were no prayers or invocations to divine power. Men who had fought with Kirov from boyhood against czarism, who had endured with him imprisonment and exile, who had formed with him the committees that arranged for the seizure of the new Russian republic by the Bolsheviks, and who had worked tirelessly for years to restore Russia to its old status as a world power, stood on the platform one by one and eulogized him as the Bolshevik equivalent of a martyr.
He was accorded the honor of burial in the wall of the Kremlin along with those whose ashes interred in the wall testify to their importance to the Soviet Union.
The executions, as the order of the military collegium of the all-Russian Supreme Court to which their cases were remanded under the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," left alive five of the 71 whose arrests were announced Saturday night, a few hours after Kirov's assassination.
Also left were F.D. Medved, chief of the Leningrad branch of the Ministry of Interior; F.T. Fomkin, his assistant, and six other responsible officials were arrested and held for trial on the ground they were negligent in guarding Kirov.
It was not known how many more had been arrested or would be arrested.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International.
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