Sergey Kirov – in memoirs of contemporaries

90 years ago, on December 1, 1934, during the middle of a working day in Smolny, Sergei Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad Regional and City Committees of the CPSU(b), was fatally shot in his office.

Kirov had been leading the city on the banks of the Neva for almost nine years, since January 1926, when he spoke from the rostrum of the XVII Party Congress about the "huge successes" they had achieved. He said, "It's a fact! You want to live here, you can't deny it."

What was Kirov like in his personal life? The 1939 edition of Sergei Kirov: Memoirs of Leningrad Workers, an electronic copy of which is available on the Presidential Library's portal in the Sergei Kirov (1886-1934) collection, provides detailed descriptions of his personality.

A few days after Sergey's death, on December 17, 1934, the enterprise Krasnoputilovsky Plant was renamed Kirov Plant at the request of Krasnoputilov workers.

It's amazing how Kirov was aware of everything related to production, both main and secondary. For example, he spoke to the workshop secretary: "You need to know what kind of water the workers drink". He also drove the neighborhood children in a company car and went with Leningrad farmers to the Mariinsky Theatre, "taking off his coat and remaining in his uniform, helping unload the cars".

The authors of the book S. M. Kirov: A Brief Biographical Sketch (1936) describe Kirov's office as the center where all the threads of Leningrad's and the Leningrad region's gigantic construction converged.

Kirov was a man who loved reading and knew all the latest literary and artistic novelties, as well as the achievements of science and technology. However, his greatest passion was hunting. His contemporaries remembered him as a tireless hiker who could walk through the forests and swamps for dozens of kilometers without tiring. He was hardy and indefatigable, sometimes driving even his strongest companions to exhaustion, but he would then good-naturedly tease them. The driver Sidor Yudin describes this in detail in his book of memoirs of Leningrad workers.

Kirov was a popular politician who was frequently mentioned in the press. In the bibliographic index Sergei Mironovich Kirov in the Leningrad Press from 1935, it is mentioned that his name appeared 1,094 times in newspapers from 1926 until his tragic death.

Kirov was beloved by both the government and people, who said goodbye to him with tears in their eyes, rather than formally. This can be verified by reading the obituaries in the collection of the "Communist Youth" magazine (No. 23-24, 1934) at the Presidential Library's collections.

The collection Sergei Kirov (1886-1934) at the Presidential Library's portal contains materials that reveal little-known aspects of the life of this Soviet leader: memoirs from people who knew him, photos, periodicals, and rare book editions edited by Lavrenty Beria.