THE KIROV AFFAIR
Adam B. Ulam
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988
404 pp., $19.95
Let me try this one on you. Where was the best recent novel of Soviet political intrigue written? In Moscow, you say? Wrong. In Minsk? Wrong again. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's where. And who wrote it? A recent émigré from the Soviet Union now driving a cab in Boston? Not by a long shot. Adam B. Ulam, the author of The Kirov Affair, is Gurney Professor of History and Political Science at Harvard, and a writer better known for a dozen or so scholarly volumes dealing with the convolutions of Soviet ideology, strategy, and tactics. There were few intimations over the years that Ulam harbored literary ambitions as well, although discerning observers should have been alerted by the playfully French cinematic title of Dangerous Relations.
The title of Ulam's present book refers to the mysterious murder in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, Stalin's viceroy in Leningrad. Stalin supervised the investigation in person, and fourteen people were executed for their alleged complicity in the crime.
Officially, at the time, the murder was blamed on a sinister conspiracy of Stalin's enemies: Trotsky, from his exile abroad where he worked hand in hand with German intelligence transmitting all sorts of treasonous instructions to Kamenev and Zinoviev, they in turn putting their heads together with some other former Party leaders to devise heinous plans to assassinate Stalin, Voroshilov, and others in the Leader's closest entourage, so as to weaken the Soviet state, make it an easy prey for the fascist invader, and thus wreak vengeance for their rejection by the Soviet people.
The hysteria unleashed by the trails of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and many others did not, however, abate with the sentencing and executions. On the contrary, it continued to gather momentum, and ultimately resulted in a bloody purge of monstrous proportions in 1936 and 1937. That orgy of arrests, phony trails, mass executions, and exile decimated the country's ruling elite, including the officer corps of the Soviet army, which was nearly destroyed four years later by Hitler's divisions. This is to say nothing of the harm brought to millions of ordinary citizens by the purges, which also led to an enormous expansion of the network of forced labor camps. Thus, the magnitude of the horrors unleashed by Kirov's assassination is rivaled only by those of the nazi era. Of books published in the West on the subject of the aftermath of Kirov's death, two stand out: Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Most recently, there have been suggestions in the Soviet Union (including in literary works) of a suspicion long held by Western historians of Russia. The real perpetrator of Kirov's murder was probably Stalin himself.
It is against this background that Ulam presents, through a series of flashbacks, a young man who later becomes, in the early 1980s, a serious contender for the mantle of an ailing Soviet leader who bears a great resemblance to the late Leonid Brezhnev. As a mature man, Mikhail Alexandrovich Kondratiev, the hero of The Kirov Affair, embodies some traits of Nikolai Fedorenko, onetime Soviet delegate to the United Nations Security Council, and Anatoly Dobrynin, longtime
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