Sergei Mironovich Kirov (1886 – 1934) was a prominent Russian revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He was a close, personal friend to Joseph Stalin, and his death in 1934 was used as a pretext to launch the Great Purge.

An Old Bolshevik, Kirov took part in early revolutionary activities against Tsarist Russia, for which he was arrested and imprisoned several times. He rose through the Communist Party ranks to become head of the party organisation in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo.

On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by a gunman at his offices in the Smolny Institute. There is a widespread belief that Joseph Stalin and elements of the NKVD were behind Kirov's assassination, but evidence for this claim remains lacking. Kirov's death was later used as a pretext for Stalin's escalation of repression against dissident elements of the party, culminating in the Great Purge of the late 1930s in which many of the Old Bolsheviks were arrested, expelled from the party, and executed. Complicity in Kirov's assassination was a common charge to which the accused confessed in the show trials of the period.



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