Kremlin Plot is a 1935 criminal case in the Soviet Union about an assassination attempt on Joseph Stalin, which preceded the Great Purge.[1]
Plot
After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, the investigation led to the discovery of a plot in early 1935 to kill Joseph Stalin besides poor security measures for the Kremlin and harsh criticism of Stalin from the Kremlin working staff.[1]
In total, 110 people were investigated by the NKVD and only six of them made significant confessions of involvement. The leading conspirator was Mikhail Cherniavsky, a military Fourth Department officer who lost his Communist faith while studying chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology undercover. He became convinced that the Stalinist command economy could never compete with American capitalism and that it was necessary to replace Stalin as Soviet leader. On March 26, he confessed that he was part of a 'terrorist' assassination plot organized after the Kirov affair in the belief that equally poor security in the Kremlin could enable them to smuggle in pistols and shoot Stalin. No evidence shows that he was tortured, but he was persuaded to admit that he had been allegedly recruited by an American Trotskyist named Ryaskin when he was in America. When asked about the details two days later, he could provide none.[1]
Pressure to execute the plotters came from the NKVD and its head, Genrikh Yagoda, rather than Stalin himself. Unlike his later curt agreement with execution requests, Stalin only agreed with the execution of two people among a total of twenty-six people whose death was demanded. One was Mikhail Cherniavsky and the other was Alexei Sinelobov, a deputy commandant of the Kremlin, whose sentence was later commuted to 10 years' imprisonment.[1]
Relevant research
Relevant research was conducted by Svetlana Lukhova, whose probe into voluminous Soviet archives shed important light on the motivations of Stalin before the Great Purge.[1]