Publisher's Synopsis
On 1st December 1934, Kirov, a senior member of the Leningrad Communist Party and second in power to Stalin, was assassinated by a gunman in his private office. This single event was the excuse which triggered one of the greatest state-organized massacres of all time. In the years that followed, literally millions of people were executed, accused of having been involved in the murder.;The level of official falsification was unparalleled. False confessions, conflicting explanations and contradictory evidence abound in this study, which concludes that there was only one man capable of planning a crime of such epic proportions and that was Josef Stalin himself.;Robert Conquest is the author of "The Great Terror", "The Harvest of Sorrow" and has also published a collection of poetry.
