The Kirov murder and Soviet society: Propaganda and popular opinion in Leningrad, 1934-1935

This dissertation examines the relationship between government propaganda, popular beliefs, and the political participation of ordinary citizens in the Stalin terror. Based largely on newly available archival materials from Moscow and St. Petersburg, the study focuses on government portrayals of two events often considered to have been turning points in the terror: the murder of Communist Party leader Sergei M. Kirov on 1 December 1934 and the exile of class-alien elements from Leningrad in March 1935. The regime expended a great deal of time and effort attempting to explain the significance of these events to a broad section of the population. Propagandists and party organizers then filed voluminous reports describing people\u27s reactions to the propaganda and their opinions on many other subjects. Leningraders demonstrated a wide variety of beliefs, but many were skeptical toward the government\u27s frequently changing construction of enemies. In fact, the propaganda campaign around Kirov\u27s murder backfired in that, instead of encouraging people to rally closer around the party and Stalin, as the newspapers and radio repeatedly urged them to do, it unleashed a torrent of opposition against the regime and its leaders. Moreover, the propaganda was unsuccessful because people were more concerned with pressing economic issues than with possible political conspiracies. Realizing the ineffectiveness of its propaganda, the regime discovered it could mobilize public opinion by turning a source of weakness in its support--complaints about the economy--into a source of strength. By maintaining that there were still hidden enemies in the nation who were hoarding scarce commodities, the regime encouraged people to deflect their anger away from the government and toward each other instead. This study is thus a contribution to discussion on the relative weights of compulsion, belief, and opportunism in ordinary people\u27s responses to social violence in states with government-controlled media and extensive police networks, and on the effect of poverty and social structure on those responses