Sergei Kirov Term Analysis

Sofia Petrovna didn’t really understand what it was all about, she was bored and wanted to leave, but she was afraid it wasn’t the thing to do and glared at one of the typists who was making her way to the door.

Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the party and the Komsomol.

Two years before, after the murder of Kirov (Oh! What grim times those were! Patrols walked the streets…and when Comrade Stalin was about to arrive, the station square was cordoned off by troops…and there were troops lining all the streets as Stalin walked behind the coffin)—after Kirov’s murder there had also been many arrests, but at that time they first took all kinds of oppositionists, then old regime people, all kinds of “vons” and barons. But now it was doctors.

After the murder of Kirov they had sent away, as a member of the nobility, Madame Nezhentseva, an old friend of Sofia Petrovna’s—they had attended school together. Sofia Petrovna had been astonished: what connection could Madame Nezhentseva possibly have to the murder? She taught French in a school and lived just like everybody else. But Kolya had explained that it was necessary to rid Leningrad of unreliable elements. “And who exactly is this Madame Nezhentseva of yours anyway? You remember yourself, Mama, that she didn’t recognize Mayakovsky as a poet and always said that things were cheaper in the old days. She’s not a real Soviet person…”