The Mysterious Death of Stalin's Only Friend

Access any device, any time, from anywhere for FREE with AnyDesk: https://anydesk.com/spectacles On December 1, 1934, Leonid Nikolaev entered the Smolny Institute. The Soviet Union would never be the same. — Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/spectaclesmedia Get our videos one week early: https://go.nebula.tv/spectacles Hang out on our Discord: https://discord.gg/VWcpybH683 Check out our script: https://www.spectacles.news/this-is-the-ussrs-jfk-mystery/ For citations, turn on CC. Footnotes below ↓ — About us: Spectacles is a love letter to democracy, its values, its caretakers, and its ideas. Around the world, individual rights and representative government are facing unprecedented attacks from the forces of reaction and revisionism. But despite liberal democracy’s real shortcomings and today’s all-too-fashionable cynicism, we remain committed to its preservation and improvement. Join us as we explore just what liberal democracy is, how it comes about, and how it can best be maintained in a changing world. — SOURCES A = Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (Hill and Wang, New York: 1999). B = Lenoe, Matthew E. The Kirov Murder and Soviet History. Yale University Press, 25 May 2010. C = Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin, Vol. II. Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941. London, Penguin Books Ltd, 2017. D = Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich, Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 24-25 February 1956. E = “Letter of an Old Bolshevik," https://archive.org/details/letter_of_an_old_bolshevik__a_key_to_the_moscow_trials/page/n15/mode/2up F = Matthew Lenoe, “Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?” in The Journal of Modern History 74 no. 2 (June 2002). — CITATIONS [^1]: A,189 [^2]: A,189-190 [^3]: B,152 [^4]: B,157 [^5]: B,157-158,167. The source and intent of the second shot is a matter of dispute. [^6]: A,30-32 [^7]: A,91 [^8]: A,104 [^9]: B,70-73 [^10]: A,125-128 [^11]: B,85 [^12]: B,82/96;C,180 [^13]: A,170-172 [^14]: A,172 [^15]: A,172 [^16]: A,179-181 [^17]: C,194 [^18]: B,157 [^19]: B,251 [^20]: B,259 [^21]: ??? [^22]: C,208 [^23]: B,281-284 [^24]: B,288 [^25]: B,309 [^26]: B,310 [^27]: C,213 [^28]: C,219 [^29]: B,456 [^30]: C,305 [^31]: B,463-465 [^32]: B,471-478 [^33]: B,477 [^34]: B,478-480 [^35]: B,468 [^36]: C,305 [^37]: B,647 [^38]: B,229 [^39]: B,398 [^40]: B,397 [^41]: B,288-289 [^42]: B,283 [^43]: B,281 [^44]: D [^45]: A,263-264 [^46]: E,14 [^47]: B,112-113 [^48]: A,173 [^49]: A,189 [^50]: A,200 [^51]: B,407 [^52]: B,161 [^53]: B,162 [^54]: B,427 [^55]: B,413-427. This section of Lenoe’s book is remarkably thorough, with input from several independent experts with excellent credentials. It is dense and impossible to reproduce worthily here. For more details, please read his work. [^56]: B,477-478 [^57]: B,113-114 [^58]: B,533-534 [^59]: F,374 [^60]: F,378 [^61]: C,198 [^62]: B,210 [^63]: C,198 [^64]: B,201-205 [^65]: B,216 [^66]: B,239 [^67]: B,249 [^68]: B,226 — 00:00 MURDER 02:36 KIROV 09:04 INVESTIGATION 13:43 CONSPIRACY 17:43 IS IT TRUE? 22:38 STALIN DID IT 27:56 OR DID HE? 30:45 A LONE GUNMAN 36:06 HOW ONE DEATH BECOMES ONE MILLION — Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images "Low-Poly Mosin Nagant" (https://skfb.ly/6uXIL) by TastyTony is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).