Status Updates From Who Killed Kirov?: The Krem...

Fairly good so far.

D.B.Sorokin: "I asked Medved if Stalin revealed any interest by asking him the details of Kirov's assassination. In reply, Medved cursed and answered: 'Why in hell should he ask, if he knows better than myself the story of Kirov's assassination and that its organizers were Iagoda and Zaporozhets [both NKVD]'"

Trotsky: "On the surface relatively a second-rater himself among Bolshevik leaders, [Stalin] had already begun convincing a growing group of Bolshevik politicians eager for advancement that he was able to reward the faithful with political plums."

[Kirov] was not innately cruel or sadistic, but the brutalities of World War I and over two years of civil war were apparently enough to inure him to human suffering. As a Socialist Revolutionary leader later observed, such experiences "wiped out the value of human life -- both of one's own and of others. It hardened people not to care about the death of millions."

Lenin (1917) wrote "Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new [Provisional] government. We especially suspect Kerenskii. The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd Duma. No rapprochement with the other parties."