d against Stalin on the Ryutin case. Stalin saw Kirov as a threat from now on even though there is little evidence to suggest that Kirov was against Stalin on many issues. Kirov was murdered on December 1st 1934 by a man named Nikoaelev. Stalin was not directly implicated in the murder but it has been suggested that Stalin, in a sense, allowed the killing to take place by ensuring that certain circumstances enabled the killer to get near to Kirov. One can see the advantages of this to Stalin, on the one hand it silenced a potential opponent and on the other it enabled the widespread clamp down on political opposition. So even if Stalin had not been involved in a plot to eliminate Kirov he used the event to silence all opponents.The terror which followed the assassination took several different forms and involved mass deportations to the labour camps or Gulags or execution. The 'Show Trials' were among the most famous parts of the terror. In these trials Stalin's political opposition were accused, in the case of Zinoviev and Kamenev of plotting Stalin's murder. The purpose of these trials was to discredit the people whom Stalin feared as potential opposition, people such as Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda. The defendants were all sentenced to death. These trials were based on confessions of the accused men, and therefore meant that there was no case to prove. The NKVD, or secret police, played, it can be argued, the greatest role in the terror of the 1930s. The huge network of informers meant that the population were in constant fear of each other as well as the state machine. anyone was a potential NKVD informer even close family members, Hosking writes, "Children were encouraged to denounce their parents".From this we can see that the actual fabric of society and family was broken up because no-one could be trusted any longer. This would almost certainly end any chance of organised political opposition to Stalin because there was no way of ...
