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History is littered with political assassinations, from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln.

But none capture the modern imagination like JFK. Three letters is all you need.

Yet there are four lesser-known assassinations in European history that replicate the suspense, drama, historical importance, and above all mystery of that famous atrocity.

In Sweden, the murder of Olof Palme had the same earth-shattering effect as JFK, leaving millions with a traumatic memory of exactly where they were when they heard the news.

In Serbia, zealous reformer Zoran Dindic was struck down in his prime, only to be replaced by corrupt, self-interested politicians, capturing that same question many still ask of the young, bright JFK. “What if he had lived?”

In turn, JFK’s untimely death engendered paranoia and cynicism in many Americans: an attribute darkly captured in Russia’s story, when Joseph Stalin used the murder of his friend Sergei Kirov as a pretext to launch his infamous purges.

But perhaps nothing captures the essence of the JFK assassination quite like the conspiracy theory—the belief that a killer was working on behalf of sinister forces hidden from the public’s eye. In Italy, many people theorize that Prime Minister Aldo Moro’s own party collaborated with the Communist Red Brigades in his kidnapping and murder.

Above all, these stories — like JFK — all remain enduring mysteries that to this day in some crucial way are still unsolved.

OLOF PALME

At 11:15pm on February 28, 1986, in downtown Stockholm, longtime Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme and his wife Lisbet left the Grand Cinema and began walking down Sveavägen avenue to a nearby subway station to catch a train home. They had no security detail. The Prime Minister often preferred to go among the public as if he were an ordinary citizen.

Passing the Adolf Fredrik church, they crossed to the east side of the street and continued heading south. They paused to look in a shop window, but only briefly. Then, as they crossed the intersection with Tunnelgatan alley, two shots rang out.

Even before Mrs. Palme fell to her knees over her husband, Anna Hage, stopped at a red light nearby, caught sight of a man collapsed on the sidewalk, as a nearby figure dashed into the adjacent alley. Fearing an emergency and being a nursing student herself, she leapt from the car, and ran to the man lying on the snow-dusted sidewalk.

She saw blood coming from his mouth. This was bad.

She reached for his neck. No pulse. She turned him on his back and began chest compressions and attempting mouth-to-mouth. Within moments, a man passing in a taxi, Stefan Glantz, joined her efforts. Neither of them had any idea this was the Prime Minister. This was just an ordinary citizen.^[1]

After disputing with the victim’s wife about the importance of the life-saving efforts, someone else began to try to move the victim’s legs, saying he ought to be lying on his side. Anna told him off, saying this man’s heart had already stopped. This was all they could do. She was so engrossed in her work, she made no memory of his face.^[2]

25 year-old Lars Jeppessen snapped his head over his right shoulder and saw a man on Svevägen just ahead fall to the ground into his view. He must have been shot. Then, footsteps on the opposite side of Tunnelgatan, but some kind of shed obstructed the source of the noise. Lars turned to look over his left shoulder. A glimpse. Someone, it had to be a man, seemed to fumble with something as he ran toward the nearby stairs. Then, quick as he came, he was obscured again.

Lars dashed after the man, who was now bounding up the stairs. Before pursuing him further, Lars stopped and looked at the man lying on the ground. He wondered if he should help, but he saw others rushing to do so. It was up to him to chase the shooter.

He went to the stairs but stopped at the first step. He didn’t want to follow too closely. At the top of the stairs he saw the shooter pause, only for a split-second, and glance over his right shoulder, before disappearing. Lars ran as fast as he could. But he never caught another certain glimpse of the shooter.

Stig Engström only heard one loud pop, as he left his office building at 44 Sveavägen. He figured it was a car’s exhaust bang. Nothing unusual as downtown noise goes.^[3]

As he proceeded down the street, after attempting to check his watch,^[4] he saw a man lying on the ground whom he presumed to be a passed out drunk. A woman was on her knees beside him, asking for someone to call an ambulance.^[5] A young man and woman hovered over him, and then he saw the blood coming from the man’s mouth.^[6] Now he knew something was wrong.

The older woman said he was shot, and the killer had run down Tunnelgatan. Engström looked down that way and saw the silhouette of a figure standing there against a lighted wall, looking in their direction. He looked back at the body on the ground, then back down Tunnelgatan. The man was gone. Then he tried to help turn the victim on his side, to help drain the blood away.^[7] He was already dead.

Except… Engström’s story changed… a lot. In fact, his behavior became so bizarre and untrustworthy, he eventually became a suspect in Palme’s murder. In 2020, Swedish police even pronounced with certainty that he was the murderer.

But Engström committed suicide in 2000. With nobody to put on trial, after nearly 35 years of active investigation into the murder of one of Europe’s most controversial cold war era leaders, the police closed the case.

And who really killed Olof Palme…remains a mystery.

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Who is Olof Palme?

Of course, to understand why someone would want to kill Olof Palme, we need to know what he was wearing. gestures We also need to know who the guy was. So who was Olof Palme? In short, he was a man of contradictions.

Born in 1927 to a wealthy, conservative family, Palme would go on to become one of the most consequential social democratic leaders in Swedish history: a hero of the working class.^[8] Moreover, as a young man, he traveled to America to study at a fine liberal arts college before bumming across America as a hitchhiker.^[9] By the way, that school he went to—Kenyon College—pretty cool. Not that we’re biased or anything.

Anyways, to Palme America was both an inspiration—possessing a remarkable spirit of equality and openness—and a cautionary tale—as inequality and racism showed the perils of failing to commit fully to one’s ideals. And his travels didn’t end there; in Eastern Europe he grew to despise Soviet totalitarianism, and in Southeast Asia he saw the colonized peoples of the world demanding recognition of their rights to self-determination.^[10]

As he returned to Sweden, Palme knew one thing very clearly. The Sweden which raised him, which chose neutrality in World War II, and the Sweden which existed today, which chose silence in the cold war, could no longer be tolerated. If Sweden wanted to practice politics of equality at home, it had to start doing so on the world stage, standing up for the downtrodden not just domestically but internationally.^[11]

As luck would have it, political opportunity fell right into his lap, as in 1951 Palme happened to meet then-Prime Minister Tage Erlander on a chance train ride, as he was traveling home, alone and among the ordinary folk, as Social Democratic politicians so often did. Erlander was immediately impressed with Palme, and soon enough Palme was the Prime Minister’s personal secretary.^[12]

Over time Palme’s responsibilities grew, and so did the public’s awareness of his contradictions.Here was a social democratic politician, campaigning for the everyman, but who clearly was not one of them. He came from a wealthy family for one, but more importantly, Palme was haughty and strident: a man of immense talent and capability and who wasn’t necessarily humble about it.^[13]

Still, he overcame the criticism and became Prime Minister in 1969.^[14] Immediately, he sought to remake Sweden’s foreign policy, abandoning quiet neutrality in favor of an aggressive third way between America and the Soviet Union: a fierce critic of American hypocrisy and Soviet horrors all the same.^[15] The principle was simple: the downtrodden of the world had a friend in Olof Palme’s Sweden.

Of course, making such friends brings plenty of enemies. At home, as economic troubles began to worsen, critics regarded Palme as more interested in those suffering outside Sweden than within. Though he led his party to its first defeat in forty years, only six years later, in 1982, he led a return to power and return to form: making Sweden into _the _country of support for South Africa’s ANC in their fight against apartheid, among other efforts.^[16]

Palme was a brilliant, difficult man. His aspirations were equality, democracy, and international fraternity, but at the same time he liked the spotlight, and was stubborn to a fault. Paradoxically, Palme desperately wanted to be like the people he’d fought so hard for. So, on that cold February night, Palme dismissed his security and set out to see a movie…as if he were just an ordinary citizen.

From the moment Palme fell to the ground, the police were behind the curve. Multiple witnesses phoned emergency services immediately, but the police were late to the crime scene, giving the killer time to escape.^[17] It took several minutes to identify Palme, given Lisbet’s non-responsive state of shock.^[18] At headquarters, officers failed to put out a call for additional manpower, and Stockholm wasn’t put under lockdown until three hours after the murder.^[19]

At the crime scene, witness questioning was terribly disorganized; several witnesses with valuable testimony were sent home. The police perimeter was too small, and passers-by trampled over evidence, including the bullet used to kill Palme.^[20]

As time went on, maverick cops developed their own pet theories. The lead officer on the investigation became obsessed with the idea that a leftist Kurdish group was behind the assassination.^[21] This wasn’t totally implausible at first, but he stuck with it even after it became clear there wasn’t much to go on. He even shut down an inquiry into Stig Engström, thinking his own theory deserved more attention and resources.^[22]

All this police misconduct snowballed, leaving an increasingly cold trail. The murder weapon, determined by ballistic evidence to be a .357 Magnum, was never found, even though there were only 10 such weapons in the entire country which were missing under suspicious circumstances at the time of Palme’s killing.^[23] Even as more plausible suspects emerged, the evidence against them was often circumstantial. Capturing the killer started to look unlikely, if not downright impossible.

With little in the way of decisive detective work to narrow things down, the list of suspects in Palme’s murder is immense, running the gamut from completely deranged to highly plausible. Usually intricate theories of tightly organized conspiracies end up on the deranged end of the spectrum, but in the case of Olof Palme, at least one such theory is worth discussing: the South African connection.

The South African

The motive is simple; Palme was the foremost political figure in the west supporting the fight against apartheid. For South Africa’s white-supremacist government, killing Palme could do wonders.

When Palme died, a few people did point at South Africa, but it wasn’t actually until 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, that the theory gained any steam. As the new Black South African government was sorting through the crimes of the period, a former government agent named Eugene de Kock alleged that Craig Williamson, a spy who was known to have assassinated a number of anti-apartheid activists’ families, had orchestrated the Palme murder.^[24]

Now, de Kock didn’t say much else, but independent journalists have pieced together a theory.

As it goes, Williamson was selected for the job because he’d spent years infiltrating Swedish organizations which supported the ANC. Rather than pulling the trigger, he would keep his hands clean, providing resources and intel to a Swedish middle man who hated Palme and had the connections to recruit someone for the actual dirty work.^[25]

Enter Bertil Wedin, an avowed Swedish right-winger who worked as a mercenary for Rhodesia’s white supremacist government in the 1970s. Williamson and Wedin had met all the way back in 1980, and today stand accused of collaborating on the burglary of anti-apartheid activist offices in London, a charge which, if true, certainly helps paint the picture of these two men as international clandestine criminals.^[26]

So the South African government has a motive. Williamson and Wedin have the means. But what about opportunity? Here, the theory gets a bit murky. Perhaps Wedin recruited a disaffected right-winger to do the job, someone without a lot of experience but with plenty of passion, naive enough to take the fall if caught.^[27]

Whoever the gunman, the theory goes, they would have been trailing Palme for some time, finally seen their chance that night after the movie, pulled the trigger, and fled.

How does this theory hold up? Well, there’s a compelling motive. Williamson was a serious guy, a bona fide killer. But…it’s pretty incomplete. Who actually pulled the trigger? There isn’t much to say, despite some rigorous journalistic work to figure it out. Not to mention, the accusation by de Kock came at a time when former apartheid officials could get amnesty for their crimes by presenting evidence against each other—that’s not proof he was lying, but he would have had an incentive to do so.^[28]

True or not, this theory points to a very real insight about power and identity: the concepts at the heart of Palme’s own story and personal contradictions. Williamson spent his entire career working tirelessly to deny a people recognition of their humanity and their right to self-determination, literally killing those who stood in his way. Apartheid South Africa’s intense need to suppress the desire of millions for recognition of their basic humanity was a powerful force, one that, however unlikely, could have stretched thousands of miles, onto a dark street in Stockholm in February, to take the life of a man who had spent his life doing the opposite.

The Grand Man

Several early witnesses—including Olof’s son, Mårten—testified to seeing someone outside the Grand Cinema before and after the screening and following the Palmes as they left.^[29]

The search for the so-called Grand Man led police first to Ulf Spinnars, a seedy character who claimed to know something about the murder. In turn, they encountered Christer Pettersson who, as a friend of Spinnars, was able to provide him with an alibi.^[30]

Interestingly, this was not the first time the police had met with Pettersson. After suffering a traumatic head injury as a young man, Pettersson developed a habit of substance abuse and addiction and soon began landing himself in more trouble, ultimately stabbing a drug dealer to death in 1970: an event which garnered him prison time and the nickname, “the bayonet killer.”^[31]

But about that alibi. Pettersson claimed Spinnars had been staying at his apartment on the edge of town. That evening, Pettersson had taken the train downtown to visit the Oxen Club which was owned by drug dealer Sigge Cedergren. He then left the club around 10 pm, taking the train home to arrive at about 11:30—a plausible timeline given his apartment’s distance from central Stockholm.^[32]

It all made sense. In fact, this whole group of low-lifes appeared to be a dead end. But after two years of fruitless investigations and a decision to retrace their steps, the police noticed an oversight. They hadn’t bothered to ask Cedergren if he’d even seen Pettersson that night at the club. So in 1988, the police asked Cedergren—who was, ironically, at the tail end of a prison stint—about the affair. He hadn’t seen Pettersson that night at all. He volunteered an explanation for the mixup; perhaps Pettersson had wanted to buy some drugs and stopped by Cedergren’s apartment. He lived near the Grand Cinema.^[33]

Now they had a suspect. So they sought out Ulf Spinnars once more, who now disputed the very story which provided him an alibi for the murder, asserting that Pettersson hadn’t returned home until 12:30—ample time to have committed the crime.^[34]

It was time to talk to Pettersson. His alibi didn’t change much, but it was now—a couple years later—more detailed. He’d left in the early evening, gone to the Oxen Club, hung out with Cedergren and his girlfriend where, incidentally, he’d signed an affidavit as a witness to their opening a shared bank account, gotten drunk, gotten on the train home, fallen asleep, passed his stop, and had to go all the way back home, thus explaining his late arrival.^[35]

Except…neither Cedergren nor his girlfriend testified to seeing Pettersson at the club that night, and that document existed but was undated.^[36] Pettersson just might be their culprit.

So the police set up a lineup. A key ‘Grand Man’ witness and Olof Palme’s son Mårten, who both testified to seeing someone follow the Palmes from the theater, picked out Pettersson, although quite tentatively.^[37] Then, they called in Lisbet Palme to view a video lineup—she refused to be anywhere near the killer—and she identified Pettersson, stating, “It’s evident who it is.” That was enough. Christer Pettersson was charged with the murder of Olof Palme.^[38]

The trial that began in June of 1989 was a disaster for Pettersson. His defense lawyer was unnecessarily confrontational with Lisbet Palme, who remained a sympathetic figure with the Swedish public. In fact, Petterson was convicted almost exclusively on the basis of her testimony.^[39]

However, the conviction was not unanimous, and Pettersson was granted an appeal. Two months later, citing evidence of Lisbet Palme’s state of shock and unreliability along with police misconduct in nudging her selection at the lineup, while lacking evidence for any clear motive for Pettersson, his appeal was successful. Christer Pettersson was innocent.^[40]

Without compelling new evidence, it was impossible to retry him, even as he made conspicuously self-incriminating remarks in media appearances, apparently motivated by compensation for his sensationalism.^[41] Petterson died in 2004, leaving behind a frustrating trail of circumstantial evidence and unanswered questions.^[42]

Maybe he had the means. Cedergeren—who dealt not only drugs but weapons—claimed he sold Pettersson a revolver which matched the forensic criteria.^[43] As for motive, the popular theory goes, ironically enough, that Cedergren bore a passing resemblance to Palme and Petterson, for whatever reason, had it out for him, like he did for the last drug dealer he killed.^[44] After all, considering opportunity, it’s plausible he was hanging around the area of the theater and on a dark night could have mistaken Palme for Cedergren or someone else.

However, the most compelling part of the story is merely how good a story it is. Palme was an extraordinary politician who wanted to walk the streets of the capital with his wife as just an ordinary citizen in the city he loved. One can almost say, if Petterson did it, that Palme got what he wanted: dying an anonymous, sudden death in a case of mistaken identity, as if he were nobody at all.

But what if there were a more poetic ending? What if the suspect was also more credible—enough to convince Swedish police in 2020 to name him Palme’s killer and close the case? Well, there is: Stig Engström, the third eyewitness from the beginning of the video, whose story kept changing.

The Skandia Man

Let’s take a look at what he said to police the night of the murder. According to the notes,

“Engström had finished work for the evening and had just come out into the street when he heard what he first thought was an exhaust bang. However, he soon saw that someone was lying on the ground and also that there were people around him. As he passed the alley by Tunnelgatan, he looked there.” Against a lighted wall, “he saw a man in his 20s, wearing a dark blue jacket.”^[45]

A couple notes on Engström’s timing and position. According to this telling, he’s just outside 44 Sveavägen—roughly 50-60 meters away from the shooting when it occurs. And, according to Ensgtröm, he clocked out at 11:20 pm. The shooting took place at approximately 11:21 and 20 seconds. So he would have had to clock out in the late seconds of 11:20 at the earliest, if he really heard the shooting just outside his office. That is, as long as the time-clock is accurate.

So Engström says he heard a bang, then saw Palme surrounded by witnesses, and then saw a man lurking in Tunnelgatan. In fact, that’s all pretty reasonable. Lars Jeppessen—the second eyewitness from the intro, the man who chased the killer in the alley—testified the same night to police, according to their notes, that he “hesitated for a moment whether to rush down to the injured person or whether to pursue the perpetrator.”^[46] He would later clarify that he crossed to the other side of Tunnelgatan before doing so — a crucial detail because this makes him visible from where Engström was standing.^[47]

This is a vital point in Engström’s alibi. If he really saw Lars, it makes his guilt very hard to believe. Recall that at the time Lars was standing in that spot, he testified the killer was already bounding up the steps and had made it some distance. To see Lars would have been very difficult from anywhere other than where Engström claimed to be standing himself.

What about the rest of his statement? Well, he makes a few bizarre remarks, but they’re ultimately explained, with a little investigation. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough time for two people making monthly videos to get into them here, but if you want to learn more, supporters on Patreon get access to our podcast, where we discuss things that don’t make the cut for videos, like this. Link in description.

So Engström’s first statement makes enough sense. The problem is, he didn’t stick to it.

First, his position at the time of the murder changed. The earliest police notes imply he claimed he was 50 yards away when he heard the first shot, ^[48] but he later claimed to be much closer, saying he’d “walked with quick steps, almost half running, as he was in a hurry to get to the subway. When [he] was about 20 meters from the intersection at Tunnelgatan, he heard a bang.”^[49] Part of the discrepancy may be attributed to the police abridging the story in the earliest notes, but there are bigger problems. If Engström was just 20 meters away and jogging, it’s unlikely Anna—the intro’s first eyewitness, Palme’s first attendant—or Stefan could have gotten there before Engström. Further, Engström’s jogging makes little sense, as he had plenty of time before the last train.

Second, the timing started to get fuzzy, too. In his third conversation with police Engström attempts to explain his failure to register the gunshots appropriately, claiming that he was distracted trying to look at his dark watch.^[50] But he’d just then clocked out of work — if he was worried about time, surely he’d taken a look at the time then, before mistakenly assuming he needed to rush to the station.

Finally, in successive statements Engstrom expanded his own involvement in administering first aid to Palme, from casting himself as a helpless bystander to offering advice about how best to position the victim, all the way to actively attempting to turn him on his side.^[51] There are other examples, but these are the most conspicuous instances of apparent dishonesty, and they all have one thing in common — a persistent effort to establish himself closer to the crime and more involved in the aftermath.

Put another way, if he were innocent, Engström’s first story is perfectly credible. He left work, heard the shot, ran to the scene, and even saw Lars Jeppsson where he’s supposed to be, confirming the timing. End of story. So…why lie?

Well, perhaps he got lucky with his first story, perhaps he’d caught a glimpse of Lars when Lars caught a glimpse of him! After all, Lars’s description of the killer—middle-aged, “dark down jacket,” something “like a cap on his head, and with a “wide back”—sounds rather like Engström: a heavy-set, middle-aged man, who wore a dark coat and a cap the night of the crime.^[52]

According to the 2020 police announcement, the motive is simple. Engström craved attention: a middle-aged guy working late nights in a dead-end job who strolled out into the street one night, exhausted and bitter, and saw a man who had it all. He was famous, beloved by many countrymen: a politician who had the confidence—the arrogance—to waltz around at night alone, as if nothing could touch him. But Stig had the chance to put him in his place. So he did.

Of course, murder is rarely rewarded with adulation and fame, but scorn and infamy. Unless you kill Shinzo Abe — check out our video on that assassination after this one.

So Engström fled. Dissatisfied, he sought the limelight, telling the police a story that made him seem important. But it wasn’t enough. He even complained to his wife the police weren’t paying attention to him.^[53] In response, he changed his story and inflated his role.

So, he’s got a plausible motive. But what about means and opportunity? It turns out Engström had a neighbor-acquaintance who collected guns and owned a revolver which fit the forensic search criteria. So he could’ve had means. As for opportunity, a building employee testified that the time-clock—essential to Engström’s alibi—was one minute fast,^[54] meaning that if Engström’s timecard showed 11:20 pm, he really clocked out at 11:19 — much too early for his story to make sense and early enough to spot Palme walking down the street, tail him, and commit the crime. Engström begins to look like quite a believable suspect.

Except… another building employee claimed the time-clock was a minute slow, which means Engström would have really clocked out at 11:21 — perfectly in time for his original story to add up and late enough to make it impossible for him to shoot Palme.^[55] The police never tested the time clock.

Once again, his original story was believable. So why lie?

Well, perhaps the police are right about Engström’s character, even if he didn’t kill Palme. He was an early arrival to a freshly-murdered prime minister but was ignored by police on account of lacking any useful information. So, he changed his story and exaggerated his role to gain attention. Simple and believable.

In effect, this motive cuts both ways; explaining his behavior whether he’s guilty or innocent. Indeed, most on both sides of his case point to his attention-seeking as the primary motive for his behavior. Yet again, a frustratingly inconclusive theory.

But while the case for Engström’s guilt is riddled with holes, it has some convincing moments: perhaps most of all, because it offers en even more poetic ending than Pettersson. An extraordinary man of great impact walks the streets at night, pretending to be ordinary. Not only does he die an anonymous death, a sort of wish ironically granted. He’s gunned down by his polar opposite: an ordinary man who thought with the pull of a trigger, he could change his fate, become extraordinary. And here we are almost forty years later, still talking about the lowly Stig Engström.

Whether Palme was killed by a villainous secret agent, a hapless drug addict, or a hopeless loser, the story of his death is a fascinating one.

Of course, there’s the extraordinary drama of it all: walking alone in the dark, cold, February evening; a shadowy gunman slipping away into the night; the police blunders; and the many compelling and bizarre suspects.

But there’s something just a bit deeper in all the drama: a real insight about what it means to live in a democracy.

Palme was a man of contradictions: a rich man working for the poor, a powerful individual who believed in group solidarity. But so was Sweden: a country which preached at home the obligation of each to his neighbor, while opting for neutrality and shirking that responsibility on the world stage.

Because democracy is full of contradictions like these. Liberalism proclaims universal, inalienable rights, but it also must tolerate differences between countries, lest we attempt to police the world. Democracy prizes the voice of the individual, even as it attempts to draw citizens together in coexistence and compromise.

What’s more, democracy promises that all are equal, even as some like Palme are regarded as special—still a citizen, but something more—while some like Engström may still yearn, even violently, to be something greater than yet another citizen in the crowd.

INTRODUCTION

At 8:45AM, on March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro—president of Italy’s ruling Christian Democratic party and five time Prime Minister, the King of Italian politics— left church to meet with party members ahead of Italy’s most important legislative session in 20 years. But as his driver turned onto Via Mario Fani,

Aldo Moro was pinD white Fiat 128 ahead of him had just slammed on its brakes, causing a pileup with Moro’s blue 130 and the Alfetta behind, occupied by two policemen and a bodyguard. In the blink of an eye, another white 128 blitzed in behind the pileup to pin the cars in place.

Then came the shooters: four gunmen dressed in airline uniforms appeared on the street, firing over a hundred rounds. Moro’s detail didn’t even have the chance to shoot back. They kept their guns in the trunk.

As quick as it began, it was over: five dead and Moro, wounded but alive, was hauled into a van painted like a police vehicle.^[1]

55 days later, his body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4.^[2]

I: WHY ALDO MORO?

Forty eight hours after the lightning kidnapping on Via Fani, a journalist at il Messaggerro, a Roman newspaper, received a call, alerting him to the presence of a package at Largo Argentina, a site of ancient temple ruins in Rome.

There he found a large orange envelope, and in it, this image: of Aldo Moro beneath a flag emblazoned, “Brigate Rosse,” the“Red Brigades.” The Brigades were a far-left terrorist group responsible for a series of kidnappings, bombings, shootings, and stabbings across Italy, all aimed at destabilizing politics and instigatin g communist revolution.

How kidnapping Aldo Moro — a man who, while he was a political kingpin, held no formal office beyond a seat in Italy’s Parliament — would light the fuse of revolution… we’re not exactly sure. In fact, the Red Brigades themselves didn’t seem to have much of an idea!

Because in that same package containing the photo of Moro, the kidnappers included a press release, wherein they…well, basically just went on a barely comprehensible rant. An excerpt, translated, of course. Thanks to Jiang Zemin for lending me his glasses. Don’t miss that video. ahem

“Let it be clear therefore that with the capture of Aldo Moro, and the trial to which he will be subjected by a People's Court, we do not intend to “close the game” nor even flaunt a “symbol,” but to develop a slogan on which all the Offensive Resistance Movement is already being measured, making it stronger, more mature, more incisive and organized.”^[3]

In other words, we know this won’t instigate a revolution, but, “Hey, pretty impressive, right?”

And in a way, it actually was impressive, and terrifying.

You see, Italy in the 1970s and early 80s was not exactly what you might expect, if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name — full of whimsy, sunshine, and aperol spritz. Of course, that all happened, but at this time Italy was in the midst of a decade-plus low-grade civil war, known as “The Years of Lead,” involving frequent terrorist attacks from the left, via groups like Red Brigades, and from the right. Think something like Ireland’s troubles, but…more about Cold War ideologies.

So Italy was an absolute mess. But while a few bombings—such as the massacres at Piazza Fontana, Piazza Loggia, Italicus Express, and others—had been catastrophic, no attack had yet struck so close to the heart of the government, so surgically and successfully dispatched a security detail like Moro’s. This was unlike anything the Red Brigades had yet pulled off — of all times, in 1978, after a couple years in decline and with their leader Renato Curcio captured and on trial in Turin.

So why now? And why Moro?

Recall on the morning of the kidnapping, Moro “left church to meet with party members ahead of Italy’s most important legislative session in 20 years.” Because on March 16, 1978, Italy’s Parliament was set to hold a vote of confidence to approve a new government of Christian Democrats.

But Moro’s party only held 262 of the 316 seats required for a majority. And this is what was so historic; the center-right Christian Democrats were about to form a government with the support of the Communist Party of Italy.^[4]

Of course, being the President of the Christian Democrats, Moro was always a boogeyman for radicals like the Red Brigades, but it was this deal that finally pushed them over the edge. This was a big problem. Wait a second, you’d think that a bunch of Communist terrorists would be big fans of this — after all they’d want the Communist party to succeed!

However, importantly, the Communists wouldn’t be in the government. They were just promising to approve the Christian Democrats’ government, in an attempt to moderate their image and prove that they could work within the rules and processes of Italian liberal democracy.

This was the product of a new movement, happening in Spain, France, and Italy, known as “eurocommunism” — which sought to distance European communist parties from the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. And if this could work in Italy—if the party could improve its image, win broader approval, and next time call on the Christian Democrats to support their government—eurocommunism might just work… anywhere, because Italy had the largest Communist party in the western world. Italy was the proving ground for a more democratic, more moderate vision of communism.^[5]

And that was anathema to the Red Brigades who believed the path to progress could only be paved with guillotines, gulags, and guerilla terrorism—and barring those, it certainly wasn’t a trek made hand-in-hand with the Christian Democrats! This historic compromise had to be stopped — and that meant taking out the architect: Aldo Moro. It was Moro who’d called upon his party to work with the Communists, who’d spent the long nights meeting with them to iron out the agreement, who’d staked on this plan his career, his reputation, and, ultimately, his life.^[6]

But it wasn’t as though the gunmen on Via Fani had just shot Moro then and there. No, they kidnapped and held him for fifty-five days before finally executing him. So what happened over those fifty five long days and nights? And why wasn’t the government able to rescue him?

II: FIFTY-FIVE DAYS

Well, while the left-of-the-left sure hated him, Moro may have had as many enemies to his right…even in his own party.

So, let’s talk about the police who, obviously, failed to find and rescue Moro—which many cite as evidence of right-wing conspiracy against him.

Now, to be fair, Rome is a huge, famously complex and messy city home to millions. So it was definitely a bigger challenge than, say, finding a gunman in Stockholm. Speaking of which…I’m cold, so I’m gonna put on Olof Palme’s hat. Go check out our video on the unsolved murder of Sweden’s Prime Minister, after this one.

Where was I? The police search! So, it was a big ask, but we’ll talk about those conspiracy theories in a minute. First, here’s what they did do.

Besides the dozens arrested and brought in for questioning—all of whom were useless—it wasn’t until April 18, about a month into the ordeal that they thought they hit a breakthrough.^[7] Another press release shared with il Messaggero announced that Moro had been executed “by suicide” and that his body could be found in a lake in the mountains east of Rome. But the statement proved to be a forgery — the lake was completely frozen over. Just about the only real achievement of the whole investigation happened that same day, when police discovered a Red Brigades hideout in Rome. In it, a license plate of one of the white Fiat 128s involved in the ambush.^[8]

That, however, is about all they dug up during the fifty-five days. Signor Moro’s only real shot at freedom was negotiation, and he knew it. Because it wasn’t just the Brigades that were sending messages to the outside world. Moro wrote dozens of letters to his family, to the Pope, and to the government, pleading for help in his release. Now, it may sound strange that his captors would let him get away with this, and, yeah, it kind of is. But, while the letters were written by Moro, there’s no doubt about that, whether the sentiments expressed were truly his…we’ll never know.

On March 29, Moro’s first letter was released publicly by his kidnappers. In it, he implored that, “The sacrifice of innocents in the name of an abstract principle of legality is inadmissible.” He continued, noting that every other country in the world, except for West Germany and Israel, was open to negotiations with terrorists, suggesting that the Italian government had not only the power but the political precedent to secure his release via negotiation.^[9]

In later letters, the proposal—reinforced by continued press releases from the Brigades—would become clearer: Moro for 13 imprisoned Red Brigades terrorists…including Renato Curcio — the group’s leader currently on trial in Turin.

However, while the Socialist Party leader Bettino Craxi attempted to forge a middle path—drawing up a list of Red Brigades criminals guilty of more minor crimes like robbery and assault, that the government might be willing to give up.^[10] The terrorists rejected the deal.^[11] It was the big fish or nothing, and the government—Moro’s own party—wasn’t interested.^[12]

In their view, which was shared by the Communist party, to negotiate with the terrorists would validate the group as a legitimate interlocutor with the government and reward their terrorism, incentivizing further attacks. In fact, Moro alluded in his first letter to the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz, a regional official in West Germany, for whom the government made an exception to its no-negotiation policy. Unfortunately, the terrorists released in exchange for Lorenz did later return to attack West Germany: in effect, proving the government’s point.

Still, Moro pressed on, drafting letter after letter, each more desperate than the last, pleading, begging for help from the men he’d spent years working with, the party he’d spent his life building. Toward the end, he grew bitter, understandably, writing his wife that the party could have saved him if they wanted to.^[13]

On May 1, informed by his kidnappers that he was sentenced to die and seeing clearly that no help was coming from the men he thought his friends, Moro offered his final address to them, writing, “All I have to do is note my complete incompatibility with the Christian Democracy party. I renounce all positions, I resign from the Christian Democrats. I ask the President of the Chamber to transfer me from the [CD] group to the mixed group.”^[14]

On May 5, Aldo Moro wrote his wife, Eleanora, “Dear Norina, they have told me that they are going to kill me in a little while…I kiss you for the last time.”^[15]

Four days later, on May 9, a Moro family friend, Franco Tritto, received a phone call. “We fulfill the President's last wishes by communicating to the family where they can find the body of the Honorable Aldo Moro. On via Caetani, there is a red Renault 4 there. The first license plate number is 5.”^[16]

His execution had been…grisly, and it spoke to the amateurish capabilities of the kidnappers. In his body were found bullets from multiple guns, not because he’d been executed by some kind of firing squad. No, Moro had been carried down to an underground parking garage, hidden in a basket, until he was allowed to climb into the trunk of the car. Whether he believed his kidnappers when they told him he was just being moved somewhere else, or he had already resigned himself to his fate, we can never know. But as he laid there, perhaps contemplating this very question, two shots rang out. The pistol wielded by Mario Moretti—the chief of the kidnapping operation—had jammed. He asked his associate for his Skorpion machine gun. Moro may yet have been alive. Then a few bursts of gunfire.^[17] Aldo Moro, after 55 days of fruitless pleading with his countrymen and colleagues, 55 days of witless police searches, 55 days imprisoned by a bunch of fanatical fools, was dead.

He was found just as promised by the terrorists: in the trunk of a red Renault 4 on via Caetani. The detail they declined to mention? The car was parked here, halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and Communist Party. The symbolism was lost on nobody.

Per his own wishes expressed in a letter and those of his family, members of his party were barred from his funeral and burial. His wife, siblings, and children never forgave the Christian Democrats their betrayal.^[18]

III: A HORRIBLE PLOT

Because, according to his family, Moro’s death wasn’t the result of unfortunate negligence or mistaken judgment: a miscalculation by the government that Moro would be released unharmed, like many of the Red Brigades’ previous kidnapping victims. No, over a series of trials, parliamentary inquiries, and statements to the press, Moro’s family repeatedly suggested that the Christian Democrats, possibly with the encouragement of international forces, had either conspired to kill Moro, or deliberately stood aside, hoping the Red Brigades would murder him.^[19]

No one in the Moro family ever laid out a complete theory of what happened, but they are far from alone in believing in some kind of conspiracy. Over the past four and a half decades, a host of politicians, journalists, scholars, and amateur sleuths have attempted to get behind the curtain of Moro’s killing.

If the blame lies, as Moro’s family alleges, with the CD, perhaps the most compelling of these theories is the story of Propaganda Due, or P2.

P2 was a secret society, originally established under the freemasons in 1970 but later expelled: a shadowy cabal straight out of a cheap thriller movie that counted among its members key elements of the Italian political elite, including prominent Christian Democracy leaders and CD-appointed bureaucrats. What was P2 all about? What belief bound all these influential people together? Simple: a commitment to anti-Communism and maintaining Italy’s “stability.”^[20]

And we mean “secret society.” Nobody outside P2 really knew it existed at all until a few years after Moro’s death, when a parliamentary commission revealed it.^[21] The scale of its influence in the highest levels of Italian society was cause for immediate alarm. And as it turned out, over half of the members of the crisis committee that had directed the failed rescue operations in the Moro Affair were members of P2.^[22] Moreover, the Italian security services had been comprehensively reorganized less than a year before Moro’s assassination, and the director of the new military intelligence bureau, Giuseppe Santovito…was also a member.^[23] Perhaps the reorganization and new leadership weren’t coincidental. They would, after all, explain the security services’ conspicuous incompetence in Moro’s rescue. Moro wanted to open politics to the Communists, P2 opposed his move, and at the critical moment, its members had the power to botch his rescue and leave Moro to his fate. At least, that’s one theory.

But maybe Moro’s death was even bigger than P2. Maybe Moro was onto something when he wrote a letter to his wife from captivity, blaming American and German influence for his party’s betrayal.^[24] It wouldn’t be his first run-in with Washington. In 1974, just as he was beginning to consider the “historic compromise,” Moro met with then-American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In some reports of the meeting, Kissinger told Moro that such a compromise would be a red line for the Americans. Moro, his family claimed, was so shaken by the meeting that he almost quit politics entirely.^[25] Just two years later, Moro attended a summit in Puerto Rico alongside American, French, German, and British leaders, where he was excluded from a secret meeting in which the other four countries agreed to basically embargo Italy if the Communists entered the government with the Christian Democrats. When the secret meeting became…not so secret, Moro released a statement expressing his dismay, but it didn’t change any minds.^[26]

This was all par for the course for America—both in terms of its Italy policy and broader Cold War perspective: until 1968, they’d been funding the Christian Democrats to help keep them in power, and just a few years later the Lockheed corporation was caught buying off Christian Democrats so they would vote for a major aircraft purchase.^[27] Again, there’s a straightforward motive for killing Moro: to keep the CD loyal, toeing the anti-Communist line.

But these theories lack a… je ne sais quoi. Let’s get weirder, with the Mossad: Israel’s top-tier intelligence agency. In 1975, Mossad agents made contact with the Red Brigades, offering the Brigaders assistance and warning them about two informants who had penetrated their ranks.^[28]

Now, you may be wondering: why on Earth would the Mossad offer assistance to the far left of Italy’s far left, a bunch of communists who 100% hated Israel?^[29] Well, the Mossad knew that an Italy where the Communist party had real influence in government would be far more sympathetic to Arabs in the Middle East.^[30] An armed leftist group opposed to participating in Italian democracy would kill a lot of birds with one stone—it would divide the left, but it would also destabilize Italy, making Israel the reliable Mediterranean ally for the United States. Oh, and Moro was basically the first European leader to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians. ^[31]

Except…the Mossad’s contacts with the Red Brigades never amounted to much, and there’s certainly no evidence that they were involved with Moro’s kidnapping and murder. It’s pure speculation.^[32]

In fact, there’s no concrete evidence that any of these players—P2, the US, or Israel—had a direct hand in any of the events that transpired. In the case of P2, for example, there’s a kind of chicken and egg problem. These guys were already conservative, already anti-communist, and already influential in Italian politics. Was P2 really such a potent organization, or just an expression of already existing political sentiment? For their part, the Red Brigade leaders who partook in the kidnapping have taken offense at the very notion they would work with such forces. In the words of Mario Moretti, the architect of the operation, “One thing that I will never succeed in making the Italian bourgeoisie believe is that the Moro kidnapping was exclusively ours, organized by about twenty mere workers. The Italian bourgeoisie will never acknowledge this truth; it will always search for the hidden instigator or the foreign agency that never existed.”^[33]

Nothing connects these external players to that fateful Thursday morning on via Mario Fani or the fifty-five painful days that followed. But there are circumstantial matters, oddities and associations that have dogged those who defend the official version of events, certainly to a greater extent than, say, the assassinations of Shinzo Abe, Olof Palme, or even JFK. The Italian people remain skeptical of the official story.^[34] Why?

Well, consider the broader context. Italy was immersed in violence, paranoia, and profound social unrest. Not unlike The Red Brigades, far-right militants were pursuing a “strategy of tension,” instigating and provoking maximum violence and chaos in the hopes that Italian democracy would collapse, and they had friends in the Italian police and maybe the United States government.^[35] Meanwhile, P2 did count among its members high political officials and wealthy financiers—in essence, it _was _a political conspiracy, even if its actual influence has been exaggerated since its discovery. And of course, various foreign intelligence agencies, including Mossad, were engaging in covert attempts to influence Italian politics. Even the Red Brigades, for their part, had received assistance from abroad: funds and weapons from Palestinian militants as well as the Czechoslovakian secret police—including probably the machine gun used to finish off Moro.^[36] In other words, if you had a conspiratorial political axe to grind in the 1970s, well, all roads led to Rome.

In the end, Moro’s death isn’t explained by some conspiracy. If anything, the sheer volume of shady things going on in Italy renders the Moro Affair a kind of an anti-conspiracy. P2 members, neo-fascists, communists, and maybe even the American government may have toasted Moro’s death on May 9th, but in the mountain of strange events that occurred, nothing beyond circumstance suggests direct involvement in Moro’s death. Everyone had their fingers in the pie, often with competing goals. Sometimes they succeeded; just as often, they failed to achieve them. The resulting state of chaos was exactly the fertile soil from which an organization like the Red Brigades grows. Their doctrine permitted any means in service of their utopian ends, a fact that hardly contradicted the spirit of the times.

So the idea that other forces actively worked with them to bring about Moro’s demise…doesn’t add up, even if their actions fueled the rise of the Brigades. The Italian state was known for its incompetence and corruption. The police’s initial suspect list included, along with six individuals who were indeed involved, one informant employed by the government and one exile who lived in Paris.^[37] And the security services? The 1977 restructuring that some suggest had to do with Moro’s death is perhaps more plausibly read as an unfortunate coincidence. These are far more logical explanations for the failure to rescue Moro. Does it really make sense that, if there was a grand plot, we don’t have hard evidence of that nearly half a century later?

IV: THE FINAL WORD

Ironically enough, when they put Moro on “trial,” the Red Brigades believed they were about to unravel the dark truths of the conspiracy behind Moro’s government. He would finally admit what they already knew—that the Christian Democrats were nothing more than a puppet government for the United States, that Moro himself was no more than a provincial governor of an imperial territory, masquerading as the leader of an independent nation.^[38]

By all available accounts, admittedly secondhand, Moro responded with a remarkable clarity of vision. Yes, the US had interests in Italy, and sought influence, but this was the nature of politics.^[39] More importantly, they’d failed! Moro had orchestrated the historic compromise with the communists anyway, and the day of his kidnapping the deal, hated by fascists, communists, and foreign governments alike, went through, as the Communist party voted their confidence in the Christian Democratic government.

Moro held to his principles until the moment of his demise, but can we say the same about the party that refused to negotiate for his release? Even if we absolve them of conspiracy, weren’t their actions incredibly callous nonetheless?

If we put ourselves in their position, it’s hard to say. As some key decision makers at the time have since said, they weren’t sure whether Moro’s kidnapping was just the opening gambit in a wider, more brutal insurgency. To bestow political recognition and prestige on a group as brutal and dangerous as the Red Brigades might only have brought about more, not less, suffering in the long run.^[40]

And yet…something feels wrong about this kind of calculation. It was the Red Brigades, after all, for whom zealous ends justified brutal means. In following the coldly calculated interests of the Italian state, were the Christian Democrats and their Communist partners not displaying the same inhumanity: a statesman’s life in exchange for the potential of stability?

Either way, Moro’s death was a tragedy, and a lesson. On that fateful day in March, Moro had walked with the weight of his country on his shoulders. He’d been the most important man in Italian politics for decades, but he had seen that his party’s long dominance of the system was wreaking havoc, on itself, on Italy, on her people. Healthy democracy needs loyal, robust opposition, and alternation between the parties in power, or the party that rules becomes corrupt, unresponsive, and risks dragging democracy down with it. Moro had attempted to coax the Communists into a commitment to liberal democracy, and he’d been on the verge of success.

It was democracy, with all its wondrous mundanities of negotiating coalitions and reaching compromise, that had terrified Moro’s enemies, to his left and to his right. Democracy, that had convinced the Red Brigades if they didn’t kill Moro now then their reason for being might evaporate. No one would support violent revolution if democracy could work: for the terrorists, an uncharacteristic moment of clear-sightedness.

In the end, then, what killed Aldo Moro was this fear that democracy could work, that moderation, compromise, and the peaceful transfer of power could deliver domestic tranquility and enduring faith in political institutions. To deny democracy its power, Moro had to go.

Moro isn’t a martyr. He was a politician, with a politician’s virtues and flaws. But his death is, in a somewhat perverse way, a testament to democracy’s strength, to the importance of achieving and maintaining it, to defying those who fear it so much they’ll kill those who make it work.

INTRODUCTION

Leningrad, December 1st, 1934, 4:30PM.

First secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party Sergei Kirov entered the Smolny Institute building, greeted by his longtime bodyguard Mikhail Borisov.^[1] Together, they headed up the stairs to the third floor where top local party officials, including Kirov, had their offices.^[2] Waiting at the top were a couple of guards from the NKVD—the Soviet Union’s secret police. Entry to this area required a party membership card, but they immediately recognized Kirov and let him through. His bodyguard Borisov had disappeared.^[3]

As Kirov walked alone down the dimly lit hallway toward his office, one Leonid Nikolaev exited a bathroom just ahead. Upon spying the first secretary, Nikolaev turned his back, pretending to fuss with something, until Kirov passed behind him. Then, Nikolaev turned and followed Kirov, quickening his pace. They turned the corner.

Nikolaev took four quick strides, drew his revolver, raised it behind Kirov’s head, and^[4]-

gunshot, thud, gunshot, thud

Sergei Kirov was dead. His killer lay on the floor next to him. He may have attempted to shoot himself or simply fired once more into the air, waving his gun, but either way he soon fell to the ground, unconscious.^[5]

That such a high-ranking figure could be murdered in plain sight was itself significant. What made it earth-shattering was that Sergei Kirov was a close—perhaps the single closest—friend of Joseph Stalin, the iron-handed ruler of the Soviet Union. Immediately, the dictator boarded a train for Leningrad from Moscow with one question on his mind, “Who was really behind this?”

Before long, a series of mysterious events and revelations were uncovered: the bizarre death-in-transit of the bodyguard Borisov, the inexplicable arrest-and-release of the assassin Nikolaev months earlier, the shocking confessions of a vast conspiracy network arrayed against Stalin, and more. Together they combined to transform the strange murder of an unusually-important bureaucrat into a half-decade Soviet government campaign against internal enemies and saboteurs, leading to the execution of nearly a million Soviet subjects.

But who really killed Sergei Kirov remains a mystery.

KIROV

To understand the theories surrounding Sergei Kirov’s death, we must first understand his life. In essence, Kirov was an important man: above all, because he was important to Stalin. Born in 1886, Kirov was a striver who rose above his humble orphan origins to a regional university where he became enchanted with the local chapter of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks.^[6] When, in the course of Russia’s revolution, civil war broke out between the Bolshevik “Reds” and enemy “Whites,” Kirov brutally suppressed anti-Bolshevik independence movements in the Caucuses, near modern-day Georgia, where Stalin was born. Then the Nationalities Commissar, Stalin was laser-focused on quashing exactly that kind of regional separatism.^[7] He approved of Kirov’s…efficiency.

By 1923, the Reds had won the civil war. Lenin’s revolution had succeeded. The next year, he gave up the ghost, leaving Stalin at the de-facto highest post in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, Lenin’s will was garbled and disputed. So, against Lenin’s other clearest successor—Trotsky—Stalin formed an alliance with two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev. But just as the triumvirate forced Trotsky out, Stalin turned on Zinoviev and his junior comrade Kamenev. They put up a fight, but they were no match.^[8] Kirov would soon prove indispensable to Stalin, as he was dispatched to Leningrad—home to Zinoviev’s political machine—to clean house. After all, who better than the man who tamed the wild Caucuses? So Kirov set to work, exiling trainloads of so-called “Zinovievites” to Russia’s bleak periphery.^[9]

His loyalty and success netted him a further promotion: membership in the Union’s highest political organ, the Politburo. Yet no sooner had Kirov dealt with the Zinovievites than Stalin had new enemies in Leningrad: this time, those opposed to agricultural collectivization, a policy which was causing famines and killing literally millions.^[10] Perhaps Kirov flinched. Amidst the showdown with these critics—many of whom, his own former comrades—he remarked in a letter to his wife, “Things are not working out very well.”^[11] Whatever his personal feelings, Kirov stuck by Stalin—not just as the dictator’s loyal servant but as his friend. In Moscow or Leningrad, they stayed at each other’s apartments; in letters, Kirov addressed Stalin as, “Soso,” an affectionate nickname used by few others; on vacation in Sochi, Soso relished Kirov’s company.^[12]

But in 1934, Kirov’s loyalty would be tested. Over the last four years, Stalin’s collectivization had starved nearly 10 million Soviet subjects to death. Yet if you attended that year’s 17th Party Congress in Moscow, you wouldn’t have guessed. Party officials—even disgraced and powerless Zinoviev—lavished Stalin with praise. Kirov glorified him, “the best helmsman of our great socialist structure.”^[13]

Behind closed doors, however, party elites had other things to say. Collectivization was a world-historical disaster. A dangerous cult of personality was forming around Stalin. Perhaps it was time for a new leader. One name allegedly floated? Sergei Kirov.^[14] He wasn’t the most senior Communist official, but he was almost universally seen as agreeable and competent. Yet when Kirov got wind of these whisperings, he rushed to report the matter to Stalin, ever the loyal friend and subordinate.^[15] Did this solidify Stalin’s trust in Kirov, or earn his suspicion? If his name appeared in such discussions, perhaps he was a threat. Whatever Stalin thought, perhaps Kirov had now made some enemies who rather preferred such discussions remain far from Stalin’s ears.

Just where Kirov stood is hard to tell, but by August of 1934 the two were once again vacationing together as usual.^[16] And in November, Kirov visited Stalin in Moscow. They had no idea this would be their last meeting. In the evening, they retreated to Stalin’s dacha outside the city, where they enjoyed a puppet show performed by Stalin’s daughter, watched a movie, and played billiards. Afterwards, they dined on fish Kirov had brought from Leningrad.^[17] Just two weeks later on December 1st at 4:00pm Kirov, back in Leningrad, decided to stop by his office to review some files before a speech that evening.

If only Kirov had somehow been able to access those files without leaving his apartment. If only he had AnyDesk, the amazing program that lets you access any of your devices from anywhere in the world at any time, as if they were right there in the room with you.

Whether you need to print something remotely, help a family member troubleshoot some tech woes, grab some files off your other computer, do something quick in a desktop program from your tablet, or just stay home to avoid being assassinated at your office, AnyDesk has you covered with lightning-fast responsiveness even on the slowest Soviet internet.

“Soviet internet fastest in world!”

Seriously, AnyDesk is an incredibly important tool for us—we use it to access all our old project files, which thanks to AnyDesk, are available all over the world: key when I was working in Japan and New Zealand. And the best part: AnyDesk is actually totally free for personal use, so checking it out at AnyDesk.com/Spectacles is a great way to support the channel without spending a dime.

We use it all the time to make these videos and seriously recommend it. Super easy and super useful. See for yourself, for free, at AnyDesk.com/Spectacles. It could save your life, unlike Sergei Kirov.

THEORY I

THE INVESTIGATION

Within thirty minutes of the shooting, high-ranking Leningrad NKVD officers arrived at Smolny and began collecting witness statements. While some differed on details—“In what manner did Nikolaev fall to the ground?” “Was he still holding the gun when he was found lying next to Kirov or had he dropped it?” “Did anyone strike Nikolaev in response to the murder?”—nearly all of them agreed on the essential facts of the case: the number and timing of the shots, the orientation of the men lying in the hallway, and Nikolaev as the lone gunman.^[18]

The “Who?” was obvious: Nikolaev shot Kirov. The “How?” was also quickly answered when a search revealed he carried a party membership card – the only credential necessary to reach the third floor. All that remained was, “Why?”

In Moscow, Stalin had an idea. He slammed the phone down, shouting, “idioty!”, and summoned Genrikh Yagoda.^[19] Twenty minutes later, the NKVD central chief—the national head of secret police—appeared at Stalin’s office.

Back in Leningrad, Deputy Chief of the local NKVD Fyodor Fomin had made no headway interrogating the incoherent or otherwise catatonic Nikolaev when the phone rang. It was Stalin’s line, but Fomin recognized his boss’s voice. Yagoda asked if Nikolaev was wearing foreign clothes. He was not. Yagoda hung up. Minutes later, Fomin’s phone rang again. Yagoda. Same question. Still negative. But Fomin got the message. Stalin was headed to Leningrad, and he wanted to know who was really behind this.^[20]

As soon as Nikolaev regained his senses, Fomin launched into his first recorded interrogation with a simple demand, “Tell us who else participated in the organization of this attack with you.” Nikolaev insisted, “I prepared the whole thing by myself, and I told no one of my plans.” His stated motive was distinctly personal: he’d been mistreated at his previous job, dismissed from the party, and, despite multiple pleading letters, received no relief from Kirov, Stalin, or anyone else. Disinterested in his story, Fomin pressed Nikolaev repeatedly to admit his accomplices, but to no avail.

The next day, Stalin descended on Leningrad, and that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Seeking answers, he summoned Kirov’s bodyguard, Borisov, to Smolny. But on the way from the NKVD offices where he was being held, Borisov’s transport truck crashed, killing him. The guards accompanying him were unscathed. Moreover, Stalin learned that the NKVD had apprehended Nikolaev once before in October lurking outside Kirov’s apartment but released him. Stalin smelled a rat.^[21]

The next day, NKVD central chief Yagoda indicted his Leningrad subordinates for negligence, including the Leningrad NKVD chief and his deputy Fomin. Admonishing the two, Stalin warned, “The murder of Kirov is the hand of an organization, but which organization is difficult to say right now.”^[22]

The following morning, the new lead investigator—supervised by Stalin-appointee Nikolai Yezhov—opened with as telling a question as his predecessor: “What influence did your connections to former oppositionist-Trotskyites have on your decision to kill Comrade Kirov?”^[23]

Suddenly, Stalin’s man was hunting for connections to the dictator’s 1920s opponents—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—enemies whose power lay in Leningrad and whose supporters Kirov had dutifully purged.

In fact, entries in Nikolaev’s diary uncovered days earlier mentioned the names of two known Leningrad oppositionists. To this opening question, Nikolaev averred that he knew these men as individuals but not as a group, and he maintained that he’d acted entirely on his own.

The next day, December 5th, Nikolaev was interrogated five times. The day after that, seven. Finally, he broke, confessing to conspiracy with several others in the plot against Kirov.^[24]

On December 9, Nikolaev’s old roommate was brought in for questioning, whereupon he confessed to participating in an oppositionist conspiracy headed by Stalin’s old enemies Zinoviev and Kamenev.^[25] A breakthrough. Three days later he coughed up full member rolls of all five cells of the movement.^[26] So the arrests began.

THE PURGE

On the 28th, 14 individuals including Nikolaev stood trial for conspiring to kill Sergei Kirov. Within 24 hours all accused were convicted and shot.^[27] Zinoviev and Kamenev stood trial in mid-January and were convicted of fostering a “moral atmosphere” critical of Stalin and Kirov and conducive to terrorism. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years, Kamenev to five.^[28]

Kirov’s killers were dead, their role models confined to prison cells. Yet the investigation and continuing reports from secret police flooding Stalin’s desk painted a frightening image. All these criminals were just the tip of the iceberg. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky — they all had countless supporters, countless knives in the dark searching for Stalin’s back. Within two months, nearly 12,000 Leningraders were arrested on charges of terrorism, espionage, and more.^[29] Over the next two years, the NKVD arrested over half a million people across the USSR, executing more than 4,000.^[30]

Except…with each arrest, each execution, the worrying reports just increased. The Kirov case, closed by the sentencing of Zinoviev and Kamenev, was suddenly reopened in 1936. Overseeing it would be the man Stalin had trusted to take over the Leningrad investigation in December 1934, who uncovered the Zinovievite conspiracy where others had failed: Nikolai Yezhov.

Within a month, Zinoviev and Kamenev confessed not just to creating a terrorist “moral atmosphere” but to direct participation in the conspiracy against Kirov. In August they were tried, convicted, and shot. In the process, Yezhov uncovered more enemies.^[31]

And so the campaign continued, turning deeper inwards, to the NKVD itself. Yezhov discovered it had been _Yagoda _who’d given orders to release Nikolaev after his first arrest in 1934, and who ordered Borisov hold back from Kirov.^[32] Moreover, under interrogation, the driver of the truck which had crashed and killed Borisov made a shocking admission: a Leningrad NKVD operative had deliberately crashed the vehicle, presumably to kill Borisov and cover the NKVD boss’s tracks.^[33]

By the time Yagoda faced trial in 1937, he was joined by myriad others all of whom confessed to forming a broad conspiracy network which since 1932 had plotted to kill Union leadership, succeeding against their first target, Kirov. All pleaded guilty, were convicted, and shot.^[34]

But to ensure this network of conspirators was truly excised, Stalin couldn’t stop there. He directed Yezhov to institute mandatory arrest and execution quotas. By May of 1937, party members with no record of opposition were being rounded up by Yezhov’s NKVD. By July, almost every provincial party secretary was in prison, if not already tried, convicted and shot.

Over the next year and a half, official NKVD records count 1.5 million arrests and precisely 681,692 executions. Hundreds of thousands more surely perished from abuse in the far-east’s concentration camps. Further still, literally tens of thousands of deaths may simply have been forgotten in a rounding error.^[35] Of the Union’s 100 million working-age subjects, nearly 1% were murdered by the state in this campaign, motivated ultimately by the death of one man: Sergei Kirov.^[36]

IS IT TRUE?

But could this be true? Could it really be the case that millions of potential terrorists were spread across the union, infiltrating every level of government, plotting to kill Stalin? Could Nikolaev have been merely one member of an anti-Kirov, Zinovievite conspiracy in Leningrad? Well, let’s take a look.

According to Stalin’s official conspiracy theory, Nikolaev’s means are not very important or controversial. He was a veteran of the civil war, and many such men retained their service pistols. Though it expired in 1931, he did carry a license for the weapon.^[37] Nothing altogether unusual.

That he had the opportunity to make his attack on Kirov, however, was of significance. According to Stalin, the NKVD was party to the plot against Kirov, responsible for Nikolaev’s release in October, and for Kirov’s bodyguard Borisov’s absence at the moment of assassination and subsequent death in transport.

Yet the evidence on all three fronts is dubious at best. As for Nikolaev’s October arrest-and-release, he appears to have posed no threat to Kirov at the time. In fact, he wrote a letter to Kirov two weeks later begging for help and swearing himself a loyal “warrior” for the party line.^[38]

As such, there seems nothing amiss about the responsible officer’s behavior, because, in his own words, “(1) Nikolaev’s identity was fully established. (2) Nikolaev was a party member. (3) Nikolaev, who worked in Smolny, knew S. M. Kirov. [And] (4) …Nikolaev’s attempt to approach Comrade Kirov with a request for a job assignment [was] natural and not suspicious, as there had been such cases before and afterwards.”^[39] Indeed, according to NKVD daily logs, every single person taken into custody like this between October and November was similarly released without issue.^[40]

As for the mysterious absence of Borisov on the scene and his suspicious death, that’s a bit more complicated, and it’s central to the second theory of who really killed Kirov. So, we’ll deal with it in a minute. For now, let’s take it for granted that Borisov and the NKVD collaborated in Kirov’s death and that the NKVD killed him to cover their tracks. Where does that leave us?

Well, Nikolaev’s means are essentially uncontested, while his opportunity was provided by the collusion of secret police and Kirov’s bodyguard. Yet even if the NKVD had a hand in Kirov’s death, what evidence is there that a vast anti-Stalin conspiracy really motivated them and Nikolaev?

For one thing, Nikolaev’s confession of conspiracy came only after nearly a week of intensifying interrogation. While there’s no evidence to suggest he was tortured, there’s plenty that he was manipulated with false assurances of his own and his family’s safety: a conceivably effective tactic with such a mentally vulnerable prisoner.^[41] Moreover, the supposedly traitorous context in which Nikolaev wrote of his “Zinovievite” associates in his diary was in fact the opposite. Nikolaev describes them critically, accusing them of “traitorous” behavior against Stalin.^[42]

Further, Zinoviev and Kamenev aren’t mentioned in any interrogation protocols prior to December 4, more than 48 hours into the investigation and after Stalin’s appointees took over, at which point, suddenly, “oppositionists-Trotskyites” are the subject of the first question put to Nikolaev that day. In fact, Yezhov testified to the Central Committee in 1937, saying, “Comrade Stalin, as I remember it, called [me] in…and said, ‘Look for the killer among the Zinovievites.’ I should note that [Yagoda] did not believe in that…Comrade Stalin had to intervene. Comrade Stalin called Yagoda and said, ‘Look, we’re going to smash their faces.’”^[43] Yezhov is not a perfectly reliable source, but these comments, combined with the abruptness of the investigation’s turn and the discrepancies between Nikolaev’s diary and his confessions are altogether plenty enough to cast doubt on Stalin’s official story of a Zinovievite conspiracy.

Yet it remains possible. And if you’d like to dive deeper into it or any of the other theories we discuss, we release a bonus podcast doing just that for every video over on our Patreon. Go check it out. But, while we can’t say for sure that Zinoviev and Kamenev didn’t master-mind Kirov’s murder, by looking at a couple more theories, we may gain a clearer picture of relative degrees of plausibility. We may also in turn gain a better understanding of how exactly this one death ballooned to nearly a million executions in just a few years. To that end, if Stalin was cold and calculating enough to slander Zinovievites to death, sanctioning a cascade of carnage across his empire, could it be possible it was him who had Kirov killed in the first place, as a sort of casus belli for his reign of terror?

THEORY II

Since the end of the purges, many have leveled this precise accusation at Stalin, perhaps most significantly Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s eventual successor in the 1950s.

Significantly, Stalin and those who accuse him each regard the NKVD as complicit in Kirov’s death and central to their respective conspiracy theories. Kruschev himself asserted that “the killer of Kirov, Nikolaev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was protect [Kirov]” and that the death of Borisov in NKVD custody “in a car ‘accident’ in which no other occupants of the car were harmed” was highly suspicious.^[44]

But while Stalin believed—or cynically asserted—that the secret police was captured by oppositionists, those who blame him have a simpler answer. Stalin, after all, was the ultimate authority over the NKVD. In other words, he obviously had the means. In turn, four years after his succession to power, Khrushchev’s investigative commission concluded that Stalin had indeed been the man behind it all.^[45]

It seems a strange idea; Stalin and Kirov were close friends. So where’s the motive? One contemporary’s account, from an anonymous “Old Bolshevik” at the top of the party apparatus, recalls that Kirov opposed Stalin’s plan to execute a disgraced oppositionist in 1932, speaking “with particular force against recourse to the death penalty. Moreover, he succeeded in winning over the ‘Politburo’ to this view.”^[46] At the same time, Kirov seems to have ignored several telegrams from Stalin demanding Kirov expedite collectivization in Leningrad.^[47] It appears that—compared to his boss—Kirov may actually have been something of a moderate, which strained their relations.

Ergo, at the 1934 Party Congress, when a large contingent of regional party bosses began discussing possible replacements for the dictator, the authoritative and moderate Kirov’s name came up. Additionally, the Congress elected membership of the party’s Central Committee. Of the 1,059 votes counted Stalin received 1,056, while Kirov 1,055. Yet, as many as 289 ballots were uncounted: their results unknown to all but, likely, Stalin himself. Perhaps he saw that Kirov actually received more votes than him.^[48] Combined, these two events at the 1934 Party Congress could have rendered Kirov in Stalin’s eyes no longer a friend but an outright enemy.

So, with a clear motive and obvious means, on December 1, 1934, Stalin dealt with Kirov as he did all his enemies. But how exactly did Stalin get the opportunity?

Well, according to protocol, when Kirov was driven from his apartment to Smolny, his driver should have called ahead to notify building security…which was run by the NKVD. They would have been the only ones to know of Kirov’s impromptu visit, offering a simple explanation for the apparently incredible coincidence of Nikolaev’s chance encounter; the NKVD positioned him.^[49]

This doesn’t prove Stalin ordered it, but his behavior after Kirov’s death certainly elicits some suspicion. For starters, within hours of Kirov’s death, he revised Soviet judicial procedures with respect to terrorist crimes: limiting investigations to ten days, revoking right of appeal, and scheduling the sentence—almost always death—to be carried out immediately following the verdict.^[50] If Stalin did orchestrate the murder with a larger purge in mind, this would be the obvious next move, and it would explain how he had this legislation apparently ready and on hand right away.

Moreover, we can’t forget about poor old bodyguard Borisov: the man who just so happened to fail to protect Kirov and who suspiciously died the next day in NKVD transit to Stalin.

Why was Borisov so far behind Kirov? The obvious answer is that he was ordered to be by the NKVD, who wanted Kirov exposed. In fact, according to a 1933 Leningrad NKVD report to Stalin, the dictator had instructed the secret police to meddle with Kirov’s security by replacing his trusted guards, but Kirov rejected their efforts.^[51] Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall.

Then, after Kirov’s death, Borisov began to realize why he had been instructed to hold back from his charge, and when the NKVD received orders to “bring the bodyguard to Stalin,” they knew they had to tie up this loose end. He knew too much.

Means, motive, and opportunity: Joseph Stalin had all three. It was he who ordered the hit on Kirov.

But there are a few problems here.

Sure, Stalin attempted to adjust Kirov’s guard in 1933, but that was before the 17th Party Congress, when Stalin supposedly gained the motive to act against his friend. Moreover, Borisov had been Kirov’s bodyguard for over a decade but by 1934 was nearly 55 years old and had limited mobility.^[52] Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that he lagged behind after Kirov climbed three flights of stairs to the Smolny corridor where he was shot.^[53]

As for Borisov’s death, Stalin himself convened a commission of experts to evaluate his skull fractures, the street he was found on, vehicle condition, and any skid marks.^[54] Despite Stalin’s evident desire to pin Borisov’s demise on a Zinovievite conspiracy, the commission uncovered no evidence of foul play.^[55] Modern reviews of the original commission’s work have largely confirmed this, suggesting that tying Borisov’s death to NKVD conspiracy is likely misguided. Further still, the confession from Borisov’s driver that an NKVD officer deliberately crashed the truck was extracted with sleep deprivation and physical torture. In exchange for his “cooperation,” the driver lived to tell the tale, which he did in 1956.^[56]

There’s no question Stalin _could _have ordered a hit on Kirov, but why would he? Maybe Kirov flinched to fully enforce collectivization, but by 1934, he’d embraced Stalin’s demands.^[57] And that anonymous “Old Bolshevik” who recounted Kirov’s opposition to Stalin? It turns out he wasn’t a Bolshevik at all but a longtime exile from a different political faction.^[58] Additionally, it wasn’t all that uncommon for votes to be discarded at Party Congresses.^[59] And finally, Stalin’s suspicious judicial legislation is explained just as easily by his habitual paranoia, heightened following the murder of his close friend.

Altogether, this narrative of Stalin’s motive is backed up by a garbled, patchwork, and ultimately unreliable account of events which defies the otherwise accepted understanding of his relationship with Kirov. And that’s all without mentioning that a secretive hit job just wasn’t his style. Why hide it, when you could disgrace your enemy and valorize his destruction at your hands?^[60]

And as for Khrushchev’s commission and its guilty verdict against Stalin, that’s about as reliable as the torture-extracted confessions and show trials which formed the backbone of Stalin’s purges. Khrushchev was consolidating his own power, and maligning Stalin offered a solid pretext to replace his one-time supporters with new officials loyal to Khrushchev.

THEORY III

So, perhaps there was no conspiracy, no grand exposure of secret plots. Is it possible Nikolaev merely acted alone?

At first it seems hard to believe. Born in 1904, Nikolaev joined the revolution at thirteen, soon serving as a village soviet chairman. At 20, he was a member of the communist party, working in the Communist Youth League.^[61] He had a son, whom he named Karl Marx, and he raised money in his apartment building to erect a bust of the political economist.^[62] But by the time he was 30, Nikolaev was fired from his sixteenth job in the party apparatus. Life in the party was not easy on Nikolaev.^[63]

And when in March 1934, he refused mobilization—basically, to lecture railroad workers in Marxist theory and Stalinist propaganda—he faced a Leningrad party commission. Minutes record his behavior as “rude, extremely unrestrained, hysterical.” One member present asked, “Is Nikolaev’s psychological condition normal?” In turn, he was stripped of his party membership: the decision, unanimous.^[64]

Though he successfully campaigned for his reinstatement by May, he retained a censure on his record and proved unable to find work. His diary and other notes reflect a slow descent from frustration into panic and despair. In July, he wrote to Kirov. In August he complained to Stalin, “I have been sitting without work for five months. All of this has had a deep effect on me, that I am left completely helpless and sick…I have no life, no work, no path.”^[65]

In October, less than a week before his first arrest, he wrote to the Politburo, of which Kirov was a member, “I request that I be given in the first instance, in the shortest possible time, treatment at a sanatorium-resort, but if such a possibility does not exist, then I must give up belief and hope in a rescue.”

None of his letters ever met with a response.

By early November, Nikolaev began to write difficult to decipher “plan” notes in his diary, referencing Smolny and Kirov’s apartment and laying out sequences of actions to undertake in different scenarios, as well as sketches of Kirov’s daily routes.^[66]

In Nikolaev’s own words, his motive was simple. “The attempt on Kirov’s life had the main goal of making a political signal before the party that over the last eight to ten years of my life’s road and work there has accumulated a backlog of unfair attitudes…towards a living human being.”

This hardly proves Nikolaev wasn’t part of a broader conspiracy, but it does prove that he had a personal motive, that he didn’t need a broader conspiracy or political allegiance to Zinoviev or prodding from the NKVD to do what he did. Moreover, while there may be no direct proof against a plot, it’s hard to imagine this evidently unstable character as the chosen weapon of any conspiratorial mastermind.

As for opportunity, we’ve seen how allegations of NKVD collusion rest on shaky grounds at best, but one question remains: “How did he happen to be on the third floor of Smolny when Kirov arrived?”

According to an interrogation on December 3rd, Nikolaev was searching for tickets to a party meeting that evening, presumably to get close to Kirov, who was scheduled to speak. Smolny—one of several former work-places—was not his first stop, but he ended up there for over an hour. It wasn’t until he ventured up to the third floor—to which he would have had access, despite the censure on his card—where around 2:30 he encountered an acquaintance who offered him a ticket on the condition that Nikolaev return for it that evening. Satisfied, he went on a walk and returned to the institute around 4:30. At that point, in his words, “Going up to the third floor I went into the bathroom, relieved myself, and exiting the bathroom I turned left. After taking two or three steps I observed Sergei Mironovich Kirov approaching me along the right wall of the corridor, perhaps 15–20 steps away.”^[67] In essence, the answer is, “dumb luck.”

CONCLUSION

Maybe it’s a dissatisfying answer, but one look at the evidence, and it’s obviously in a different league of plausibility from the others. Yes, Zinoviev and Kamenev and Yagoda and Nikolaev and a million other people could have been in on it, plotting against Stalin and Kirov. Yes, Stalin was a monstrous dictator who very well could have killed his closest friend for political gain. But for one second, stack those accusations against the mountain of self-incrimination offered by Nikolaev—the diary, the letters, the obvious mental disturbances—and it instantly becomes apparent. Because for no other theory is there any such trove of evidence.

Maybe it seems just a little too lucky that he happened to be on the third floor of Smolny, but remember his October arrest. Even if assassination hadn’t occurred to him that day, he went on to study Kirov’s routines, watching him for weeks. Even if he hadn’t run into Kirov on the third floor, it’s just as likely he would have gotten a ticket to that evening’s meeting and taken his shot then, or on the Leningrad train station platform where he repeatedly waited for Kirov returning from Moscow, or some other day on his route home from Smolny. Nikolaev was determined. And even if he failed, maybe he wouldn’t have been the last to try.

Because it wasn’t just irrational suspicion on Stalin’s part; Leningrad was full of disaffected civil servants, bureaucrats, and functionaries. Moreover, the Union itself may have been full of disaffected subjects. As Nikolaev observed in his diary in late October, “A thousand generations will pass, but the idea of Communism will not be made flesh…For themselves, complete personal security, for us the most unbearable measure of punishment. For themselves, for their wives and children—garages with automobiles—for us stale bread and a cold room.”^[68] In truth, Nikolaev was right in his assessment. And though the party’s ever-active domestic propaganda machine blinded many to this fact, could he really have been the only one to recognize it?

To that very point, in this light it begins to become less and less confusing—how one murder devolved into the legalized execution of a million people. Because this was a sick system, led by a sick man, possessed by a sick ideology.

Think about it this way. In a democratic system, in theory, those in power have an incentive to deliver benefits to the public, relying as they do on the consent of the governed. This can create a symbiotic relationship whereby the public supports those in power on the basis of those in power supporting the public. Of course, this relationship depends on functioning competition which offers voters choices and invites participation, which may be more or less healthy from country to country

The Soviet regime, by contrast, did not develop such systems of public accountability. Instead, Lenin, Stalin, and their revolutionary comrades quickly rejected democracy, because their communist ideology demanded the centralization of just about everything in society—allocation of resources, prices for services, assignment of public jobs, even life and death. In turn, they created a massive, totalitarian state to see the revolution through, in essence, because the workers’ revolution was too important to be entrusted to, well, the workers.

This centralization and lack of accountability, however, did not create an efficient revolutionary machine. In the end, its results were simply disastrous. First, it eroded the incentives for competence in favor of loyalty. Government officials weren’t accountable to the public, but to superiors. Execution of demands and the meeting of centrally determined quotas trumped public welfare. Stalin’s collectivization, which Kirov dutifully carried out alongside thousands of others and which killed ten million innocents, is a prime example. Second, it incentivized secrecy, propagandization, and violent repression, since public knowledge of widespread incompetence and/or abuse might lead the public to resort to its only recourse against those in power: revolution. To that end, without elections, the regime’s only means of resolving political disputes was violence.

Now introduce to this unwieldy, violent, mess of a political order one Joseph Stalin. In the words of scholar Matthew Lenoe, whose research constitutes a backbone of this video, “[Stalin] was a vengeful and power-hungry man, and possibly a sadist in the clinical sense.” But he was also a true believer in the revolutionary ideology he espoused. His massive death tolls were not accidents but products of a complete disregard for human life in comparison to the imagined utopia to be achieved for the sake of the collective—not that such a thing is possible, anyway.

It was this set of conditions, of widespread poverty, of a security apparatus capable of repression but not of maintaining actual security, of a megalomaniacal ideologue and the dysfunctional political system he fathered, that made it possible for the xunstable and unhappy Nikolaev to walk into the Smolny Institute and kill Sergei Kirov, and then for Stalin to unleash a reign of terror. The reality of the crime may be less exciting than the lurid, vast, and shadowy conspiracy theories, but it is, in its own way, far more revealing than all of them.

I: Introduction

March 12, 2003, about 9 AM. Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Dindic is on the phone with a close adviser and confidant, Zoran Janjusevic. (C)

Dindic: Janjusevic, it’s me.

Janjusevic: Good morning, sir.

Dindic: The same to you. How are things moving along with these gangs?

Janjusevic: We're making quite good progress, actually.

Dindic: Good. I worry maybe I didn't make the right call firing Savic and Bracanovic last month.

Janjusevic: No, it was the right move. No more leaks, as far as we can tell. Spasojevic and the Zemun gang won't know what hit them.

Dindic: Well, good. That’s good. Thank you. Anyways, I’ll be in this afternoon after some meetings. We’ll talk more then.

Later that day, around 12:35pm, Dindic’s motorcade turns into the parking lot at Nemanjina 11. Dindic’s driver needs no reminder that his boss prefers to avoid the government headquarters' secure tunnel passage, and he pulls the car up to an exterior entrance instead. The security team exits the other vehicles and forms a perimeter, while Dindic's top bodyguard gets out, opens his boss's door, and turns to grab some crutches. Dindic’s lower left leg is in a cast, thanks to an achilles injury from a soccer match the week prior. Handing off the crutches, the bodyguard then goes for the Prime Minister’s briefcase, as Dindic starts toward the entrance. Then,

[two shots]

Zoran Dindic is shot. Immediately, building security drags him inside to safety, shouting that someone should call an ambulance. Alerted by the commotion, Dindic’s confidant Janjusevic appears on the scene, stunned. He kneels down by the Prime Minister and finds he’s still alive but bleeding heavily. Janjusevic tells security to forget the ambulance and to help him carry the Prime Minister to the car.

Within moments, they are speeding to the hospital. Across the rear seats, his head in Janjusevic’s lap, lies the man who ousted a genocidal dictator, who brought war criminals to justice, who sought to build a brighter future for a nation burdened by a terribly dark past, and whose greatest crime, it now seemed, was taking on gangs who profited off brutality, addiction, and war. And now, after everything, Zoran Dindic is dead.

The mystery of his murder lies not so much in the question of “Who did this?”, although there are theories that question the official explanation; Zvezdan Jovanovic pulled the trigger at the behest of his boss, notorious gangster Dusan “Duke” Spasojevic, and his former commander, Special Operative Milorad “Legion” Ulemek. Rather, it lies in the question, “How did this happen?”: a mystery which requires unraveling the interwoven stories of these men—Legion, Duke, Dindic, and others—who, some for better, others for worse, had a hand in shaping the fate of this young nation.

II: Born in Bloodshed

Those stories begin in the 1990s, when Serbia's mother-country, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was coming apart, thanks largely to ethnic tensions stoked by Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic (A, 32-33). The wars of disintegration that followed saw brutality on all sides, but are widely remembered for Serbian attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing of Croats, Bosnians, and others.

Although Serbia's government remained officially aloof from the conflicts, Milosevic’s state security services funded, trained, and encouraged the formation of Serbian militias: among them, the notorious Red Berets who perpetrated such atrocities as the ethnic cleansing of Doboj in Bosnia, resulting in over 300 civilian deaths and thousands displaced (A, 38-47, 136). And wherever they went, after the killing came the looting. According to the later testimony of one Serbian State Security official, the Red Berets

“introduced a reign of terror…They started carrying away property and prevented people from taking anything with them if they wanted to leave (B)”

In turn, they built strong relations with and fueled the rise of powerful gangs trafficking in stolen wartime plunder, including people.For their brutality and avarice, Milosevic rewarded the Red Berets, incorporating them as the Special Operations Unit or JSO within the Ministry of State Security in 1996 after the wars drew to a close (A, 107). With official status came a particularly import ant new recruit: Milorad Ulemek, also known as Legion (A, 105). Almost immediately,

Legion started climbing the ranks of the unit, and transformed it into one of Milosevic’s chief instruments of repression, carrying out the disappearance and assassination of political opponents (A, 112-113). By 1999, he was the Red Berets’ leader. But as Legion and his unit were growing in power, Serbia was struggling. Internationally isolated by sanctions imposed in response to the violence, Serbia's official economy began to sink.

In its place rose the shadow economy born from the trade of wartime plunder.

Emblematic of this trend was the Zemun Clan, a mafia group led by Dusan Spasojevic, known as the "Duke." He’d started out dealing in stolen cars but quickly graduated to heroin trafficking and kidnappings for ransom (A, 112-113). In each other, Duke and Legion each found a perfect ally—Ulemek helped plan the abductions, and reinvested part of his own cut from the ransoms into the Red Berets. Even in peace, the symbiosis between paramilitary and organized crime had only deepened (A, 112-113).

But peace was not to last. By 1999, in Kosovo—an autonomous province within Serbia—long-simmering ethnic tensions between the Serbs and majority Albanians exploded into open conflict (L, 203). Milosevic responded by deploying troops, including the Red Berets, to the region, sparking international fears of a repeat of the atrocities of the early 90s (A, 110).

When those fears were confirmed, and reports of ethnic cleansing began to leak out of Kosovo, Europe and the United States, under the banner of NATO, intervened with a massive air campaign against Serbia. For 78 days in early 1999, bombs fell across the country, until, threatened by a land invasion, Milosevic agreed to withdraw. Serbia’s infrastructure had been wrecked, along with Milosevic’s prestige, and he was now the subject of an indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (L, 204-205).

An international fugitive, the authoritarian ruler’s power was now threatened, but domestically he was still entrenched. It would take a massive push to overthrow him.

III: Fateful Choices

The man who would ultimately contribute, gain, and then tragically lose the most from that massive push was Zoran Djindjic. A former philosophy professor, Djindjic had spent the 1980s criticizing Yugoslavia’s bubbling nationalism (H). In 1989, he and a group of intellectuals established one of the first major opposition parties in the country: the Democratic Party. Though a strident liberal ideologue, Dindic was not an idealist. Summarizing his pragmatism, he reportedly remarked to a disgruntled ally:

"If you want honesty, go to church.” (H)

Over the course of the 90s, Djindjic employed his political acumen to call tens, sometimes even hundreds, of thousands of Serbians out onto the streets almost at a moment’s notice, protesting to demand an end to authoritarian rule (F, G). And when Milosevic found himself on the wrong side of NATO bombers in 1999, Djindjic and his allies saw an opening. With training and funding from Western pro-democracy organizations, Dindic and other opposition leaders began discussing the formation of a broad popular front against the current government. By the end of the year, it was official: eighteen political parties combined to form the Democratic Opposition of Serbia and rallied against Milosevic (K, 310-311).

And the time was ripe. Years of international sanctions and months of bombing had destroyed the Serbian economy. Milosevic’s support for the wars of the decade had become incredibly unpopular, and even his precious Red Berets weren't able to disappear and murder enough of his enemies to save him now. There were just too many (K, 310).

Yet perhaps not comprehending just how dire his situation was, in July of 2000 Milosevic decided to call early elections for the presidency of Yugoslavia, which by now was limited to Serbia and neighboring Montenegro, reduced by the losses of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Slovenia (N).

Djindjic faced a difficult choice. To many, he was the face of opposition, but while many Serbs were tired of Milosevic's bloodshed, they weren't necessarily inclined to support a liberal philosophy professor who’d once railed against Serbian nationalism. Moreover, Djindjic was publicly linked to the very European countries that had bombed Serbia only a year and a half earlier, and he knew it, stating in his own words,

"My political position is currently too pro-European for most people in Serbia. Their feelings about Europe are still too linked to the NATO intervention and sanctions, and they are suspicious about the good intentions of those countries." (D, 3)

And so, Djindjic stepped aside in favor of Vojislav Kostunica, a longtime opponent of Milosevic but a far more traditional candidate who more readily embraced Serbian nationalism (D, 1). Djindjic was entrusted with the crucial, but far less glorious, task of managing Kostunica’s campaign (K, 312).

The election was held on September 24th, 2000. Kostunica won an outright majority, embarassing Milosevic who won a mere 37% of the vote (K, 311). After over a decade in power, Slobodan Milosevic had been rejected by his own people.

Claiming that Kostunica hadn’t actually won a majority, Milosevic demanded a second round of voting (O). In response to this obvious power-grab, protests erupted across the country, and crowds descended on Belgrade. Except…Milosevic and his lackeys still had the guns. While the opposition movement planned a massive protest for October 5th, Djindjic and the other leaders were concerned that the police—and Legion's notoriously brutal Red Berets in particular—would unleash deadly force against the demonstrators (K, 312).

And so, on the night of October 4th, Zoran Dindic, the man who said that those who wanted honesty in politics should instead go to church, once again making a fateful choice, got into the back of a Jeep in downtown Belgrade and sat across from Milorad Ulemek, the man who would, in 2003, have him killed. But that was years away. On this night in 2000, they struck a deal. If the Red Berets refused to follow Milosevic’s inevitable order to put down the protests, the protestors would steer clear of Legion's men. More importantly, the deal effectively secured the unit's continued existence in the post-Milosevic regime (A,115-116).

The next day, over 500,000 Serbians flooded the streets of Belgrade. Milosevic ordered the his loyal Red Berets to defend the regime, but Legion told his men to stand down (L, 312). For Milosevic, the jig was up. On October 7th, just two days later, Kostunica was inaugurated as the President of Yugoslavia (K, 314). Two months later, the opposition parties won a smashing victory in Serbia’s parliamentary elections. Zoran Dindic, for his work, leadership, and willingness to compromise with Kostunica and Legion, was chosen as Prime Minister (P).

Dindic now faced two inseperable challenges: how to revive the collapsed economy and what to do about Slobodan Milosevic. The International Criminal Tribunal had indicted Milosevic in 1999 and put out a warrant for his arrest. Europe and America wanted that warrant executed, with Milosevic extradited to the Hague to be put on trial. Until that happened, the sanctions strangling Serbia, particularly from America, weren't going anywhere (R).

Now, Milosevic had been arrested not long after his ousting, but that was for domestic crimes of corruption and abuse of power (Q, 663). That didn't help with the issue of extradition, and Kostunica, with whom Djindjic almost immediately experienced a falling out, refused to green-light a constitutional amendment or exception (R) . On June 28th, 2001, the Yugoslav federal court concurred with Kostunica, ruling that Milosevic could not be extradited.

This put Djindjic between the rock of international justice and the hard place of national constitutionalism. Because Yugoslavia’s old constitution, written under Milosevic, was still in force, and it said in plain terms that

A Yugoslav citizen may not be deprived of his citizenship, deported from the country, or extradited to another state. (S)

Djindjic had no authority to disobey.

Now, Milosevic had been arrested not long after his ousting, but that was for domestic crimes of corruption and abuse of power. That didn't help with the issue of extradition, and Kostunica, with whom Djindjic almost immediately experienced a falling out, refused to green-light a constitutional amendment or exception. On June 28th, 2001, the Yugoslav federal court concurred with Kostunica, ruling that Milosevic could not be extradited (Q).

Djindjic was, yet again, faced with a difficult choice, his options constrained by a constitution written by the government he had just helped overthrow and international actors who had a life-or-death say over his country’s economy. And so he convened a meeting of his cabinet. They held a vote. Fifteen ministers, including Djindjic, voted to extradite Milosevic. Just one voted against, while six abstained. Within hours, Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of a decade of brutal civil violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, was put onto a plane and flown to the Hague (Q).

It was a blatantly unconstitutional act by Djindjic and his government, yet one done out of both a desire to achieve a higher justice that transcended the law and a practical need to provide for his people. In Djindjic’s own words,

We should fulfill certain conditions to be accepted as a partner. The conditions are to accept the rules of this democratic world, to cooperate with international organizations. That means cooperation with The Hague tribunal, fighting against corruption and organized crime in our country, conducting financial discipline and (promoting) free markets and democratic institutions. (T)

Serbian sanctions were lifted, but Dindic was hardly out of the woods yet.

IV: Mutiny

Because of course Milosevic didn’t act alone in his crimes against humanity, nor was he the only one wanted by the Hague. Among the many others on the list were, importantly, two brothers, Predrag and Nenad Banovic, wanted for their work as concentration camp guards where they beat, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered non-Serb prisoners. (4B)

To apprehend these criminals, Dindic’s Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic dispatched the Red Berets on November 8, 2001. To this day it’s not known exactly what they were told about their targets, whether they knew exactly who they were or why they were wanted, but when, within hours of their arrest, the Banovic brothers were on a plane destined for the Hague, the Red Berets were not very happy.

On November 9, they mutinied. The Red Berets, many of whom served as security for government officials, simply didn’t show up to work, instead blockading themselves in their headquarters at Kula and issuing a statement demanding Mihajlovic’s resignation, saying,

“The unit was deceived and led to perform an illegal and unconstitutional act against its will. Given that the law on cooperation with the Hague Tribunal has not yet been passed…we reject any order issued in that direction. Members of this unit will not be hunters of Serbs persecuted like beasts without any basis in law.” (4B)

At that moment, Dindic was away in Washington, meeting and currying favor with American officials. News of the mutiny did not help things.

The next day the Red Berets made a show of force by barricading a critical highway north of Belgrade for several hours. Dindic, still scrambling to return to the capital, did nothing. (4C)

On the 11th he arrived in Belgrade, made a statement threatening to fire the special operatives if they didn’t quit the mutiny,

and convened a meeting with his cabinet and closest advisers.

Records revealed ten years later3 give us an astonishing insider look at the debate that followed. (4C)

Interior Minister Mihajlovic, at the center of this conflict, began the meeting by casting doubt on the purported legal concerns of this paramilitary death squad, theorizing that instead they were simply paranoid they would be next on the Hague's list. The rest of the military, he added, remained loyal.

Then, after another minister exclaimed,

“It is an armed rebellion against the government!”

Dindic made his first comment. Instead of responding to this or to Mihajlovic’s subtle suggestion to quash the mutiny, he laid out a complex three-pronged argument refuting the mutineers' legal arguments.

When another minister remarked that Djindjic hadn't answered what should actually be done,

Dindic replied,

“Let's see that the competent ministry finds a solution that will not add fuel to the fire. We have enough time tomorrow, if things escalate, to react more sharply.”

With that, the meeting adjourned. In other words, despite the urging of his subordinates, Dindic chose to delegate the decision and delay decisive action.

The next day, on the 12th, the Red Berets took the mutiny a step further, blockading the same critical highway, but this time for nearly ten hours.

On the 13th, Mihajlovic went to meet with the mutineers. They reiterated their demand that he resign. Determining the best course of action was to sacrifice himself, Mihajlovic penned his resignation there and then. But when he held it out for the mutineers to see, a fellow minister accompanying him snatched it from his hands and tore it to shreds. One of the Red Berets drew a knife and threatened to kill the man. But this was not the day Zvezdan Jovanovic would kill a government official. That would come just over a year later, when he set his sights on Zoran Dindic and pulled the trigger.

In the meantime, the ministers returned to Belgrade with nothing to show other than shredded paper and plans to attend yet another cabinet meeting.

This time, Dindic began by excoriating those who led the effort to arrest the Banovic brothers, validating the complaints of the mutineers. Though he refused Mihajlovic’s resignation, he suggested offering the Red Berets a deal: he would fire the Minister and Deputy Minister of State Security, who had immediate responsibility for the Banovic arrests. If they refused this, he added, then the cabinet would decide how to respond later.

At that, Mihajlovic became heated, retorting,

“The only thing that is not good is this talk of “tomorrow.” We have to know what our answer is to all situations…This is about an armed rebellion…It is a political battle for whether we will cooperate with The Hague and whether we will be a legal state in which organized mafia will not rule this country, in which there will be no [military] units…stronger than the state. Therefore, are we going to disarm those brothers in arms and blood and bring them to justice or not?”

Dindic dismissed the notion,

“This story about disarming them is a story for small children.”

Mihajlovic:

“That is not true. If the Government orders to disarm that unit and disband it, I will implement that decision.”

Another minister butted in:

“Zoran, I invite you to hit the table with your fist!…This is, with a political background, an armed rebellion against the Government.”

Another sounded his agreement, before one man cut through the din with the fateful question,

“Do we have the strength to disarm them?”

The room went quiet. Dindic responded, gravely,

“Don't ask for an honest answer.”

When some ministers pressed him to explain, he added,

“When I individually called [the military commanders] who should intervene and asked, “Why you don't want to intervene?” they would answer, “Why would I, when I go to The Hague tomorrow?” That's when I realized the scale of this spreading paranoia.”

Nobody wanted to do anything, because everyone feared they were next on the Hague lists. So once more, Dindic balked and delayed. For the moment, the Red Berets were satisfied, laying down their arms on the 17th, after Dindic brought in new leadership at State Security: Minister Andreja Savic and Deputy Minister Milorad Bracanovic, the latter being himself a former member of the Berets.(J)

V: The Aftermath

However, this concession would prove fatal. In the aftermath of the mutiny, Dindic knew he had to step up the fight against criminal gangs and paramilitaries, or else everything he'd worked for would be destroyed. So, in 2002, his government began secretly establishing new courts and prosecutors to go after the mafia and building robust legal protections for witnesses. In January of 2003, though, word got out. Somehow the Zemun Clan had become aware of these plans. There had to be a mole. Who else but the two men at the top of State Security connected to Ulemek and, by extension, Spasojevic? So Dindic fired Savic and Bracanovic. (J) /CAM/

But it wasn’t enough; their dismissals were in reality a trip wire, a step that told Legion and Duke that it was time to get rid of Djindjic entirely. They recruited Zvezdan Jovanovic to pull the trigger. As he later testified, Jovanovic believed that by assassinating Djindjic he could restore a pro-Milosevic government, one final testament to the deep ties between the authoritarian, genocidal regime that had preceded Djindjic and the rapacious criminals who had profited from it. (U)

In a poetic turn of fortune for Serbia, however, Dindic’s killers achieved anything but that. With this kind of violence against the state, there was no longer room for debate and delay about what had to be done. Within hours of Dindic's death, his cabinet convened and, motivated in part by Mihajlovic's insistence, declared a state of emergency and launched a massive police crackdown known as Operation Sabre. After more than 11,000 arrests, the results were stark. Although it took over a year to round up Ulemek and Spasojevic, the Red Berets were formally disbanded and the Zemun Clan, although it still exists today, has been nothing more than a shadow of its former self since 2003. (V)

But this leaves one question unanswered. If the Berets and gangs were dealt with so effectively, shouldn’t Djindjic have simply acted more aggressively, earlier? There’s no doubt that he needed Ulemek’s men on October 5th, 2000; if he hadn’t convinced them to step aside Milosevic might have stayed in power. But by the time of the mutiny in late 2001, it wasn’t so obvious anymore. The deliberations show that there was a real belief among some officials that this was the moment to put the Red Berets out of business, a move that, if successful, would have freed up the government to take action against the nation's gangs as well. Yet Djindjic hesitated.

Because he inherited a brutal dilemma. He was attempting to build a new, just society with the bricks and stones of a repressive, genocidal dictatorship. In his quest, the tools at his disposal — the Red Berets, the army, the constitution — were all tainted by the old regime. On the one hand, he had to extradite Milosevic and men like the Banovic brothers. He had to clean house. But to do so meant leveraging the laws crafted to prop up dictatorship and calling on the assistance of the very men who feared—not without reason—that “cleaning house” meant that they were about to be swept away too: next on the Hague lists.

Relying on, occasionally conceding to, the institutions and personnel of the old political order does not necessarily render the efforts of transition disingenuous. Men like Zoran Dindic, Janjusevic, Mihajlovic, and so many more gave everything in their earnest mission to build democracy. Yet, today, despite their efforts, Serbian democracy lags and is even backsliding. Organized crime resurged in the 2010s and continues to plague the country. Because transitioning to a functioning democracy is not easy work. Nor is it guaranteed. Even when successful, it’s a slow process full of fits and starts. In the case of Serbia, the forces of the old order were deeply entrenched in the state security system, and the ravages of war had empowered criminal elements at the expense of the public. It was never going to be easy, because there can be no clean break with the past. We play with the hand we’re dealt.

And yet, there are better and worse ways to play that hand in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Choices and leadership matter at critical moments, even when the shadow of the past looms large over the options available to decision makers. Zoran Djindjic made choices at crucial junctures, choices that led, successfully, to the ousting of a brutal regime and the establishment of a young democracy, but also, unsuccessfully, to the sustained influence of that regime’s fragments over the new order.

There’s no program here, no set of steps every leader can take. There is only good judgement and a willingness to take risks. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Maybe he could have broken with the past, at least more cleanly, at the moment of the mutiny. Or maybe he did everything right, and Serbia's history was just too dark, too recent. We can't know for sure. But we do know that he tried, and that in killing him, his assassins only empowered the allies of Serbian democracy and enshrined his memory as a man who sought, amidst the pain and tragedy, a glimmer of hope.

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