A Broken Screw in the Soviet System. The Life and Fate of Leonid Nikolaev

Abstract

The tectonic change of 1917 not only disrupted the country but also placed, for a brief moment, a “little man” at the centre of “big story.” Nikolaev was a typical representative of ordinary people being pushed into a corner by circumstances and deceived in their expectations by a pseudo-socialist state. The high expectations of ordinary people, who were involved by the Bolsheviks in their politics, naturally crashed into the harsh realities of the construction of socialism.
Brought to political life from social non-existence, this ordinary man soon became unnecessary to the new political regime’s needs and was subject to manipulation and mobilization by the party. This is how he ended up being merged with the human mass, which was faceless to the party nomenclature. However, this ordinary man was opposed to the latter and thus became the cause of large-scale social cataclysms. He got a weapon and killed Kirov; the personification of the political power against which Nikolaev’s act was directed.
In the early Soviet period, many representatives of this social stratum raised their voices in protest, even if not in a terrorist form. Many of them were physically eliminated, the rest were brought to submission. This was a demonstration of the toughness of the Bolshevik regime, which transformed into the regime of Stalin’s personal power in the 1930s, involving terrorist forms of governing.