There have been other major political upheavals before the Russian October, 1917, revolution.
The French revolution may have been more colourful and more romantic.
But no other revolution can match that of the Russians in the nobility of its conception, in the brilliance of its ideals, in its violence, and in its tragedy, It is a mystery to the ordinary mind, though academics will continue to speculate, how a movement once just a dream of political outcasts became such a giant as to contest the mastery of the world.
Was it due to the revolutionary rhetoric: 'workers of the world unite.
You have nothing to lose but your chains.
You have a world to gain.
'? Was it its 'vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world'? Whatever the reasons were, the communist party became the most revolutionary movement in the history of man.
It was in the heart of the gigantic political body that Sergei Mironovich Kirov lived, flourished and perished.
Like many of his contemporaries his life is typical rags to hero fairy tale.
He was born on the 27th of March, 1886, to a peasant family.
His father abandoned his family when Kirov was five years old.
His mother soon died of tuberculosis.
He had to rely on the largesse of others to receive an education.
He was soon ensnared in the political ferment of in Russia that heralded the Revolution in 1905.
He joined the workers' demonstrations that followed Bloody Sunday in January 1905, when tsarist troops mowed down a demonstrating crowd killing about 200 people.
He was jailed several times before the October revolution of 1917.
With the communists in power he served the Bolshevik army that brutally crushed all resistance.
He rose within the party until he became a member of the politburo, and later the secretary of the Central Committee.
He therefore shared the stage with some of the most fabled figures of the Russian revolution.
He worked with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, the three who embodied the essence of the revolution.
He served with the other architects of the Russian state Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin.
He was acquainted with one of the most eminent Russian writers, Emil Gorky.
He knew the great General Zhukov.
There are few to match these great men on the Russian pantheon.
Thus to dig into the murder of Kirov is to cast a light into the lives and intrigue of very powerful men.
Sergei Kirov was shot in the neck on the 1 December, 1934, as he walked into his offices in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolaev.
Kirov's bodyguard, Borisov, who had been walking 'too far behind' his master, a grave breach of discipline, to even see the shooting, died a day after the crime.
Did Nikolaev have a personal motive or did he have accomplices? Was Kirov's murder an attack on Stalin and communism? Or did Stalin have Kirov killed because of his rising popularity in the party, and later used his murder as a pretext to wipe out his party enemies, Interestingly, Nikolaev never tried to escape after the shooting: instead he was found next to his victim unconscious.
The assassination of the Kirov triggered a catalogue of repressive measures.
Nikolaev, after several months of torture confessed to a litany of crimes against the state and was shot.
His mother, wife and siblings were also arrested and executed.
This was followed by a series of show trials in which many with even the flimsiest of connections with Nikolaev were arrested, charged and shot.
Many of the old Bolsheviks were imprisoned, and the common charge was complicity in the murder of Kirov.
The old guard of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin after being charged 'with having a moral responsibility' in Kirov's murder met with the same fate.
Others committed suicide in despair.
Even the exiled Trotsky was charged with Kirov's murder, and sentenced to death in-abstentia.
Trotsky was later killed in Mexico by a Soviet agent, and most of his family members were murdered.
The executions slowly gathered force like an avalanche, and were a prelude to the Great Purge.
The latter according to Whitaker Chambers in his book 'Witness' 'was in the most literal sense a massacre.
It was like one of those western jack-rabbit hunts in which a whole countryside forming a vast circle that finally closes in on its victims, and then clubs them to death.
The purgees, like the rabbits, had no possible chance of escape'.
The reader initially flinches from the violence and the brutality in Stalin's Russia.
It precedes the murder of Kirov, and continues without respite after it.
The book fails to resolve the mystery that it set out to answer.
Despite pointing a finger at Josef Stalin for the murder and even arguing compellingly about his culpability, it does not provide conclusive evidence to support its thesis.
Yet it raises a few interesting issues, and answers an even broader question.
It points the finger at the powerful men who were part of the Soviet leadership and were themselves later purged.
In other words the writer is saying that Kirov was not just a victim but he was also a culprit.
'He had after all been an accomplice in the crimes that the young Bolshevik regime perpetrated upon its people, and he had contributed to Stalin's rise to power'.
The author asks therefore if the communist old guard with their unquestioning and mindless support of Stalin create a cult around his leadership, and thus generously feed the monster that destroyed them, and later soaked the entire Russian landscape in blood.
Who killed Kirov is a well written historical novel, and is a compelling narrative of the Kirov murder.
It is also a well-researched analysis of the psychology of the Stalin years.
There are no heroes in the story, but only villains and their victims.
The writer portrays Stalin as the predecessor to the brutal autocrats who continue to haunt and hound humanity to this day.
The book transcends the goriness of the violence by posing questions that the entire world should be asking itself.
What it depicts seethes on in both rich and poor countries even in the 21st century.