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The Kremlin Affair (Russian: Кремлёвское дело) is a 1935 criminal case in the Soviet Union about an assassination attempt on Joseph Stalin, which preceded the Great Purge and installment of Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD. Following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, responsibility befell the inadequate security and intelligence measures within the Leningrad government. Subsequent investigations into the security apparatuses of government offices across the Soviet Union were carried out and led to the discovery of numerous criminal elements within the Kremlin and Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union.

=Plot= In total, 112 people were arrested in connection with the Kremlin Affiar and 109 were eventually sentenced by the Military Collegium or by absentia in special meeting with the NKVD. Investigations conducted by the NKVD found that only six of them made significant confessions of involvement, and the most serious crimes were to be handled by the Military Collegium. The leading conspirator was Mikhail Cherniavsky, a military Fourth Department officer who lost his Communist faith while studying chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology undercover. He became convinced that the Stalinist planned economy could never compete with American capitalism and that it was necessary to replace Stalin as Soviet leader. On March 26, he confessed that he was part of a 'terrorist' assassination plot organized after the Kirov affair in the belief that equally poor security in the Kremlin could enable them to smuggle in pistols and shoot Stalin. No evidence shows that he was tortured, but he was persuaded to admit that he had been allegedly recruited by an American Trotskyist named Ryaskin when he was in America. When asked about the details two days later, he could provide none. Among the arrested was Nikolai Rosenfeld, Lev Kamanev's nephew and an engineer at Moscow power plant.

Pressure to execute the plotters came from the NKVD and its head, Genrikh Yagoda, rather than Stalin himself. Unlike his later curt agreement with execution requests, Stalin only agreed with the execution of two people among a total of twenty-six people whose death was demanded. One was Mikhail Cherniavsky and the other was Alexei Sinelobov, a deputy commandant of the Kremlin, whose sentence was later commuted to 10 years' imprisonment.

Sentencing
=Convicted=

--- =Aftermath= Along with the investigation, in February, Avel Yenukidze, then Secretary of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee was removed from the post, by which the security of the Kremlin was supposed to be ensured. Rudolf Augustovich Peterson also lost his post due to the case. On March 21, the Politburo sent the members of the Central Committee and commissions of party and Soviet control the "Report of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the apparatus of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and comrade. Yenukidze". The report was delivered by Nikolai Yezhov. In the report, Avel Yenukidze was accused of failing to exercise sufficient political vigilance. It was also claimed that the assassination attempt also involved Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, as well as the Mensheviks and White Guards.

People later implicated for their role in their handling of the Kremlin Plot
add yagoda confession, other resources

Izvestiya report in 1989
add information and conclusions by the government