Nikolayev was well-known to the NKVD, which had arrested him for various petty offences in recent years. Various accounts of his life agree that he was an expelled Party member and failed junior functionary, with a murderous grudge and an indifference towards his own survival. Nikolayev was unemployed, with a wife and child, and in financial difficulties. According to Orlov, Nikolayev had allegedly told a "friend" he wanted to kill the head of the party control commission that had expelled him. Nikolayev's friend reported this to the NKVD. Zaporozhets then allegedly enlisted Nikolayev's "friend" to contact him, giving him money and a loaded 7.62 mm Nagant M1895 revolver. However, Nikolayev's first attempt at killing Kirov failed. On 15 October 1934, Nikolayev packed his Nagant revolver in a briefcase and entered the Smolny Institute where Kirov now worked. Although Nikolayev was initially passed by the main security desk at Smolny, he was arrested after an alert guard asked to examine his briefcase, which was found to contain the revolver. According to Alexander Barmine, a few hours later, Nikolayev's briefcase and loaded revolver were returned to him, and he was told to leave the building. The author thus claims that, though Nikolayev had clearly broken Soviet laws, the security police had inexplicably released him from custody and he was even permitted to retain his loaded pistol. According to Barmine's account, with Stalin's approval, the NKVD had previously withdrawn all but four police bodyguards assigned to Kirov. These four guards accompanied Kirov each day to his offices at the Smolny Institute, and then left. On 1 December 1934, the usual guard post at the entrance to Kirov's offices was supposedly left unmanned, even though the building housed chief offices of the Leningrad party apparatus and was the seat of the local government. According to some reports, only a single friend, Commissar Borisov, an unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, remained. Given the circumstances of Kirov's death, as a former Soviet official and author Alexander Gregory Barmine noted, "the negligence of the NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union."