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Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev[1] September 23 [O.S. September 11] 1883 - August 25, 1936), born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum (Russian: ), was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician. Zinoviev is best remembered as the long-time head of the Communist International and as the chief defendant in a 1936 show trial, the Trial of the Sixteen that marked the start of the so-called Great Terror in the USSR and resulted in his execution the day after his conviction.
Contents
1 Biography o 1.1 Before the 1917 Revolution (1901-1917) o 1.2 1917 o 1.3 The Civil War (1918-1920) o 1.4 Rise to the top (1921-1923) o 1.5 With Stalin and Kamenev against Trotsky (1923-1924) o 1.6 Break with Stalin (1925) o 1.7 With Trotsky against Stalin (1926-1927) o 1.8 Submission to Stalin (1928-1934) o 1.9 Show trials (1935-1936) 2 The "Zinoviev Letter" 3 Footnotes 4 External links
Biography
Before the 1917 Revolution (1901-1917)
Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad (currently Kirovohrad), Ukraine, to Jewish dairy farmers, who educated him at home. Between 1923 and 1935 the city was known as Zinovyevsk. Gregory Zinoviev was known in early life under the names of Apfelbaum or Radomyslovsky and later adopted several designations, such as Shatski, Grigoriev, Grigori and Zinoviev, by the two last of which he is most frequently called.[2] He studied philosophy, literature and history. He became interested in politics, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901. He was a member of its Bolshevik faction from the time of its creation in 1903. Between 1903 and the fall of the Russian Empire in February 1917, he was a leading Bolshevik and one of Lenin's closest associates, working both within Russia and abroad as circumstances permitted. He was elected to the RSDLP's Central Committee in 1907 and sided with Lenin in 1908 when the Bolshevik faction split into Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers. Zinoviev remained Lenin's constant aide-de-camp and representative in various socialist organizations until 1917.
[edit] 1917
Grigory Zinoviev. Zinoviev spent the first three years of World War I in Switzerland. After the Russian monarchy was overthrown during the February Revolution, he returned to Russia in April 1917 in a sealed train with Lenin and other revolutionaries opposed to the war. He remained a part of the Bolshevik leadership throughout most of that year and spent time with Lenin after Lenin was forced into hiding after an abortive coup attempt in July 1917. However, Zinoviev and Lenin soon had a falling out over Zinoviev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. On October 10, 1917 (Julian calendar), he and Lev Kamenev were the only two Central Committee members to vote against an armed revolt. Their publication of an open letter opposed to use of force enraged Lenin, who demanded their expulsion from the party. On October 29, 1917 (Julian calendar), immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power during the October Revolution, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union, Vikzhel, threatened a national strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped Lenin and Leon Trotsky from the government. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their allies in the Bolshevik Central Committee argued that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to start negotiations since a railroad strike would cripple their government's ability to fight the forces that were still loyal to the overthrown Provisional Government. Although Zinoviev and Kamenev briefly had the support of a Central Committee majority and negotiations were started, a quick collapse of the anti-Bolshevik forces outside Petrograd allowed Lenin and Trotsky to convince the Central Committee to abandon the negotiating process. In response, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, Vladimir Milyutin, and Victor Nogin resigned from the Central Committee on November 4, 1917 (Julian calendar). The following day, Lenin wrote a
proclamation calling Zinoviev and Kamenev "deserters". He never forgot their behavior, eventually making an ambiguous reference[citation needed] to their "October episode" in his Testament. This was an important turning point in Zinoviev's career. For the next five years it was Trotsky and not Zinoviev who was the number two man in the Bolshevik Party. Zinoviev, an ambitious man, was not willing to accept his demotion and did much to undermine Trotsky's position within the Party between 1918 and 1925[citation needed].
Zinoviev, speaking at an engagement with Maxim Gorky. Zinoviev soon returned to the fold and was once again elected to the Central Committee at the VII Party Congress on March 8, 1918. He was put in charge of the Petrograd (Saint Petersburg prior to 1914, Leningrad 1924-1991) city and regional government. In September 1918 he declared: To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. [3] He became a non-voting member of the ruling Politburo when it was created after the VIII Congress on March 25, 1919. He also became the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern when it was created in March 1919. Zinoviev was responsible for Petrograd's defense during two periods of intense clashes with White forces in 1919. Trotsky, who was in overall charge of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, thought little of Zinoviev's leadership, which aggravated their strained relationship.
In early 1921, when the Communist Party was split into numerous factions and disagreements were threatening to engulf the Party, Zinoviev supported Lenin's faction. As a result, Zinoviev was made a full member of the Politburo after the Xth Party Congress on March 16, 1921, while members of other factions such as Nikolai Krestinsky were dropped from the Politburo and the Secretariat. Zinoviev was one of the most powerful figures in the Soviet leadership during Lenin's final illness in 1922-1923 and immediately after his death in January 1924. He delivered the Central Committee's reports to the XIIth and XIIIth Party Congresses in 1923 and 1924 respectively, something that Lenin had previously done. He was also considered one of the Communist Party's leading theoreticians. As head of the Comintern, Zinoviev deserved some of the blame for the failure of the Communist revolt in Germany in the fall of 1923, but he managed to shift it to Karl Radek, the Comintern's representative in Germany in 1923[citation needed].
Zinoviev Speaks During Lenin's illness, Zinoviev, his close associate Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin formed a ruling 'triumvirate' (or 'troika') in the Communist Party, playing a key role in the marginalization of Leon Trotsky. The triumvirate carefully managed the intra-party debate and delegate selection process in autumn 1923 during the run-up to the XIIIth Party Conference and secured a vast majority of the seats. The Conference, held in January 1924 just before Lenin's death, denounced Trotsky and Trotskyism. Some of Trotsky's supporters were demoted or reassigned in the wake of his defeat, and Zinoviev's power and influence appeared to be at its zenith. However, as subsequent events showed, his real power base was limited to the Petrograd/Leningrad Party organization while the rest of the Communist Party apparatus was increasingly under Stalin's control.
After Trotsky's defeat at the XIIIth Conference, tensions between Zinoviev and Kamenev on the one hand and Stalin on the other hand became more pronounced and threatened to end their fragile alliance. Nevertheless, Zinoviev and Kamenev helped Stalin retain his position as General Secretary of the Central Committee at the XIIIth Party Congress in May-June 1924 during the first Lenin's Testament controversy. After a brief lull in the summer of 1924, Trotsky published The Lessons of October, an extensive summary of the events of 1917. In the article, Trotsky described Zinoviev's and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, something that the two would have preferred to be left unmentioned. This started a new round of intra-party struggle with Zinoviev and Kamenev once again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. They and their supporters accused Trotsky of various mistakes and worse during the Russian Civil War and damaged his military reputation so much that he was forced to resign as People's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council in January 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go along at that time and skillfully played the role of a moderate.
Grigory Zinovyev, cartoon by Nikolai Bukharin, 1926 With Trotsky finally on the sidelines, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate began to crumble in early 1925. The two sides spent most of the year lining up support behind the scenes. Stalin struck an alliance with Communist Party theoretician and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and Soviet prime minister Alexei Rykov. Zinoviev and Kamenev allied with Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Grigory Sokolnikov, the Soviet Commissar of Finance and non-voting Politburo member. The struggle became open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925. With only the Leningrad delegation behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves in a tiny minority
and were soundly defeated. Zinoviev was re-elected to the Politburo, but his ally Kamenev was demoted from a full member to a non-voting member and Sokolnikov was dropped altogether, while Stalin had more of his allies elected to the Politburo. Within weeks of the Congress, Stalin wrestled control of the Leningrad party organization and government from Zinoviev and had him dismissed from all regional posts, leaving only the Comintern as a potential power base for Zinoviev.
choice of the date. On the 15th of September, 1924, I was taking a holiday in Kislovodsk, and, therefore, could not have signed any official letter.... "It is not difficult to understand why some of the leaders of the Liberal-Conservative bloc had recourse to such methods as the forging of documents. Apparently they seriously thought they would be able, at the last minute before the elections, to create confusion in the ranks of those electors who sincerely sympathise with the Treaty between England and the Soviet Union. It is much more difficult to understand why the English Foreign Office, which is still under the control of the Prime Minister, MacDonald, did not refrain from making use of such a white-guardist forgery."[5]
Footnotes
1. ^ Also transliterated Grigorii Ovseyevish Zinoviev. 2. ^ "Zinoviev, Grigori". Encyclopdia Britannica (12th ed.). 1922. 3. ^ George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-19-822862-7 page 114 4. ^ Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar; Simon Sebag Montefiore, pp. 188, 193-98 5. ^ Grigorii Zinoviev, "Declaration of Zinoviev on the Alleged 'Red Plot,'" The Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 8 (Dec. 1924), pp. 365-366.
External links
Grigory Zinoviev Archive, part of Marxists Internet Archive. Anatol Lunacharsky on Zinoviev. Leon Trotsky on Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev