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Lev Borisovich Kamenev[c] (néRozenfeld;[d] 18 July [O.S. 6 July] 1883 – 25 August 1936) was a Russian-Soviet revolutionary politician. A prominentOld Bolshevik, Kamenev was a leading figure in the early Soviet government and served as adeputy premier of theSoviet Union from 1923 to 1926.
When Vladimir Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, Lev Kamenev formed a triumvirate alongside Zinoviev and the ruling party'sGeneral Secretary,Joseph Stalin, that led Soviet Russia until Lenin returned to work later in the year. After Lenin sustained a second stroke in December 1922, Kamenev became the country's actingPremier as well as chairman of the Politburo for the rest of the Soviet leader's lifetime. Just as a third stroke in March 1923 definitively ruled out any prospect of Lenin returning to government, the aforementioned triumvirate proceeded to consolidate power within the regime by marginalizingLeon Trotsky and his allies.
After being eclipsed by Stalin within the Soviet leadership by 1925, Kamenev was stripped of his offices in 1926 before being expelled from the party altogether in 1927. While readmitted to the party's membership, he never again occupied a position of power in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Kamenev was arrested in response to allegations of complicity inSergei Kirov's assassination and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was ultimately made a chief defendant in theTrial of the Sixteen (theshow trial at the beginning of Stalin'sGreat Purge), found guilty of treason, and executed in August 1936.
Kamenev was born as Lev Borisovich Rozenfeld in Moscow to aJewish father and aRussian Orthodox mother. Both his parents were active in radical politics.[3] His father, an engine driver on the Moscow-Kursk railway, had been a fellow student ofIgnacy Hryniewiecki, the revolutionary who killed theTsarAlexander II.[4] When Kamenev was a child, his family moved toVilno, and then in 1896, to Tiflis (known asTbilisi after 1936), where he first made contact with an illegal Marxist circle. His father used the capital he earned in the construction of theBaku–Batumi railway to pay for Lev's education.[citation needed] Kamenev attended the boys'Gymnasium in Tiflis. In 1900, he enrolled as law student inImperial Moscow University. He joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1901,[5] and was arrested in March 1902 for taking part in a student protest, and, after a few months in prison, was sent back to Tiflis under police escort. Later in 1902, he moved toParis, where he metVladimir Lenin, whose adherent and close associate he became, other Marxist exiles from theIskra group that published the newspaper, and his wife, Olga Bronstein,[4] younger sister ofLeon Trotsky. The couple had two sons together.
From that point on, Kamenev worked as a professional revolutionary and was active in the capitals of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Tiflis. In January 1904, he was forced to leave Tiflis, where he had helped organise a strike on the Transcaucasian railway, and moved to Moscow, where he learnt about the split between theBolshevik andMenshevik factions, and joined the Bolsheviks.[4] Arrested in February 1904, he was held in prison for five months, then deported back to Tiflis, where he joined the local Bolshevik committee, working alongside Georgian Bolsheviks, includingJoseph Stalin. After attending the3rd Congress of the RSDLP inLondon in March 1905, he returned to Russia to participate in theRussian Revolution of 1905 in St. Petersburg in October–December.
He went back to London to attend the5th RSDLP Party Congress, where he was elected to the party'sCentral Committee and the Bolshevik Center, in May 1907, but was arrested upon his return to Russia. After Kamenev was released from prison in 1908, he and his family went abroad later in the year to help Lenin edit the Bolshevik magazineProletariy.[4] After Lenin's split with another senior Bolshevik leader,Alexander Bogdanov, in mid-1908, Kamenev andGrigory Zinoviev became Lenin's main assistants abroad. They helped him expel Bogdanov and hisOtzovist (Recallist) followers from the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in mid-1909.
In January 1910,Leninists, followers of Bogdanov, and variousMenshevik factions held a meeting of the party's Central Committee in Paris and tried to reunite the party. Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea but were willing to give it a try under pressure from "conciliator" Bolsheviks likeVictor Nogin. Lenin was adamantly opposed to re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership. The meeting reached a tentative agreement. As one of its provisions, Trotsky's Vienna-basedPravda was designated as a party-financed 'central organ'. In this process, Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to Pravda's editorial board as a representative of the Bolsheviks. The unification attempts failed in August 1910, when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.
After the failure of the reunification attempt, Kamenev continued working forProletariy and taught at the Bolshevik party school at Longjumeau near Paris.[6] It had been founded as a Leninist alternative to Bogdanov'sParty School based inCapri. In January 1912, Kamenev helped Lenin and Zinoviev to convince the Prague Conference of Bolshevik delegates to split from the Mensheviks and Otzovists.
In January 1914, he was sent to St. Petersburg to direct the work of the Bolshevik version ofPravda and the Bolshevik faction of theDuma. He moved to Finland when Pravda was closed, in July 1914, and was there whenWorld War I broke out.[4] He organised a conference in Finland Bolshevik delegates to the Duma and others, but all the participants were arrested in November tried in May 1915. In court, he distanced himself from Lenin's anti-war stance. In early 1915, Kamenev was sentenced to exile inSiberia; he survived two years there until being freed by the successfulFebruary Revolution of 1917.
Before leaving Siberia, Kamenev proposed sending a telegram thanking the Tsar's brotherMikhail for refusing the throne. He was so embarrassed later by his action that he denied ever having sent it.[7]
On 25 March 1917, Kamenev returned from Siberian exile to St. Petersburg (renamed asPetrograd in 1914). Kamenev and Central Committee membersJoseph Stalin andMatvei Muranov took control of the revived BolshevikPravda and moved it to the Right. Kamenev formulated a policy of conditional support of the newly formedRussian Provisional Government and a reconciliation with the Mensheviks. After Lenin's return to Russia on 3 April 1917, Kamenev briefly resisted Lenin's anti-governmentApril Theses but soon fell in line and supported Lenin until September.Kamenev and Zinoviev had a falling out with Lenin over their opposition to the Soviet seizure of power in October 1917.[8] On 10 October 1917 (Old Style), Kamenev and Zinoviev were the only twoCentral Committee members to vote against an armed revolt. Their publication of an open letter opposed to using force enraged Lenin, who demanded their expulsion from the party.[9] However, when the Bolshevik-ledMilitary Revolutionary Committee, headed byAdolph Joffe, and thePetrograd Soviet, led by Trotsky, staged an uprising, Kamenev and Zinoviev went along. At the Second All-RussianCongress of Soviets, Kamenev was elected Congress Chairman and chairman of the permanentAll-Russian Central Executive Committee. The latter position was equivalent to the head of state under the Soviet system.
Kamenev at the Brest-Litovsk in December 1917 (right first).
On 10 November 1917, three days after the Soviet seizure of power during theOctober Revolution, the executive committee of the national railroad labor union,Vikzhel, threatened a nationwide strike unless the Bolsheviks shared power with other socialist parties and dropped the uprising's leaders, Lenin and 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.[10] 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 aided Lenin and Trotsky to convince the Central Committee to abandon the negotiating process. In response, Zinoviev, Kamenev,Alexei Rykov,Vladimir Milyutin andVictor Nogin resigned from the Central Committee on 4 November 1917 (Old Style) and Kamenev resigned from his Central Executive Committee post. The following day, Lenin wrote a proclamation calling Zinoviev and Kamenev "deserters."[11] He never forgot their behavior, eventually making an ambiguous reference to their "October episode" in hisTestament.
In late 1917, Kamenev was sent to negotiate with Germany over thepotential armistice atBrest-Litovsk, which finally came in the form ofTreaty of Brest-Litovsk. In January 1918, Kamenev was sent to spread the revolution to Britain and France and negotiate with the countries about the potential alliance in case Germany continued its offensive against the Bolshevik regime, but after he had been in London for a week, he was arrested and deported. On his return, via Finland, he was captured by Finnish partisans led byHjalmar von Bonsdorff opposed to the Bolshevik revolution, and held until August 1918, when he was exchanged for Finnish prisoners held by the Bolsheviks.[4]
In 1918, Kamenev became chairman of the Moscow Soviet, and soon after that, Lenin'sDeputy Chairman of theCouncil of People's Commissars (government) and theCouncil of Labour and Defence. In March 1919, Kamenev was elected a full member of the first Politburo. His relationship with his brother-in-law Trotsky, which was good in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution and during theRussian Civil War, lessened after 1920. For the next 15 years, Kamenev was a friend and close ally ofGrigory Zinoviev, whose ambition exceeded Kamenev's.[according to whom?]
During Lenin's illness, Kamenev was appointed as the acting President of the Council of People's Commissars and Politburo chairman.[1] Together with Zinoviev andJoseph Stalin, he formed a rulingTriumvirate (also known by its Russian nameTroika) in theCommunist Party, and played a key role in the marginalization of Trotsky. The triumvirate carefully managed the intra-party debate and delegate selection process in the fall of 1923 during the run-up to the 13th Party Conference, securing a vast majority of the seats. The Conference, held in January 1924, immediately prior to Lenin's death, denounced Trotsky and "Trotskyism."
In the spring of 1924, while the triumvirate was criticizing the policies of Trotsky and theLeft Opposition as "anti-Leninist", the tensions between the volatile Zinoviev and his close ally Kamenev on one hand, and the cautious Stalin on the other, became more pronounced and threatened to end their fragile alliance. However, Zinoviev and Kamenev helped Stalin retain his position asGeneral Secretary of the Central Committee at theXIIIth Party Congress in May–June 1924 during the firstLenin's Testament controversy, ensuring that the triumvirate gained more political advantage at Trotsky's expense.
Lev Kamenev, Director of theLenin Institute of the Central Committee 1923
In October 1924, Stalin proposed his new theory ofSocialism in One Country in opposition to Trotsky's theory ofPermanent revolution, while Trotsky published "Lessons of October,"[12] an extensive summary of the events of 1917. In the article, Trotsky described Zinoviev and Kamenev's opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, which the two would have preferred to be left unmentioned. This started a new round of intra-party struggle, with Zinoviev and Kamenev again allied with Stalin against Trotsky. They and their supporters accused Trotsky of various mistakes and worse during theRussian Civil War. Trotsky was ill and unable to respond much to the criticism, and the triumvirate damaged Trotsky's military reputation so much that he was forced out of his ministerial post asPeople's Commissar of Army and Fleet Affairs and Chairman of theRevolutionary Military Council in January 1925. Zinoviev demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party, but Stalin refused to go along with this and skillfully played the role of a moderate.
At the 14th Conference of the Communist Party in April 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves in a minority when their motion to specify that socialism could only be achieved internationally was rejected, resulting in the triumvirate of recent years breaking up. At this time, Stalin was moving more and more into a political alliance withNikolai Bukharin and theRight Opposition, with Bukharin having elaborated on Stalin'sSocialism in One Country policy, giving it a theoretical justification.One of Kamenev's last public acts while he was still a major figure in the soviet leadership was to read the storyThe Heart of a Dog, byMikhail Bulgakov. He denounced it, saying "It's an acerbic broadside about the present age, and there can be absolutely no question of publishing it."[13] The story was banned in the Soviet Union until 1987.
Lev Kamenev, acting Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Premier) Soviet Union, greeted on the military parade to celebrate 6th anniversary of the October revolution, 7 November 1923
With Trotsky mainly on the sidelines through a persistent illness, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate collapsed in April 1925, although the political situation was hanging in the balance for the rest of the year. All sides spent most of 1925 lining up support behind the scenes for theDecember Communist Party Congress. Stalin struck an alliance withNikolai Bukharin, a Communist Party theoretician andPravda editor, and the Soviet prime ministerAlexei Rykov. Zinoviev and Kamenev strengthened their alliance with Lenin's widow,Nadezhda Krupskaya. Also, they aligned withGrigori Sokolnikov, thePeople's Commissar for Finance and a candidate Politburo member. Their alliance became known as theNew Opposition.
The struggle became more open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee, and came to a head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925, when Kamenev publicly demanded the removal of Stalin from the position of the General Secretary. With only the Leningrad delegation (controlled by Zinoviev) behind them, Zinoviev and Kamenev found themselves in a tiny minority and were soundly defeated. Trotsky remained silent during the Congress. Zinoviev was re-elected to the Politburo, but Kamenev was demoted from a full member to a non-voting member, and Sokolnikov was dropped altogether. Stalin succeeded in having more of his allies elected to the Politburo.
The photo shows the leadership of the USSR:Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party;Alexei Rykov, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Prime Minister); Lev Kamenev, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Deputy Prime Minister);Grigory Zinoviev, Chairman of the Comintern's executive committee. Apr 1925.
In early 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters gravitated closer to Trotsky's supporters, with the two groups allying, which became known as theUnited Opposition. During a new period of intra-party fighting between the July 1926 meeting of the Central Committee and the XVth Party Conference in October 1926, the United Opposition was defeated, and Kamenev lost his Politburo seat at the Conference.
"He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of."
Bukharin in conversations with Kamenev on Stalin's theoretical position, 1928.[16]
Kamenev continued to oppose Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, resulting in his expulsion from the Central Committee in October 1927. After the expulsion of Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Communist Party on 12 November 1927, Kamenev was the United Opposition's chief spokesman within the Party, representing its position at theXVth Party Congress in December 1927. Kamenev used the occasion to appeal for reconciliation among the groups. His speech was interrupted 24 times by his opponents – Bukharin,Ryutin, andKaganovich, making it clear that Kamenev's attempts were futile.[17] The Congress declared United Opposition views incompatible with Communist Party membership; it expelled Kamenev and dozens of leading Oppositionists from the Party. This paved the way for mass expulsions in 1928 of rank-and-file Oppositionists, as well as sending prominent Left Oppositionists into internal exile.
Kamenev's first marriage, which had begun to disintegrate in 1920, as a result of his reputed affair with theBritishsculptorClare Sheridan, ended in divorce in 1928 when he leftOlga Kameneva and marriedTatiana Glebova.[18][19] They had a son together, Vladimir Glebov (1929–1994).[20]
While Trotsky remained firm in his opposition to Stalin after his expulsion from the Party and subsequent exile, Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated almost immediately and called on their supporters to follow suit. They wrote open letters acknowledging their mistakes and were readmitted to the Communist Party after a six-month cooling-off period. They never regained their Central Committee seats but were given mid-level positions within theSoviet bureaucracy. Kamenev and, indirectly, Zinoviev, were courted by Bukharin, then at the beginning of his short and ill-fated struggle with Stalin, in the summer of 1928. This activity was soon reported to Joseph Stalin and used against Bukharin as proof of his factionalism.
Zinoviev and Kamenev remained politically inactive until October 1932, when they were expelled from the Communist Party, after receiving an oppositionist group's appeal but not informing the party of their activities during theRyutin Affair. After again admitting their alleged errors, they were readmitted in December 1933. They were forced to make self-flagellating speeches at the17th Party Congress in January 1934, where Stalin paraded his erstwhile political opponents, showing them to be defeated and outwardly contrite.
The murder ofSergei Kirov on 1 December 1934 was a catalyst for what are called Stalin'sGreat Purges, as he initiated show trials and executions of opponents.Grigory Zinoviev, Kamenev and their closest associates were again expelled from the Communist Party and arrested.
During this time Kamenev wrote a letter to Stalin, saying:
At a time when my soul is filled with nothing but love for the party and its leadership, when, having lived through hesitations and doubts, I can boldly say that I learned to highly trust the Central Committee's every step and every decision you, Comrade Stalin, make. I have been arrested for my ties to people who are strange and disgusting to me.
The act of rehabilitation of Kamenev
The men were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison and Kamenev to five. After the sentence the writerMaxim Gorky pleaded with Stalin for Kamenev's release, but was ignored.[21] Kamenev was charged separately in early 1935 in connection with theKremlin Affair, in which his nephew Nikolai Rosenfeld, a Moscow thermal power engineer, was involved as a major participant. Although he refused to confess, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. In August 1936, after months of rehearsal in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostlyOld Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. This time, the charges included forming a terrorist organization that killed Kirov and tried to kill Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. ThisTrial of the Sixteen was one of theMoscow Show Trials and set the stage for subsequent show trials. Old Bolsheviks were forced to confess increasingly elaborate and monstrous crimes, including espionage, poisoning and sabotage. Like the other defendants, Kamenev was found guilty and executed by firing squad on 25 August 1936.[citation needed] The fate of his body is unknown. In 1988, duringperestroika, Kamenev, Zinoviev and his co-defendants were formallyrehabilitated by theMilitary Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.[22]
After Kamenev's execution, his relatives suffered similar fates. Kamenev's second son, Yu. L. Kamenev was executed on 30 January 1938, at the age of 17. His eldest son,Air Force officer A.L. Kamenev, was executed on 15 July 1939 at 33. His first wife,Olga, wasexecuted on 11 September 1941, in the Medvedev forest outsideOryol, together withChristian Rakovsky,Maria Spiridonova, and 160 other prominent political prisoners.[20] Only his youngest son, Vladimir Glebov, survived Stalin's prisons andlabor camps, living until 1994.[23]
^In Lenin's absence, Kamenev served as the Soviet Union's actinghead of government in his place.[1]
^AfterVladimir Lenin suffered a second stroke on 15 December 1922, he effectively withdrew from all aspects of governing Soviet Russia until his death.[2] In Lenin's absence, Kamenev served as the country's actinghead of government in his place.[1]
^Lindemann, Albert S. (1997).Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge University Press. p. 430.ISBN0-521-79538-9.
^abcdefGeorges Haupt, and Jean-Jaques Marie (1974).Makers of the Russian Revolution. (This volume contains a translation of biography of Kamenev published in a Soviet encyclopaedia in the 1920s) London: George Allen & Unwin. pp. 41–45.ISBN0-04-947021-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
^For a key profile of Kamenev search the AQA Oxford History 'Revolution and Dictatorship: Russia 1917–1953' – Pg 18 "key profile of Lev Borisovich Kamenev"
^See Adam Bruno Ulam.Stalin: The Man and His Era, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973,ISBN0-8070-7005-X p.112
^For an account of the discussions within the Bolshevik leadership in November 1917, see Elizabeth A. Wood.The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, Indiana University Press, 1997,ISBN0-253-21430-0 p. 70
^McSmith, Andy (2015).Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, the Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin. New York: The New Press. p. 61.ISBN978-1-59558-056-6.
^Medvedev, Roj Aleksandrovič (1989).Let history judge: the origins and consequences of Stalinism (Rev. and expanded ed.). Columbia Univ. Press. pp. 112, 143.ISBN978-0-231-06351-7.
^See Elisabeth Kehoe.The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the English Aristocratic World Into Which They Married, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004,ISBN0-87113-924-3, p.325.
^See Robert Conquest.The Great Terror: A Reassessment, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990,ISBN0-19-505580-2 andISBN0-19-507132-8 (pbk), p. 76.
^abSee Michael Parrish.The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996,ISBN0-275-95113-8 p. 69.
Corney, Frederick C., ed.Trotsky's Challenge: The "Literary Discussion" of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution. (Chicago:Haymarket Books, 2017).
Debo, Richard Kent. "Litvinov and Kamenev—Ambassadors Extraordinary: The Problem of Soviet Representation Abroad."Slavic Review 34.3 (1975): 463–482.online
Isaac Deutscher.The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (1954)
Isaac Deutscher.The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929 (1959)
Haupt, Georges, and Jean-Jacques Marie.Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies (Routledge, 2017).
Hough, Jerry F.; Fainsod, Merle (1979).How the Soviet Union is Governed. Harvard University Press.ISBN0-674-41030-0.
Kotkin, Stephen.Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2015)excerpt
Lih, Lars T. "Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917."The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928, 8 (2014), 55–68(2014).online
Pipes, Richard.Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (2011)
Pogorelskin, Alexis. "Kamenev and the Peasant Question: The Turn to Opposition, 1924–1925."Russian History 27.4 (2000): 381–395.online
Rabinowitch, Alexander. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (1968).
Renfrew, Alastair (2015). "Chapter 9—The Beginning and the End: The Formalist Paradigm in Literary Study". In Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.).1922: Literature, Culture, Politics. Cambridge University Press. pp. 145–167.ISBN978-1-107-04054-0.
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