Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolshevik, Kamenev was a leading figure in the early Soviet government and served as a deputy premier of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1926.
Born in Moscow to a family active in revolutionary politics, Lev Kamenev joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction after the party's 1903 split. He was arrested several times and participated in the failed Revolution of 1905, after which he moved abroad and became one of Lenin's close associates. In 1914, Kamenev was arrested upon returning to Saint Petersburg and exiled to Siberia. He returned after the February Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the monarchy, and joined Grigory Zinoviev in opposing Lenin's "April Theses" and an armed seizure of power within the former Russian Empire. Nevertheless, when Lenin came to power in Russia following the success of the October Revolution, Kamenev briefly served as chairman of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets along with a number of senior posts, including chairman of the Moscow Soviet and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. In 1919, he was elected as a full member of the first Central Committee Politburo, the supreme decision-making body of the emerging Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
When Vladimir Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, Lev Kamenev formed a triumvirate alongside Zinoviev and the ruling party's General 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 acting Premier 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 marginalizing Leon 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 in Sergei Kirov's assassination and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was ultimately made a chief defendant in the Trial of the Sixteen, found guilty of treason, and executed in August 1936.
Early life and career
Kamenev was born as Lev Borisovich Rozenfeld in Moscow to a Jewish father and a Russian Orthodox mother. Both his parents were active in radical politics. His father, an engine driver on the Moscow-Kursk railway, had been a fellow student of Ignacy Hryniewiecki, the revolutionary who killed the Tsar Alexander II. When Kamenev was a child, his family moved to Vilno, and then in 1896, to Tiflis, where he first made contact with an illegal Marxist circle. His father used the capital he earned in the construction of the Baku–Batumi railway to pay for Lev's education. Kamenev attended the boys' Gymnasium in Tiflis. In 1900, he enrolled as law student in Imperial Moscow University. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901, 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 to Paris, where he met Vladimir Lenin, whose adherent and close associate he became, other Marxist exiles from the Iskra group that published the newspaper, and his wife, Olga Bronstein, younger sister of Leon 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 the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, and joined the Bolsheviks. 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, including Joseph Stalin. After attending the 3rd Congress of the RSDLP in London in March 1905, he returned to Russia to participate in the Russian Revolution of 1905 in St. Petersburg in October–December.
He went back to London to attend the 5th RSDLP Party Congress, where he was elected to the party's Central 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 magazine Proletariy. After Lenin's split with another senior Bolshevik leader, Alexander Bogdanov, in mid-1908, Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev became Lenin's main assistants abroad. They helped him expel Bogdanov and his Otzovist followers from the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in mid-1909.
In January 1910, Leninists, followers of Bogdanov, and various Menshevik 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 like Victor 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-based Pravda 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 for Proletariy and taught at the Bolshevik party school at Longjumeau near Paris. It had been founded as a Leninist alternative to Bogdanov's Party School based in Capri. 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 of Pravda and the Bolshevik faction of the Duma. He moved to Finland when Pravda was closed, in July 1914, and was there when World War I broke out. 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 in Siberia; he survived two years there until being freed by the successful February Revolution of 1917.
Before leaving Siberia, Kamenev proposed sending a telegram thanking the Tsar's brother Mikhail for refusing the throne. He was so embarrassed later by his action that he denied ever having sent it.
On 25 March 1917, Kamenev returned from Siberian exile to St. Petersburg. Kamenev and Central Committee members Joseph Stalin and Matvei Muranov took control of the revived Bolshevik Pravda and moved it to the Right. Kamenev formulated a policy of conditional support of the newly formed Russian Provisional Government and a reconciliation with the Mensheviks. After Lenin's return to Russia on 3 April 1917, Kamenev briefly resisted Lenin's anti-government April 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. On 10 October 1917, Kamenev and Zinoviev were the only two Central 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. However, when the Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by Adolph Joffe, and the Petrograd Soviet, led by Trotsky, staged an uprising, Kamenev and Zinoviev went along. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Kamenev was elected Congress Chairman and chairman of the permanent All-Russian Central Executive Committee. The latter position was equivalent to the head of state under the Soviet system.
On 10 November 1917, three days after the Soviet seizure of power during the October 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. 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 and Victor Nogin resigned from the Central Committee on 4 November 1917 and Kamenev resigned from his Central Executive Committee post. The following day, Lenin wrote a proclamation calling Zinoviev and Kamenev "deserters." He never forgot their behavior, eventually making an ambiguous reference to their "October episode" in his Testament.
In late 1917, Kamenev was sent to negotiate with Germany over the potential armistice at Brest-Litovsk, which finally came in the form of Treaty 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 by Hjalmar von Bonsdorff opposed to the Bolshevik revolution, and held until August 1918, when he was exchanged for Finnish prisoners held by the Bolsheviks.