Grigory Zinoviev

Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev (born Ovsei-Gershen Aronovich Radomyshelsky; 23 September [O.S. 11 September] 1883 – 25 August 1936) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolshevik, Zinoviev was a close associate of Vladimir Lenin prior to 1917 and a leading figure in the early Soviet government. He served as chairman [predsedatel] of the Communist International (Comintern) from 1919 to 1926.

Zinoviev joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks in the party's 1903 split, forging a close political relationship with him. After participating in the failed Revolution of 1905, he served as Lenin's aide-de-camp in Europe.

An advocate of multi-party socialist government at the time of the October Revolution, Zinoviev joined with party moderate Lev Kamenev in opposing seizure of power by the Bolsheviks ahead of convening of the elected Constituent Assembly — in which the Bolsheviks would have been a minority. When Kamenev defended his views in a non-party radical newspaper, signing both his name and that of Zinoviev to the statement, Lenin was outraged and called for the expulsion of the pair as "strikebreakers," despite Zinoviev's condemnation of Kamenev's action.

Zinoviev subsequently lost the trust of Lenin, who began relying on Leon Trotsky as his chief associate. Zinoviev was nevertheless elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and the Comintern, and a full member of the Politburo in 1921.

During Lenin's final illness and after his death in 1924, Zinoviev allied with Kamenev and Joseph Stalin in a leadership "troika" against Trotsky. The arrangement fell apart, and in 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev joined with Trotsky in the United Opposition against Stalin. Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo and Comintern in 1926 and was expelled from the party in 1927. He, like Kamenev, submitted to Stalin and rejoined the party the next year, after which he held mid-level positions. He and Kamenev were again expelled from the party in 1932, due to the Ryutin affair, and rejoined in 1933.

In 1934, Zinoviev was accused of complicity in the assassination of Sergei Kirov and was sentenced to ten years in prison. While imprisoned, Zinoviev was further accused of treason and other offenses during the Great Purge, and was executed after a show trial in August 1936.

Grigory Zinoviev was born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyshelsky (ru: Овсей-Гершон Аронович Радомышельский, simplified to Радомысльский) in Yelizavetgrad, Russian Empire (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). He was the eldest son of Jewish dairy farmers Aron and Reizy Radomyshelsky, one of nine siblings. His mother's maiden name was Rozaliya Markovna Apfelbaum, a surname which is sometimes incorrectly cited as Zinoviev's original surname.

Ovsei-Gershon's precise date of birth is uncertain. Zinoviev in one instance offered September 8 (20 new style), 1883, as his date of birth; his "official" date of birth is reckoned as September 11 (23 n.s.) of that same year, however. Working from a birth register in an ethnographic museum, the Russian historian has claimed October 29 (November 10 n.s.) as the actual birth date, while a synagogue birth register indicates a date of September 28 (October 10 n.s.). This sort of discrepancy is not uncommon for births in the Russian empire in this era, with both Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky similarly subject to the confusion of "official" and "actual" dates of birth.

As a boy Zinoviev was taught at home during his elementary years, a common phenomenon for Jewish families of era in the Tsarist Pale of Settlement. He later asserted that he had finished five years of formal education in Russian schools, completing the high school curriculum. He reportedly worked as a clerk for a couple large-scale merchants during his younger years.

Zinoviev became interested in politics at a young age, reportedly beginning to participate in radical study circles [kruzhki] in 1899 at the age of about 16. This brought him into first contact with the labor movement in Elizavetgrad, which included semi-legal trade unions and informal groups of radicalized workers. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1901 at the age of 17 or 18. As a member of this illegal Marxist political party he assumed the first of a series of pseudonyms, "Seraya Shapka" (Grey Cap).

He soon gained the attention of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, and elected to emigrate to Western Europe in 1902, preferring the prospect of college to the prospect of prison. Briefly staying in Berlin upon his first arrival, he soon traveled to Freiburg and attempted — unsuccessfully — to gain admission to Freiburg University. After being dealt this initial academic defeat, he made his way to Bern, Switzerland — a country with liberal residence policies for foreigners and a reputation for easier access to higher education.

Zinoviev was admitted to Switzerland's largest college, the University of Bern, in the fall of 1902, joining the mass of German and Russian students who accounted for about half the university's approximately 1,000 member student body. After completing the entrance examination, Zinoviev began studying for a degree in chemistry — a somewhat perplexing and never explained choice. He later moved to the Philosophy department. Zinoviev officially, albeit dubiously, remained at the University of Bern for four years, never completing his degree.

Politics again beckoned during Zinoviev's college years. He later recalled there were three organized radical groups on campus — the "Iskra Social Democrats", the "Bund Social Democrats", and the Socialist Revolutionary Party ("SRs"). He met V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) for the first time in November 1902 when the latter was in Bern to deliver a lecture, helping to cement his affiliation to the Iskrists. He was a member of Lenin's Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP from 1903.

Zinoviev also met his second wife during his Bern student days, partnering with Zinaida "Zlata" Lilina (party name Zina Levina), an emigre Jewish medical student two years older than he.

Zinoviev's first mission on behalf of the Bolsheviks came in the fall of 1903, when he was dispatched to Russia to attempt to build a party organization there. Using his hometown of Yelizavetgrad as a base of operations, Zinoviev traveled throughout the region on party assignment, including a mission to Kremenchuk, located about 65 miles to the north. He once again fell under the eye of the tsarist secret police and he was forced by this exposure to return to Burn late in 1904.

In January 1905, Zinoviev, his wife, and five others exited the joint Menshevik–Bolshevik social democratic organization in Bern and established a support group for Vperëd, the radical newspaper Lenin had launched after leaving the Menshevik-dominated Iskra. This small split-group issued a resolution explaining their decision, charging the Mensheviks with disorganizing the RSDLP and promising to fight against that tendency. A conference of the various Bolshevik city organizations in exile was held in Geneva in the middle of March of that year, and Zinoviev was elected one of five members of a coordinating committee to direct this "RSDLP overseas organization".

The Russian Revolution of 1905 having erupted in January, accompanied by a relaxation of state censorship of the press and the better opportunity for political organizing. In October, Zinoviev returned to Russia, this time to the capital city of St. Petersburg, where he joined the staff of the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, Novaya Zhizn' [New Life]. He also spoke in public on behalf of the Bolsheviks throughout the city until falling ill towards the end of the year and being forced to return to Bern to seek medical treatment.

Zinoviev did not attend either the 3rd (London) congress or the 4th (Stockholm) congress of the RSDLP, held in the spring of 1905 and 1906, respectively. He continued to work in St. Petersburg throughout 1907, taking time to attend the 5th (London) party congress in the spring of that year as one of the delegates of the Petersburg Committee. This would be the last joint congress including both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions. Zinoviev was elected to two of the congresses' commissions and spoke to the gathering several times.

The London congress marked a turning point in Zinoviev's fortunes within the Bolshevik organization, as his oratorical skills came to the fore. His future nemesis, Leon Trotsky, then a particularly radical member of the Menshevik organization, patronizingly recalled much later:

Lenin found working in Paris to be difficult, with pervasive police surveillance and a cumbersome national library, so in the summer of 1912 he and his wife Krupskaya, together with Zinoviev and his wife Lilina, traveled to Kraków, Galicia (part of Austria–Hungary), where they rented a house together. The Zinoviev and Lenin families spent the next two summers together in Poronin, a small mountain town, before returning to Kraków each year in the fall.

Due to the physical proximity of Lenin and Zinoviev during the period of emigration, there is little documentary evidence that has survived to illuminate the personal relationship between the two. Rarely separated, almost no correspondence was exchanged by mail, save for a few brief instances when the two party leaders were vacationing in different towns. Neither left memoirs of their own, although Lenin's wife Nadya Krupskaya did publish a series of sketches, first gathered in book form as Vospominaniya o Lenine (Memoirs of Lenin) in 1926 — a work which was gradually expanded and politically "doctored" in subsequent editions of 1930, 1932, and 1934. After being mothballed for two decades, the book reissued in expanded form in 1957, published in English translation in 1960 as Reminiscences of Lenin. Little personal juice detailing the Lenin–Zinoviev exile relationship remained in this work, characterized by her biographer as a "partisan book," albeit one in which "nobody emerges as an 'enemy of the people' in the Stalinist sense."

During this period Zinoviev worked as a journalist and speechwriter for the Bolshevik organization, contributing a series of articles to the party press and writing for the party's representatives in the State Duma. Pravda would survive underground until July 1914, when it was suppressed by the Russian government and much of its staff arrested. It would be replaced by a new Bolshevik official organ, Sotsial–Demokrat, printed in Geneva and launched that same November.

The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 dramatically changed the situation for the Russian emigrant community in Galicia. As citizens of an enemy nation, Austro-Hungarian authorities cracked down on resident Russians as a security risk, with Lenin arrested on suspicion of espionage. Zinoviev and his wife were living apart from Lenin and Krupskaya in the town of Zakopane at this time, where the local authorities were less obsessed with the threat represented by anti-tsarist revolutionaries, allowing him to avoid a similar fate as that suffered by his friend and mentor.

In Russia the situation was even worse, with the Bolshevik Central Committee isolated and annihilated by secret police arrests. By 1915 only the released Lenin and Zinoviev remained, safely relocated back to Bern in neutral Switzerland. An informal conference of 19 Bolsheviks in exile was held at the end of February, electing a new coordinating committee, with Krupskaya as secretary and Armand and Lilina as members.

Zinoviev was in Bern when he first saw printed confirmation that ongoing rumors of civil disturbances had proven true and had, in fact, culminated with the collapse of the 300-year old Romanov dynasty. He recalled:

"My head spun in the spring sun. I hurried home with the paper, which was not yet dry. There I found already a telegram from Vladimir Ilyich, ordering me to come 'immediately' to Zurich."

A committee of the Duma had decided to take power the evening of February 27 (March 12 n.s.), 1917, but it took three more days for a provisional government of the Russian Republic to emerge. Dominated by mild constitutionalists who distrusted and feared the possibility of wild popular unrest, two socialists from the Petrograd Soviet were co-opted into the new central authority — vice-chair Alexander Kerensky and Nikolai Chkheidze, a top figure in the Menshevik party and president of the Soviet's Executive Committee.

Russian radicals of all stripes who had fled tsarist persecution to neutral Switzerland were anxious to make an expeditious return to their homeland with the emergence of a democratic republic, but found themselves trapped by the ongoing European war. Great Britain and France, allies with Russia in the ongoing bloodbath against Germany and Austria–Hungary, prohibited anti-war Russian radicals from passage through their lines, although they did provide pro-war radicals such as Georgii Plekhanov and Pëtr Kropotkin safe passage. Frustration grew among the anti-war Russian left.

On March 19 (n.s.) a meeting of Russian and Polish émigrés allied with the anti-war Zimmerwald movement held a meeting in Bern to discuss the transit situation. Iulii Martov, a top leader of the anti-war "Internationalist" faction of the Mensheviks, suggested the possibility of moving from Switzerland through Germany to non-combatant Sweden, and from there to Russia. Zinoviev was tapped for membership on a committee of four to work out the details of this program.

The fatal error of the rapid succession of Provisional Governments of Russia was remaining engaged in the European military bloodbath amidst total economic and social collapse. Head of the first government, the Constitutional Democrat Pavel Miliukov was heartened by American entry into the war in April and considered the popular slogan of "peace without annexations" to be a "German formula." A declaration of April 10 (n.s.) continued to advance the line that "the defense of our own inheritance by every means, and the liberation of our country from the invading enemy, constitute the foremost and most urgent task of our fighters, defending the nation's liberty." As the bodies of fallen soldiers continued to stack, tension between the self-appointed Provisional Government and the parallel system of elected councils (Soviets) continued to mount.

The afternoon of July 3, 1917, a group of largely spontaneous demonstrations broke out around Petrograd — soldiers opposing transfer to the front and workers protesting against unmet wage promises and food speculation. While more radical elements of the Bolshevik Party, such as its Military Organization, actively supported the street revolt against the government, the party's central leadership headed by Lenin and Zinoviev, sought to quell the disturbances, anxious to wait for a more opportune moment after the government's military offensive had failed convincingly, in a manner that absolved the Bolsheviks from any possible blame. Lenin was briefly away from the city on a short vacation, however, leaving Zinoviev to play an oversized role in attempting to stabilize and steer the "July Days" revolt.

With 30,000 angry workers out from the Putilov factory and thousands of sailors en route from the Kronstadt naval base nearby, Zinoviev and the central committee determined to authorize and lead a "peaceful yet armed" demonstration in Petrograd the following day. As many as half a million people filled the streets, with snipers taking a toll on protesters from surrounding buildings. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet the evening of July 4, Zinoviev advocated a middle course, in favor of the Petrograd Soviet taking power immediately while simultaneously attempting to end the riotous situation on the streets. When an unruly throng congregated outside the Tauride Palace calling for Irakli Tsereteli, a Menshevik and top leader in the Provisional Government, it was Zinoviev who stepped forward to deliver a lengthy impromptu speech to the tens of thousands assmbled, ending with a successful call for the mob to peacefully disperse.

From the afternoon of July 4, the Provisional Government went on a propaganda offensive against the Bolsheviks, blaming them for agitating and organizing the two days of urban disorder and making the claim that Lenin and Zinoviev were actually German agents, sent by the Imperial government on the sealed train to overthrow the Russian Revolution and return the citizens of the nation to the thrall of capitalism. The propaganda campaign against the Bolsheviks, with troops loyal to the government sacking the party's offices and printing ship and public sentiment turning decisively against the radicals. Arrest warrants were issued on July 6 with Lenin, Zinoviev, and other top leaders ordered to surrender.

Although Lev Kamenev, Alexandra Kollontai, and other top leaders surrendered in subsequent days, seeking to raise public support for their cause through a sensational trial defense, Lenin and Zinoviev, facing potential lynching as German spies given the hysterical situation, instead had their hair cropped and were disguised and spirited off to the relative safety of neighboring Finland. Lenin was made up to look like a Finnish peasant, while Zinoviev was outfitted in a "wide, light-colored coat with a multi-colored pattern" to look like a prosperous Baltic trader. They quickly departed to the village of Razliv, where a local Bolshevik, an old friend of Lenin's, was originally planned to help them cross the border on a late night train. Instead the pair spent several summer weeks camping out a hastily constructed leaf hut that Lenin's friend had built for them.

Despite Zinoviev's almost lockstep adherence to Lenin's sometimes dramatic changes of political tactics, at a critical meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee in October 1917 he dug in his heels and joined the consistently cautious Lev Kamenev in opposing Lenin's call for open insurrection against the Provisional Government.

Zinoviev and Kamenev felt that the new wave of popular support for the Bolsheviks following the defeat of the attempted coup by Kornilov was unreliable. Moreover, they argued, successful alliances had been formed during the Kornilov insurrection with other radical parties; the Constituent Assembly, an institution bearing authority with the public at large, should therefore be the focus of Bolshevik efforts instead of an attempt at armed seizure of power. While he did not resign his position on the committee over the matter, when the dispute was reported in the non-party radical newspaper Novaya Zhizn [New Life], headed by novelist Maxim Gorky, Lenin was enraged.

Rumors of Bolshevik planning of an armed insurrection against the provisional government had been widespread for some days in Petrograd. On October 17 (30), one day after the key meeting of the central committee that had divided over the matter, Gorky reported that two top Bolsheviks had opposed armed action. This was followed with publication on October 18 (31) of a statement by Kamenev in the same newspaper by Kamenev — with Kamenev signing both for himself and for Zinoviev — in which he defended his perspective. Zinoviev condemned this action by Kamenev, asserting that he had not authorized the latter to act in his name, making this declaration verbally on October 19 (Nov. 1) and in writing the following day.

Lenin nevertheless continued to believe that Zinoviev was intent upon sabotaging the central committee's decision and called for action against both as "strikebreakers," demanding their expulsion from the party, in letters to the party membership and to the central committee. The Bolshevik central committee met on October 20 (Nov. 2) to discuss the matter, Lenin not attending, but decided not to pursue action against either Kamenev or Zinoviev for the breach of discipline of airing of confidential party laundry in a non-party publication.

On October 25 and 26 (Nov. 7 and 8), the Bolsheviks deposed the Provisional Government, transferring power to the Congress of Soviets. Zinoviev's contribution was modest, including articles written for the Bolshevik official organ, Rabochii Put, which replaced Pravda after its ban in July, attending central committee meetings, and speaking with Lenin at the October 25 (Nov. 7) meeting of the Petrograd Soviet.

Zinoviev soon returned to the fold and was once again elected to the Central Committee at the VII Party Congress on 8 March 1918. He was put in charge of the Petrograd (Saint Petersburg before 1914, Leningrad 1924–91) city and regional government.

Sometime in 1918, while Ukraine was under German occupation, the rabbis of Odessa ceremonially anathematized (pronounced herem against) Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders of Jewish descent in the synagogue.

Shortly after the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky in August 1918 and the commencement of the five-year Red Terror period of political repression and mass killings, Zinoviev said:

To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million Russians and have them all on our side. We having nothing to say to the other 10 million; we'll have to get rid of them.

He became a non-voting member of the ruling Politburo when it was created after the VIII Congress on 25 March 1919. He also became the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern when it was created in March 1919. It was in this capacity he presided over the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in September 1920 and gave his famous four-hour speech in German at the Halle congress of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in October 1920.

Grigory Zinoviev is best remembered as the first president [predsedatel] of the Communist International (Comintern), holding that position since the organization's formation in 1919 until being removed some time shortly after the enlarged plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) held in February–March 1926.

Zinoviev was a logical choice to head the Comintern, having been active as he was in the international Zimmerwald movement during the war. With the success of socialist revolution in peasant Russia seemingly bound to the rapid achievement of revolution in the industrialized West, Zinoviev's position as Comintern chief was one of enormous prestige and authority, further cementing his position as one of the top leaders of the Russian Communist Party.

The Founding Congress of the Comintern was a small and informal affair, held during the first week of March 1919. There were 52 people who participated, but only 12 were officially delegated representatives of radical political organizations, with perhaps 8 of these being representatives of the Russian Communist Party.

Joining Lenin and Zinoviev on this delegation to the founding convention were top leaders Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Georgy Chicherin, Vatslav Vorovsky, N. Osinsky, and perhaps Joseph Stalin, listed as a delegate but leaving no evidence of having actually participated. The blockade of Soviet Russia made attendance extremely difficult in the best case; others participated informally or without formal credentials, delegates by virtue of felicitously having been present in Moscow at the right moment.

Lenin spoke to open the gathering and Zinoviev conveyed the formal greetings of the Central Committee of Russian Communist Party, indicative of the relative positions of pair in the party hierarchy.

In early 1921, when the Communist Party was split into several factions, and policy disagreements were threatening the unity of the Party, Zinoviev supported Lenin's faction. As a result, Zinoviev was made a full member of the Politburo after the 10th Party Congress on 16 March 1921, while members of other factions, such as Nikolai Krestinsky, were dropped from the Politburo and the Secretariat.

Zinoviev was one of the most influential figures in the Soviet leadership during Lenin's final illness in 1922–23 and immediately after his death in January 1924, joining with Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin to form a three-person triumvirate, sometimes referred to by the Russian word for a three horse sleigh, a troika. Zinoviev reportedly marshalled Stalin's candidacy for general secretary of the Communist Party at the 11th Party Congress in 1922, a move intended to help entrench a close associate in a position of authority.

First among equals in this period, Zinoviev delivered the Central Committee's reports to the 12th and 13th Party Congresses in 1923 and 1924, respectively. These keynote address always previously delivered by Lenin. He was also considered one of the Communist Party's leading theoreticians.

Trotsky attributed Stalin's appointment to the initial recommendation of Zinoviev. This view has been supported by several historians. According to Russian historian Vadim Rogovin, Stalin's election occurred after the 11th Party Congress, held at the end of March through early April 1922) in which Lenin, due to his poor health, participated only sporadically.

On March 9, 1923, Lenin suffered a second severe stroke, pushing the leadership of the Russian Communist Party into an even deeper flux. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin represented a majority on the Politburo, effectively making joint decisions as a triumvirate, with Trotsky isolated as a minority; the time was not ripe for an outright break, however, since the possibility of Lenin's full recovery remained possible while policy differences between the two groupings on industrial and agricultural policy not yet completely defined. The annual congress of the Russian Communist Party, scheduled for March 1923, was postponed until April 17 due to leadership turmoil associated with Lenin's sudden health setback.

During this interval, Zinoviev was the first among equals, the de facto leader of the party, head of the world communist organization, and the apparent heir to Lenin's chair.

Zinoviev and Trotsky immediately began to jockey for position to succeed Lenin after his latest health crisis, the two most logical candidates for the chief executive function. Zinoviev prepared a series of six lectures which he delivered early in 1923, reviewing the history of the Bolshevik party from its foundation down to February 1917. These were collected and released as a short book, The History of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), eventually translated into English.

Trotsky possessed an outstanding mind and years of total commitment to the revolutionary cause, but was for years an outsider to the Bolshevik Party and owed his position of power to some great extent to Lenin's personal patronage. However, Zinoviev, Lenin's closest associate for a decade, and Trotsky, Lenin's persistent opponent, shared a deep personal animus which accentuated their frequent policy disagreements.

Trotsky was particularly concerned about policies fostering capitalism in the countryside and began to take an more aggressive line in developing the planning process and committing financial support to industry. Zinoviev, for his part, sought an end to debilitating rates of inflation through a stable currency and favored a continued effort to rebuild the economy in the countryside through the New Economic Policy (NEP) program of moderation of tax rates and combination of various existing fees into a single agricultural tax.

The fourth quarter 1924 was marked by the so-called "Literary Discussion" in which the various leading participants in the Lenin succession struggle began to take explicit aim at one another with pamphlets, books, and magazine articles. The first great salvo came October 14, with the publication of the third volume of Trotsky's Collected Works by the State Publishing House — a two-part volume focused on Trotsky's writings during the revolution of 1917.

Trotsky used the foreword of this book as the venue for a 60-page introductory essay, "Uroki Oktyabrya" (Lessons of October), an extensive summary of the events of 1917. In this essay, Trotsky noted in passing recent Comintern failures with revolutionary uprisings in Bulgaria and Germany, an implicit criticism of Zinoviev's leadership, before moving to revisit details of the October days, during which, according to Trotsky, "the right wing of the party sought to delay the development of events," believing, as did the Mensheviks, that the February revolution would lead inevitably to so-called "bourgeois parliamentarianism," that multiple years remained before the time would be ripe for proletarian revolution, and that the Central Committee's advocacy of armed insurrection thus marked a grievous error and a threat to the Bolshevik Party's existence.

Zinoviev and Kamenev's letter of October 11, "On the Current Sitaution," declaring armed insurrection to be a "risk not just to the fate of our party, but the fate of the Russian and international revolution as well," was emphasized. Clearly, these two would have preferred such a collywobble to have remained unmentioned. The essay was regarded as a full-frontal attack by Trotsky on the revolutionary credentials of the party leadership; the response by Zinoviev and the Politburo majority was immediate and vigorous.

On October 24, just ten days after Trotsky's volume had hit the street, the Central Committee issued a statement, over the signatures of Zinoviev and Kamenev, decrying Trotsky's new book introduction as "a conscious distortion of the history of the party" designed to promote "Comrade Trotsky's factional goals. The Central Committee sent additional instructions callling for the "distribution of appropriate works" dealing with the 1917 revolution — a clear signal for the release of a spate of new pamphlets to counter Trotsky's perspective.

Zinoviev's chief contribution to the anti-Trotsky campaign of 1924 was an article published on November 30 and frequently reprinted in pamphlet form, Bolshevism or Trotskyism? The massive article appeared simultaneously in Sunday editions of the official party daily, Pravda, as well as the official government daily, Izvestiya, and bluntly charged Trotsky with a conscious attempt to substitute an ill-defined "Trotskyism" directly for "Leninism." This followed a tag-team effort by Kamenev and Stalin on the same them that had similarly appeared in both publications the previous Wednesday, emphasizing for all readers the direction of the political winds then blowing.

With Trotsky finally on the sidelines, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate began to crumble. In the fall of 1924, Stalin, head of the Communist Party's Organization Bureau, in charge of job assignments, removed Zinoviev ally I. A. Zelensky as secretary of the Moscow party committee and transferred him to a position in Central Asia. In his place was installed N. A. Uglanov, a former party secretary in Petrograd who had frequently found himself at odds with Zinoviev. This move undercut not only Zinoviev, but Kamenev, who found Uglanov, a member of the Orgburo and the Party Secretariat, an active opponent in ostensibly his own Moscow center of power.

The two sides spent most of 1925 lining up support behind the scenes. Stalin struck an alliance with a 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 a non-voting Politburo member.

The struggle became open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee and came to a head at the 14th 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 wrested control of the Leningrad party organization and government from Zinoviev and had him dismissed from all regional posts, leaving only the Comintern as a possible power base for Zinoviev.

During a lull in the intra-party fighting in the spring of 1926, Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters gravitated closer to Trotsky's supporters and the two groups soon formed an alliance, which also incorporated some smaller opposition groups within the Communist Party. The alliance became known as the United Opposition. In May 1926, Stalin, weighing his options in a letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, directed his supporters to concentrate their attacks on Zinoviev since the latter was intimately familiar with Stalin's methods from their time together in the triumvirate.

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 they were given mid-level positions within the Soviet bureaucracy. Bukharin, then at the beginning of his short and ill-fated struggle with Stalin, courted Kamenev and, indirectly, Zinoviev during the summer of 1928. This was soon reported to Stalin and used against Bukharin as proof of his factionalism.

After once more admitting their supposed mistakes, they were readmitted to the Party in December 1933. They were forced to make self-flagellating speeches at the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, with Stalin parading his erstwhile political opponents, now defeated and outwardly contrite.

Late in the afternoon of December 1, 1934, first secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party organization Sergei Kirov entered the Smolny building, the government's headquarters in the city. An address to a 6 pm meeting of party activists was on his agenda for the evening. Kirov's office was located on the third floor of the building, the nexus of party activity, protected by an armed guard, with access strictly limited to Communist Party members.

As Kirov passed down the hallway to his office, an unemployed Communist named Leonid Nikolaev, who lay in wait with a briefcase in his hand and a revolver in his pocket, stepped from a restroom. Nikolaev allowed Kirov to pass, then circled behind him, following him from the main corridor to a small corridor leading to his office. As Kirov slowed to enter his office, Nikolaev sped up his step to reduce the distance, pulled the handgun, and shot the Leningrad party boss — a close friend of Joseph Stalin — once in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

Nikolaev was speedily apprehended and subjected to the tender mercies of the interrogators of the NKVD for investigation.

Prior to the opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s, a great deal of scholarly and popular literature, working from the third- and fourth-hand oral testimony of various NKVD defectors, posited that the Kirov assassination was a calculated inside job ordered by Stalin himself to annihilate a potential rival for power rather than the work of a disgruntled lone wolf with a party card. The rich vein of archival documents now available seems to have relegated this material to the stacks as examples of misdirected Kremlinology, however.

The night of December 1/2, Nikolaev underwent his first round of interrogation, conducted by the central NKVD rather than local Leningrad officials. Nikolaev's wife and half-brother were also hauled in for questioning, with initial investigation focusing on building a timeline of activities for the Nikolaev brothers and focusing on a potential foreign connection between his wife, Milda Draule, her relatives in Latvia, and various German engineers. A complete set of interrogation transcripts was provided to Stalin by Deputy Chief of the NKVD Yakov Agranov on December 4 and daily updates followed — all of which still remain in party archives. No mention was made of Zinoviev or his followers during the first three days of the investigation.

Between 1924 and 1934 Zinoviev's home town of Yelizavetgrad was renamed Zinovyevsk (Ukrainian: Зінов'євськ) in his honor.

In an article published after his own death at the hands of the Soviet secret police, Leon Trotsky remembered his rival and occasional ally, Grigory Zinoviev in tandem with Lev Kamenev:

"Zinoviev and Kamenev are two profoundly different types. Zinoviev is an agitator. Kamenev — a propagandist. Zinoviev was guided in the main by subtle political instinct. Kamenev was given to reason and analyzing. Zinoviev was always inclined to fly off on a tangent. Kamenev, on the contrary, erred on the side of excessive caution. Zinoviev was entirely absorbed by politics, cultivating no other interests and appetites. In Kamenev there sat a sybarite and an esthete. Zinoviev was vindictive. Kamenev was good nature personified.... In 1917 they were brought close together for a time by their opposition to the October Revolution.... They were subsequently drawn together by their opposition to me, and later, to Stalin. * * *

"Each of them, to be sure, was Stalin's intellectual superior. But they lacked sufficient character. Lenin had precisely this trait in mind when he wrote in his 'testament' that it was 'no accident' that Zinoviev and Kamenev were opponents of the insurrection in the autumn of 1917. They failed to withstand the pressure of bourgeois public opinion."

Historian Edward Hallett Carr was more assertive in his negative assessment of Zinoviev, charging him with having been "the initiator of many sinister developments in party history." Carr asserted that Zinoviev, "was more responsible than anyone for establishing the cult of Leninism" and for making "absolute fidelity to Lenin" the "main and indispensible qualification" for party leadership. He also charged that Zinoviev invented, or was at least the first Soviet leader to publicly use, the term "Trotskyism" as a term of abuse for factional rivals. He was additionally, according to Carr, responsible for the party norm that defeated minorities in party debates should not merely submit to the decision of the majority but also to confess error, and for the practice of denouncing any alteration from the current party line as a form of heresy.

Post-Soviet archival research has nuanced earlier Cold War-era assessments. Historical records indicate that Zinoviev's power base in Leningrad was deeply rooted in local patronage networks, and his opposition to Stalin was initially framed around ideological concerns regarding the pace of industrialization and party "bureaucratization", rather than mere personal ambition.

Zinoviev was the alleged author of the "Zinoviev Letter" which caused a sensation in the United Kingdom when published on 25 October 1924, four days before a general election. The letter called on British Communists to prepare for revolution. This document is now generally accepted to have been a fabrication, validating the declaration that Zinoviev made in a letter dated 27 October 1924:

The letter of 15 September 1924, which has been attributed to me, is from the first to the last word, a forgery. Let us take the heading. The organisation of which I am the president never describes itself officially as the Executive Committee of the Third Communist International; the official name is Executive Committee of the Communist International. Equally incorrect is the signature, The Chairman of the Presidium. The forger has shown himself to be very stupid in his choice of the date. On 15 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.

Despite Zinoviev's prompt denial, the publication of the forged document contributed to a "Red Scare" in Britain. Historians argue that the controversy damaged the Labour Party's electoral prospects, reinforcing public fears of Soviet subversion ahead of the 1924 general election.

Boi za Peterburg: Dve Rechi (The Fight for St. Petersburg: Two Speeches). With Leon Trotsky. St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1920.

Bolshevizm ili Trotskizm? (with L. Kamenev and I. Stalin) Kursk: Gubkom, 1925.

Leninizm: Vvedenie i izuchenie Leninizma [Leninism: Introduction to the Study of Leninism]. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo, 1925.