Lev Kamenev - Break With Stalin (1925)

Break With Stalin (1925)

With Trotsky on the sidelines, the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate finally 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 the Communist Party theoretician and Pravda editor Nikolai Bukharin and the Soviet prime minister Alexei Rykov. Zinoviev and Kamenev allied with Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Grigori Sokolnikov, the People's Commissar for Finance and a candidate Politburo member. Their alliance became known as the New Opposition.

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, when Kamenev publicly demanded 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 while 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, while Stalin had more of his allies elected to the Politburo.

Kamenev's first marriage began to disintegrate starting with Kamenev's reputed affair with the British sculptress Clare Frewen Sheridan in 1920. In the late 1920s he left Olga Kameneva for Tatiana Glebova, with whom he had a son, Vladimir Glebov (1929–1994).