Lev Kamenev - Submission To Stalin and Death

Submission To Stalin and Death

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. 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, something that 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 for failure to inform on oppositionist party members during the Ryutin Affair. After once again admitting their supposed mistakes, they were readmitted in December 1933. They were forced to make self-flagellating speeches at the XVIIth Party Congress in January 1934 when Stalin was parading his erstwhile political opponents, now defeated and outwardly contrite.

After the murder of Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934 led to Stalin's Great Purges, Grigory Zinoviev, Kamenev and their closest associates were once again expelled from the Communist Party and arrested in December 1934. In this time he wrote a letter to Stalin. "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," Kamenev wrote. "I have been arrested for my ties to people that are strange and disgusting to me.". They 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. Kamenev was charged separately in early 1935 in connection with the Kremlin Case and, although he refused to confess, was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. This time the charges including forming a terrorist organization that supposedly killed Kirov and tried to kill Joseph Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. This Trial of the Sixteen (or the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center") was one of the Moscow Show Trials and set the stage for subsequent show trials where Old Bolsheviks confessed to increasingly elaborate and monstrous crimes, including espionage, poisoning, sabotage, and so on. Like other defendants, Kamenev was found guilty and shot on 25 August 1936.

The execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates was notable because no Old Bolsheviks, much less prominent ones, had been put to death by Stalin's government until then.

Kamenev, Zinoviev and his co-defendants were formally cleared of all charges by the Soviet government in 1988 during perestroika.