Olga Kameneva - Managing Soviet Contacts With The West (1921-1928)

Managing Soviet Contacts With The West (1921-1928)

In 1921-1923 Kameneva was a leading member of the Central Commission for Fighting the After-Effects of the Famine and oversaw a propaganda campaign against the American Relief Administration (ARA) under Herbert Hoover in the Soviet press. In 1923-1925 she was the head of the short-lived Commission for Foreign Relief (KZP), a Soviet governmental commission that regulated and then liquidated remaining Western charities in the Soviet Union. In 1926-1928 Kameneva served as chairman of the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries ("Voks", Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s Zagranitsei) In that capacity she greeted many prominent Western visitors to the Soviet Union, e.g. Le Corbusier and Theodore Dreiser, and represented the Soviet Union at the festivities in Vienna commemorating the centennial of Ludwig van Beethoven's death in March–April 1927, Throughout the 1920s she also ran a leading literary salon in Moscow.

In the early 1920s Kameneva's family life began to disintegrate starting with Lev 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).