26 Facts About Lev Kamenev

Lev Kamenev took part in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905.

Lev Kamenev was arrested in 1935 following the assassination of Sergei Kirov and made a chief defendant in 1936 Trial of the Sixteen, which marked the start of the Great Purge.

Lev Kamenev coincidentally died on the same day as Sergey Kamenev, with whom he was not related.

Lev Kamenev was born as Leo Rosenfeld in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker who was a convert to Russian Christian Orthodoxy and an ethnic Russian Orthodox Christian mother.

Lev Kamenev attended the boys' Gymnasium in Tiflis, Georgia and later Moscow University where he became involved in political activity.

Lev Kamenev took a brief trip abroad in 1902, meeting Russian social democratic leaders living in exile, including Vladimir Lenin, whose adherent and close associate he became.

Lev Kamenev visited Paris and met the Iskra group who published the newspaper.

Lev Kamenev 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.

The unification attempts failed in August 1910, when Lev Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.

In January 1912, Lev Kamenev helped Lenin and Zinoviev to convince the Prague Conference of Bolshevik delegates to split from the Mensheviks and Otzovists.

In early 1915, Lev Kamenev was sentenced to exile in Siberia; he survived two years there until being freed by the successful February Revolution of 1917.

Lev Kamenev was so embarrassed later by his action that he denied ever having sent it.

On 25 March 1917, Lev Kamenev returned from Siberian exile to St Petersburg.

Lev Kamenev formulated a policy of conditional support of the newly formed Russian Provisional Government and a reconciliation with the Mensheviks.

At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lev Kamenev was elected Congress Chairman and Chairman of the permanent All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

In 1918, Lev Kamenev became chairman of the Moscow Soviet, and soon thereafter Lenin's Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of Labour and Defence.

In March 1919, Lev Kamenev was elected as a full member of the first Politburo.

At the XIVth Conference of the Communist Party in April 1925, Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev found themselves in a minority when their motion to specify that socialism could only be achieved internationally was rejected, resulting in the triumvirate of recent years breaking up.

Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev strengthened their alliance with Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and aligned with Grigori Sokolnikov, the People's Commissar for Finance and a candidate Politburo member.

The struggle became more open at the September 1925 meeting of the Central Committee, and came to a head at the XIVth Party Congress in December 1925, when Lev Kamenev publicly demanded the removal of Stalin from the position of the General Secretary.

Zinoviev was re-elected to the Politburo, but Lev Kamenev was demoted from a full member to a non-voting member, and Sokolnikov was dropped altogether.

Lev Kamenev continued to oppose Stalin throughout 1926 and 1927, resulting in his expulsion from the Central Committee in October 1927.

Lev Kamenev used the occasion to appeal for reconciliation among the groups.

Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev remained politically inactive until October 1932, when they were expelled from the Communist Party, after receiving an oppositionist group's appeal but not informing the party on their activities during the Ryutin Affair.

Lev 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.

Lev Kamenev, was executed on 15 July 1939, at the age of 33.