Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev

Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet Communist politician

  • Born: September 23, 1883
  • Birthplace: Yelizavetgrad, Russian Empire (now Kirovohrad, Ukraine)
  • Died: August 25, 1936
  • Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Major offense: Conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and to assassinate Joseph Stalin

Active: 1901-1935

Locale: Russia

Sentence: Death by pistol shot

Early Life

Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev (grih-GAW-ree yehv-SAY-oh-vihch zih-NOHV-yehv) was born Ovel Gershon Aronov Radomyslsky, the son of a Jewish dairy farmer. He had no formal education but was taught at home. In 1901, he joined the infant Russian Social Democratic Party and began labor organizing. He left the Russian Empire because of police harassment and moved successively to Berlin, Paris, and finally Switzerland. There he met Georgy Plekhanov and Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Russian socialists who edited the newspaper Iskra (meaning “spark”), the most orthodox Marxist organ of the party at a time when European socialism was rife with revisionism. In the split between the misnamed Bolsheviks (meaning “majority faction”) led by Lenin and the Mensheviks (“minority faction”), Zinovyev sided with the former.

Political Career

In 1903, Zinovyev returned briefly to Russia and worked on Iskra, but he soon went back to Switzerland. During the revolution of 1905, he served as an agitator for Lenin’s faction, trying to convince members of the party to support the Bolshevik program. He also helped organize the General Strike, which closed down the country and forced Czar Nicholas II to promise a parliament (duma) for Russia. Suffering from heart trouble, Zinovyev left to seek medical attention abroad.

In 1907, Zinovyev was elected by Lenin’s faction to the Central Committee of the Party. Because Mensheviks (who, in fact, had the majority support of the party) did not recognize this election, Lenin formed a separate party of the Bolsheviks. Zinovyev was his second leader of the party. He became close to Bolshevik revolutionary Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and from this period onward they worked together. After serving a brief jail sentence, Zinovyev went into exile abroad, where he worked closely with Lenin and helped to organize the Bolshevik press.

Zinovyev returned to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) with Lenin in May, 1917, and was recognized by the party, public, and government as Lenin’s closest associate. Thus, in August, 1917, when the provisional government ordered the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders as German spies, Lenin and Zinovyev went into hiding together in the Finnish suburbs of Petrograd. In October, the Bolshevik Central Committee met in secret, and on Lenin’s motion it determined to carry out a coup d’état against the government of Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerensky. Zinovyev and Kamenev objected because they believed the coup would violate democratic principles, and they published their objections in the press, thereby revealing the secret plans. The government unsuccessfully acted against the Bolsheviks, but the party—under the military leadership of Leon Trotsky—overthrew the government and established Bolshevik (now called Communist) rule. Zinovyev and Kamenev briefly fell into disgrace, and Trotsky (who had just joined the Bolsheviks that summer) and a heretofore minor figure on the Central Committee, Joseph Stalin, assumed more leading roles on the committee.

Nevertheless, in the following months, Zinovyev once again regained his important posts within the party. He was elected to the seven-member Central Committee Political Bureau (Politburo), which became the top leadership of the party. He also became the chief of the party’s Petrograd district and the executive secretary of the Communist International (Comintern), which was organized to unite Communist parties around the world. Zinovyev, as leader of the Comintern, was often blamed by opponents of communism, socialism, and labor unions around the world for fomenting labor and political unrest in their countries. The most notorious example was the so-called Zinovyev letter (later found to be forged), which the British Conservative Party said incited British workmen in 1924 to organize a general strike. The Conservatives ousted the British Labour government, using the letter as campaign propaganda.

During the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), Trotsky, who was the leader of the Red Army, and Zinovyev had a falling out because of Trotsky’s impatience with the way in which Zinovyev handled the defense of Petrograd. When Lenin fell ill in 1922 and it appeared that Trotsky might succeed him as leader of the party, Zinovyev and Kamenev joined with Stalin in a triumvirate and reduced Trotsky’s power considerably. Stalin, linking himself with more conservative leaders of the Politburo, then turned against Zinovyev.

In the period between 1925 and 1927, Zinovyev and Kamenev reversed their stances and joined Trotsky in an alliance called the Left Opposition. The right wing of the Politburo (aligned with Stalin) easily defeated them, however, and had them expelled from the party. Stalin expelled Trotsky from the country but allowed Zinovyev and Kamenev to return to party membership. In the meantime, Stalin turned on the members of the right wing and emerged as the dictator of the Soviet Union.

In 1933, with his popularity falling because of his stringent economic policies and brutal suppression of the peasantry, Stalin turned on the original Bolsheviks as scapegoats. In the first of a bizarre series of public trials in 1935, prosecutors accused Zinovyev and Kamenev of conspiring both with Trotsky and with Adolf Hitler to overthrow the Soviet state and of plotting to assassinate Stalin and other leaders. The court sentenced Zinovyev to ten years’ imprisonment. The next year, in a more sensational case called the Trial of the Fifteen, the court sentenced Zinovyev and Kamenev to death. They were executed by pistol shot almost immediately afterward in the basement of the secret police building.

Impact

As a Bolshevik and a leader of the Soviet Communists, Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev was instrumental in establishing the worldwide communist movement and the Comintern. As a high-profile victim of Stalin’s purge trials, he helped shed light on Stalin as a dictator rather than a leader of a democratic political system.

Bibliography

Radzinsky, Edvard. Stalin. Translated by H. T. Willetts. London: Sceptre, 1997. An excellent biography of Stalin using Soviet archives opened after the fall of communism in the early 1990’s. Contains details of his relationship to and attitude toward Zinovyev.

Schapiro, Leonard B. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 2d ed. New York: Vintage, 1971. The standard academic, English-language history of the Soviet Communist Party. Gives details of Zinovyev’s career and fate.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary. Translated and edited by Harold Shukman. New York: Free Press, 1996. A biography of Leon Trotsky that paints a rather unfavorable portrait of him and also gives details about Zinovyev’s career.