Grigory Zinoviev

From Grokipedia

Grigory Zinoviev (23 September 1883 – 25 August 1936) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and early Soviet politician whose career spanned the Russian Revolution, leadership in the Communist International, and fatal opposition to Joseph Stalin's dictatorship. Born into a Jewish family of dairy farmers in Yelizavetgrad, Ukraine, Zinoviev joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and became a protégé of Vladimir Lenin, editing the party's newspaper Pravda and contributing to Lenin's theoretical works. Though he and Lev Kamenev publicly opposed the armed insurrection in October 1917—prompting Lenin's sharp rebuke—Zinoviev quickly aligned with the successful Bolshevik seizure of power, subsequently chairing the Petrograd Soviet and organizing the city's defense during the Russian Civil War. Elected chairman of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, he directed efforts to export revolution worldwide until his ouster in 1926 amid internal party strife. After Lenin's death in 1924, Zinoviev joined Stalin and Kamenev in a triumvirate to sideline Leon Trotsky, but by 1925 he shifted to criticize Stalin's policies on collectivization and party bureaucracy, allying briefly with Trotsky in the United Opposition before capitulating under pressure. Arrested in 1936 during the Great Purge, Zinoviev was coerced into confessing fabricated charges of terrorism and conspiracy against Stalin in a public show trial, leading to his summary execution by firing squad.

In brief

Grigory Zinoviev, born Ovsei-Gershen Radomyshelsky, joined the Russian Social Democrats as a very young man and sided with Lenin when the party split. Exile, pamphlets, and the failed 1905 rising were the apprenticeship.

After 1917 he became one of the faces of the new order, then one of its victims. The Comintern years and the later trial are the same story told twice: a revolutionary who helped build a machine that did not spare its builders.