Leader
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld · 1883–1936
Photograph, 1920s. Wikimedia Commons.
Kamenev was a senior Bolshevik of the second rank: enough power to shape 1917 and the 1920s, not enough of a personal following to survive Stalin once he became inconvenient.
Origin and religion
Born in Moscow. His father was a Jewish railway engineer. His mother was Russian Orthodox.
Jewish family (born Rosenfeld). Secular. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- Chairman of the Moscow Soviet
- Deputy chairman of Sovnarkom
- Member of the Politburo
He chaired key Soviet bodies in Moscow, sat on the Politburo, and joined Stalin and Zinoviev against Trotsky. The alliance collapsed. He was shot after the same August 1936 show trial as Zinoviev.
The record
With Zinoviev he published, on the eve of October, a warning that an armed coup would wreck the revolution. Lenin called them strikebreakers. They recanted. The episode matters because it shows the coup was a choice, argued inside the party, not an inevitable crowd event. His trial confession is a document of coercion.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Mixed ancestry
- Vladimir Lenin — Founder of the Bolshevik faction (1903)
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.