Lev Borisovich Kamenev

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Kamenev (left) with Lenin after his first stroke (1922)

Lev Kamenev ( Russian Лев Борисович Каменев listen ? / I , born as Leo Rosenfeld ; born July 6 . Jul / 18th July 1883 greg. In Moscow ; † 25. August 1936 ) was a Soviet politician. Audio file / audio sample  

Life

origin

Kamenew ("Der Steinerne") was born on July 18, 1883, the son of Boris Rosenfeld, a baptized Jew who worked as a train driver on the Moscow-Kursk Railway. His father had graduated from the Petersburg Technological Institute and his mother the Bestushev Women's College . In 1901 he passed the high school diploma in Tbilisi and began to study law in Moscow, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in the same year . After a brief imprisonment in 1902, Kamenev gave up his studies and worked for the party as a “professional revolutionary”. In Tbilisi he met Josef Stalin . In 1902 Kamenev traveled to Europe, where he met Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and other exiles. Kamenev married Olga Bronstein , the sister of Leon Trotsky , who was then influential among the Social Democrats .

Early political activity

In 1905, Kamenev returned to Russia to take part in the first (crushed) Russian Revolution of 1905. In 1907 he was arrested and spent a year in prison. After his release in 1908 he went underground again and became one of Lenin's closest collaborators in Geneva and supported him in publishing the Bolshevik propaganda organs, including the newspaper Der Proletarian . Together with Lenin and Zinoviev , he fought in the party the group of so-called Otsovists around Bogdanov and Lunacharsky .

In 1914 he returned to Petersburg to publish the semi-legal Pravda and to head the Bolshevik faction in the Duma . After the outbreak of the First World War he was arrested and remained in exile in Siberia until 1917, where he met Stalin again. In Achinsk he learned of the February Revolution and signed a telegram with others in which he congratulated Grand Duke Mikhail on his decision to renounce the tsar's crown. On March 12, he arrived in Petrograd with Stalin .

In his Pravda article, The Provisional Government and Revolutionary Social Democracy , he demanded that the Bolsheviks support the Provisional Government . The next day he pleaded in the article Without Secret Diplomacy for the revolutionary defense of the fatherland against the German Reich.

Kamenev during the October Revolution

Kamenev 1918

On April 3, 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia and immediately criticized Kamenev for these articles. This in turn rejected Lenin's April theses . At the 7th All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (B) from April 24 to 29, 1917, he accused Lenin of failing to understand the real situation, because it forced the party to cooperate with the Provisional Government. Nevertheless, Lenin's theses were accepted and made the basis of party politics.

Kamenev was subsequently elected to the party's central committee for the first time, despite his previously wavering attitude to the revolution. The telegram with Kamenev's signature, published in various newspapers, was criticized, but Lenin stood behind Kamenev, who published a reply in Pravda .

When Lenin's first letters about preparations for the uprising were read out at the September 15 session, he unsuccessfully proposed that the letters be burned. At the meeting on September 27th, July / October 10th greg. he agreed with Zinoviev against the decision to go over to the armed uprising of the October Revolution . Instead, one should wait for the Constituent Assembly to meet.

Together with Zinoviev he turned on October 18 jul. / October 31,  1917 greg. in an article for Julius Martow's newspaper Nowaja Shisn (“The New Life”) against the plan of uprising. Lenin then demanded the immediate expulsion of the two from the party. In contrast to Zinoviev, Kamenev was temporarily excluded from the Central Committee.

Member of the Bolshevik government

After the victory of the October Revolution, Kamenev advocated a coalition government that should also include socialist parties that had spoken out against the formation of the first Soviet government. From November 9 to 21, 1917, Kamenev was the first chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (GZEK) and thus briefly head of state of Soviet Russia. From 1917 to 1926 he was a member of the Central Committee and from 1919 to 1926 a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) and, after its renaming in 1918, of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks), from which the CPSU later emerged. He was the head of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet and vice-chairman of the Council of People's Commissars . During the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk in 1918 he was chairman of the delegation of the Bolshevik government and then defended the controversial peace treaty. In 1920, on the occasion of Lenin's 50th birthday, he gave a detailed speech in the building of the Moscow party organization. He claimed that Lenin did not need words of praise and that the proletariat was not used to honoring its leaders with words and medals. The speech received little approval.

In the same year the government sent him to London, where he asked for support in the Polish-Soviet war . He received an assurance that the British government would support Moscow in its demands for the areas east of the Curzon Line , also claimed by Warsaw .

In 1922 he promoted Stalin's appointment to the newly created office of Secretary General. Together with Zinoviev and Stalin, he formed a “ troika ” in the period that followed and played a key role in Trotsky's increasing isolation.

After Lenin's death in 1924, he was one of the speakers at the funeral ceremony. Kamenev emphasized that even when Lenin was alone he never lost faith in the creative power of the popular masses. After that, he was appointed Chairman of the Labor and Defense Council .

At the 13th party congress in 1924, he advocated that Lenin's advice in his “will” to replace Stalin was not implemented. Together with Zinoviev he only worked out a document calling on Stalin to respect Lenin's critical remarks.

The descent

Originally a close companion of Josef Stalin, Kamenev soon got into internal party conflict with Stalin. In a report during the seminars of the secretaries of the district committees, Stalin criticized Kamenev's statement about the existence of a party dictatorship. Thereupon the Politburo condemned Stalin's criticism as unfriendly. Stalin immediately offered to resign, which Kamenev also refused.

When Trotsky harshly attacked Zinoviev and Kamenev in his work The Lessons of October 1924 because of their hesitant role in the 1917 revolution, they in turn belittled Trotsky's role in the revolution and presented their differences with Lenin as insignificant. They demanded Trotsky's expulsion from the party, but initially only achieved his recall as People's Commissar for Military Affairs.

When Stalin attacked Trotsky hard on November 19, 1924 when he appeared before the plenum of the communist faction in the Central Council of the Soviet trade unions, he also defended Kamenev and Zinoviev from attacks by Trotsky. He attested that they had always been good Leninists and Bolsheviks.

At a Politburo meeting in early 1925, Kamenev caused displeasure when he declared the technical and economic backwardness and the capitalist environment of the Soviet Union to be insurmountable obstacles to the development of socialism. At the Central Committee plenum from January 17 to 20, 1925, Kamenev made the proposal to relieve Trotsky from the office of People's Commissar for Army and Navy and as chairman of the Revolutionary War Council and to appoint Stalin as his successor. The proposal was rejected by a majority.

At the 14th party conference at the end of April 1925, Kamenev held the rotation and at the same time for the last time the chairmanship. Contrary to Kamenev's opinion, the conference concluded that the building of socialism in the USSR was possible.

Kamenev objected to the government's policy of being too peasant-friendly in his opinion and was sharply criticized for it in Stalin's book Problems of Leninism in 1925, as did Zinoviev. In 1925/26, Kamenev, together with Zinoviev as an exponent of the so-called left opposition, gradually lost all of his party and state offices. At the 14th party congress, which proclaimed the victory of socialism in one country as possible, he gave a courageous speech on December 21, 1925 on the occasion of Stalin's birthday. He spoke out against creating a leader and emphasized: "I have come to the conviction that Comrade Stalin cannot fulfill the task of one who can unite and hold the Bolshevik staff together." The majority of the party delegates then chanted : “Stalin! Stalin! "

Kamenev was then replaced from the post of Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and Chairman of the Council on Labor and Defense. He initially remained a member of the Politburo, but in October 1926 he lost his status as a candidate for the Politburo. He and Zinoviev now turned to Trotsky.

When Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Communist Party at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927 for oppositional activities, he tried to speak on their behalf, but was unable to speak. Instead, Stalin shouted: “No leader of the opposition has spoken from this platform in a lying, pharisaic, criminal and more depraved way than Kamenev.” When Kamenev refused the immediate revocation and a confession of repentance demanded by Congress, he was expelled from the party on December 18, 1927 .

The very next day he and Zinoviev and others made a solemn declaration in which he revoked his views. However, Congress refused to accept this statement and left the decision on Kamenev's resumption to the General Secretariat.

At Joffe's funeral he gave a speech among others. In 1928 he was accepted back into the party and appointed director of the Institute for World Literature. In 1932 he, like Zinoviev, was expelled from the party for the second time and exiled to Siberia. In May 1933, after they had again revoked, they were able to return from their place of exile. Gorky in particular campaigned for Stalin's pardon .

At the 17th party congress in January / February 1934 he appeared again. He praised the “Stalin era” and said about himself: “I would like to say that I consider the Kamenev who fought against the party and its leadership from 1925 to 1933 to be a political corpse.”

After the assassination attempt on Kirov on December 1, 1934, he and Zinoviev were publicly accused of being masterminds of the assassination attempt. Soon after, he was arrested during the Stalin Purge and charged in a secret trial. He was first sentenced to five years in prison in 1935. In the same year a new trial took place against him, whereby the sentence was extended to ten years.

In 1936 he and Zinoviev were received one last time by Stalin at their request. Stalin told them in his study that their guilt had already been proven, but that if they confessed everything during the impending trial, especially Trotsky's immediate leadership in their counter-revolutionary activity, he would endeavor to save their lives. After a long silence, Zinoviev agreed to both of them.

Like Zinoviev, he was sentenced to death in the first show trial , the "Trial of Sixteen" in August 1936 , and then executed . Kamenev was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1988 and posthumously re-admitted to the CPSU.

The bullets with which Kamenev and Zinoviev were killed were placed in a small glass box with the victim's name written on it and kept private by the secret service chief Genrich Jagoda . When Yagoda was executed, his successor Nikolai Yezhov took over the bullets, which after his execution passed into the possession of his successor, Lavrenti Beria .

Afterlife and fate of relatives

The memory of Kamenev was erased from history, he fell under the damnatio memoriae . The most famous example are the photographs that Grigory Petrovich Goldstein took on May 5, 1920 during a speech by Lenin in Moscow: in the 1930s they were only published with cropped edges so that Kamenev and Trotsky standing in front of him could no longer be seen. In the sixties, the two non-persons were erased from the picture by retouching : instead of them one could only see empty stairs.

At the end of the 1920s, Kamenev had separated from his wife Olga, with whom he had two sons, and then lived with Tatiana Glebowa, with whom he had another son. His two sons from his marriage to Olga fell victim to the Great Terror , while his ex-wife Olga was executed in a prisoner shooting in September 1941. The youngest son survived imprisonment in Stalin's labor camps; he died in 1994.

literature

  • Oscar Blum : Russian heads. Kerensky, Plekhanov, Martov, Chernov, Savinkov-Ropschin, Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Lunacharsky, Dzerzhinsky, Chicherin, Zinoviev, Kamenev. With 9 portraits. Schneider, Berlin 1923.
  • Jürg Ulrich : Kamenew: The moderate Bolshevik. The collective thinking around Lenin. VSA Verlag, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-89965-206-1 .
  • “Non-persons”: Who were they really? Bukharin, Rykov, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01547-8 .

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Lenin: Letter to the members of the Bolshevik Party ( Lenin Werke . Volume 26, pp. 204–207) and Lenin: Letter to the Central Committee of the RSDLP . ( Lenin Works. Volume 26, pp. 211-215).
  2. ^ Lenin works. Volume 26, p. 544. (Note 54)
  3. ↑ Andrzej Nowak: Pierwsza Zdrada Zachodu. 1920 - Zapomniany appeasement. Warsaw 2015, pp. 355–359.
  4. ↑ Dimitri Wolkogonow: Stalin , 3rd ed. 1996, p. 105 and p. 174
  5. ↑ Isaac Deutscher: Stalin (1949) 1997, p. 403
  6. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, p. 61.
  7. ↑ Dimitri Wolkogonow: Stalin , 3rd ed. 1996, p. 295
  8. ↑ Klaus Waschik, Where is Trotsky? Soviet image policy as a control of memory in the 1930s , in: Gerhard Paul (Ed.), Das Jahrhundert der Bilder, Vol. 1: 1900–1949 , special edition for the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2009, pp. 252–259; Tobias Kruse : Erased comrades , fluter , November 12, 2014 with Goldstein's original and the retouched photo without Kamenev and Trotsky, accessed on April 5, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Lew Kamenew  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
predecessor Office successor
- Head of State of the Soviet Union in
1917 		Yakov Sverdlov
personal data
SURNAME Kamenev, Lev Borisovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenfeld, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1936
Place of death Moscow