Lev Kamenev

Lev Borisovich Kamenev (né Rozenfeld; 18 July [O.S. 6 July] 1883 – 25 August 1936) was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. A prominent Old Bolshevik, Kamenev was a leading figure in the early Soviet government and served as a deputy premier of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1926.

Born in Moscow to a family active in revolutionary politics, Lev Kamenev joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and sided with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction after the party's 1903 split. He was arrested several times and participated in the failed Revolution of 1905, after which he moved abroad and became one of Lenin's close associates. In 1914, Kamenev was arrested upon returning to Saint Petersburg and exiled to Siberia. He returned after the February Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the monarchy, and joined Grigory Zinoviev in opposing Lenin's "April Theses" and an armed seizure of power within the former Russian Empire. Nevertheless, when Lenin came to power in Russia following the success of the October Revolution, Kamenev briefly served as chairman of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets along with a number of senior posts, including chairman of the Moscow Soviet and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. In 1919, he was elected as a full member of the first Central Committee Politburo, the supreme decision-making body of the emerging Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

When Vladimir Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, Lev Kamenev formed a triumvirate alongside Zinoviev and the ruling party's General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, that led Soviet Russia until Lenin returned to work later in the year. After Lenin sustained a second stroke in December 1922, Kamenev became the country's acting Premier as well as chairman of the Politburo for the rest of the Soviet leader's lifetime. Just as a third stroke in March 1923 definitively ruled out any prospect of Lenin returning to government, the aforementioned triumvirate proceeded to consolidate power within the regime by marginalizing Leon Trotsky and his allies.

After being eclipsed by Stalin within the Soviet leadership by 1925, Kamenev was stripped of his offices in 1926 before being expelled from the party altogether in 1927. While readmitted to the party's membership, he never again occupied a position of power in the Soviet Union. In 1934, Kamenev was arrested in response to allegations of complicity in Sergei Kirov's assassination and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was ultimately made a chief defendant in the Trial of the Sixteen (the show trial at the beginning of Stalin's Great Purge), found guilty of treason, and executed in August 1936.