Lev Kamenev (18 July 1883-25 August 1936) was a member of the Politburo of the Soviet Union and the brother-in-law of Leon Trotsky. He was killed during the Great Purge in 1936.
Biography[]
Lev Rozenfeld was born on 18 July 1883 in Moscow, Russian Empire to a Jewish father and an Orthodox mother, and he married the sister of Leon Trotsky. In 1901 he joined the Bolsheviks, a movement of communists supporting Vladimir Lenin, and after his participation in the 1905 Revolution he was forced to go into exile in France like many other Bolsheviks. In 1915 he was arrested and exiled to Siberia with many other political dissidents, but in 1917 he was freed during the Russian Revolution, when Lenin seized power from the corrupt House of Romanov and made Russia into a state of the people, the Russian SFSR. Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev were opposed to armed rebellion, but in 1918 he became the Chairman of the Moscow Soviet. Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin became the ruling triumvirate in 1923 after the death of Lenin, but Kamenev became an enemy of both of them. In 1932, Kamenev and Zinoviev were excluded from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and in 1936 he was executed by firing squad for trumped-up charges.