An Empty Promise

You probably haven’t heard of the case of Grigory Zinoviev who was a prominent member of the Bolshevik Party in the early days…he was closely associated with a comrade named Lev Kamenev and was a close friend of Lenin himself during Lenin’s years in exile...Zinoviev disagreed however with Lenin’s call to hold a revolution so soon, and thought it best to wait until later…as a result, he played virtually no role in the October Revolution…nor was he was not involved in any party activities immediately after the revolution…however later, he went on to become a member of the Politburo in 1919… and went on from that to serve in the Soviet government…that is until he was arrested and executed during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s along with Lev Kamenev…Zinoviev was a chief defendant in a 1936 dog and pony show trial called the Trial of the Sixteen…that trial marked the start of the so-called Great Terror in the USSR…most defendants were charged under what was known as Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code which accused them of conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other prominent Soviet leaders in an attempt to dismember the Soviet Union...both Zinoviev and Kamenev were told that if they agreed to plead guilty to these ‘crimes’ , in exchange their lives would be spared…Stalin agreed to this but then ordered their executions immediately after the trial…this occurred in August of 1936…hence, Stalin’s promise was empty...another strike against Kamenev was that he was the brother-in-law of Leon Trotsky and Trotsky wasn’t one of Stalin’s favorite people if he had any favorites at all...history seems to indicate he did not.