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phase of the power struggles after Lenin's death.
By 1926, however, Stalin had outmaneuvered
him and Zinoviev, and Kamenev was shunted off
to Italy as ambassador. In 1927 he joined forces
with Zinoviev and Trotsky in a belated and
unsuccessful attempt to oppose Stalin. Twice
expelled from the party but both times readmit-
ted, he was arrested with Zinoviev in 1935 on the
trumped up charge of planning the assassination
of Stalin's close associate Sergei Kirov in Decem-
ber 1934. They were both expelled from the
party once more and sentenced to five years'
imprisonment. The following year, Kamenev and
Zinoviev became the main defendants at the first
show trial, were sentenced to death, and were
executed in 1936.
Kandinsky, Vasili Vasilievich
(1866-1944)
artist
Known in the West as Wassily Kandinsky, Kan-
dinsky trained in law and economics at Moscow
University. At the age of 30 he left Russia to
study art in Munich. In Munich and elsewhere
in Germany, he was an active participant in the
numerous art groups and movements that flour-
ished in the decades before World War I, such as
the Phalanx and the Berlin Secession. With
Franz Marc he founded the Blaue Reiter group.
Kandinsky was the first Russian painter to pro-
duce purely abstract works. Initially these were
Expressionist abstractions, but he later was influ-
enced by Kazimir
MALEVICH
's geometrical designs
and by Paul Klee's work. In 1914 he returned to
Russia, where he helped establish the arts after
the Russian Revolution of 1917, but he left in
1921 after disagreements over the trends to sub-
ordinate art to industry and utilitarian needs. He
joined the influential Bauhaus school of design
and architecture in Weimar, Germany, where he
taught with his friend Klee. In 1933, he left Ger-
many for France, where he lived until his death.
By the end of his life, Kandinsky had produced a
remarkable variety of abstract works. He is also
known for his theoretical writings, such as
Con-
Klein Welton #IV,
a color lithograph by Vasili Kandinsky,
1922
(Library of Congress)
cerning the Spiritual in Art
(1912) and
Point and
Line in Plane
(1926).
Kapitsa, Petr Leonidovich
(1894-1984)
physicist
Cowinner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics with
two Americans, Kapitsa was a prominent Rus-
sian physicist who survived several clashes with
STALIN
, including his refusal to work on the
Soviet atomic weapons program. Kapitsa was
born on the island of Kronstadt, near St. Peters-
burg; his father was a military engineer. He first
studied physics at the Petrograd Polytechnic
Institute under the guidance of Abram Ioffe, one
of the leading physicists in Russia (later the
Soviet Union), then at the Petrograd Physical and
Technical Institute. After graduation in 1919,
Kapitsa taught electrical engineering at the same
institute. In 1921, he traveled to Cambridge,
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