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Leningrad Communist Party organization.
Zinoviev, the pseudonym of O. G. Radomylsky,
was born to Jewish dairy farmers in the Kherson
region of the Ukraine. He joined the Russian
Social Democratic Party in 1901, and after meet-
ing Lenin and PLEKHANOV in Switzerland, sided
with the BOLSHEVIK faction after 1903. During
the 1905 Revolution, Zinoviev gained promi-
nence as a local Bolshevik leader in St. Peters-
burg. He was arrested in 1908, and after being
released for ill health, he joined Lenin in
Kraków, then a part of Austrian Poland, begin-
ning a close partnership. He spent the war in
Switzerland, and after the FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
of 1917 returned to Petrograd (St. Petersburg)
with Lenin aboard the “sealed train” that brought
Lenin and his close advisers from Switzerland
through Germany and Finland to Russia in April
1917 after the fall of the Russian monarchy.
During 1917 he formed a common front with
Lev KAMENEV in speaking out against a prema-
ture seizure of power, even after the party had
adopted Lenin's proposals for a Bolshevik upris-
ing on October 25. After resigning over the exclu-
sion of non-Bolshevik socialists from the Soviet
government, Zinoviev quickly reconciled himself
to the new realities of power and rejoined the
government. A superb though overly dramatic
speaker, he became a highly visible member of
the new regime as an original full member of the
party's Politburo, leader of the Petrograd Com-
munist Party, and chairman of the Communist
International (Comintern). As Lenin's health
deteriorated after 1922, Zinoviev joined STALIN
and Kamenev in a triumvirate to block TROTSKY
from emerging as Lenin's successor. By 1925,
Stalin was ready to turn against his two allies,
and in 1926 Zinoviev was removed from the
Politburo and the Comintern, and in 1927
expelled from the party. Subsequently readmit-
ted and twice expelled again, he was arrested in
1935, tried secretly with Kamenev as the alleged
planners behind the assassination of Stalin's
close adviser Sergei Kirov and condemned to 10
years' imprisonment. The following year in
August 1936 he was retried in the first of the big
purge trials staged by Stalin, found guilty on a
fabricated charge of conspiracy, sentenced to
death for treason, and executed on August 25,
1936.
Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhailovich
(1895-1958)
writer
An enormously popular satirist who captured the
contradictions of Soviet life in the 1920s with a
gentle but humorous touch, Zoshchenko was the
target of particularly vicious official criticism in
the years following World War II. He was born in
St. Petersburg to Ukrainian parents. While a law
student at Petrograd University during World
War I, he volunteered for the army, enroling at
Pavlovskoe Military School. An infantry lieu-
tenant in 1915, he was wounded and poisoned
by gas at the front in July 1916. He retired from
the army in March 1917 with the rank of cap-
tain. He lived in Petrograd during the February
and October 1917 Revolutions. In 1918, he
joined the Red Army but left after two years. In
1921, he joined the literary group Serapion
Brothers, which featured another future writer
of prominence, Evgenii ZAMYATIN . Zoshchenko
attained the peak of his popularity as a humorist
during the 1920s, the era of the New Economic
Policy. His short stories deftly portrayed the often
bewildered but resilient man in the street, caught
in the midst of a grandiose political project. He
also skewered the pretensions of an emerging
new elite. Zoshchenko tried to adapt to the
changing winds of Soviet politics in the 1930s by
writing works that fit in with the new socialist
realist cultural orthodoxy. Along with other writ-
ers, he spent the war years in Kazakhstan. After
the war, in 1946, his work was singled out along
with that of the poet Anna AKHMATOVA by the
new cultural commissar, Andrei ZHDANOV , as tar-
gets in his campaign against “cosmopolitan” ten-
dencies in Soviet culture that needed to be rooted
out. A harsh public campaign followed, during
which Zoshchenko and Akhmatova were
expelled from the Writers' Union, in effect ban-
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