Zinoviev received his primary education from his father at home. From the age of 14, he worked at various jobs as a clerk. In 1901, he joined the Social Democratic Party and became heavily involved in trade union activity. Persecuted by the police he traveled to Berlin, Paris and then Switzerland where, in 1903, he met Lenin and Plekhanov. He attended the Second Congress of the SDP in London later that year and joined the Bolsheviks and Lenin after the latter split with Jules Martov. He returned to Russia and became one of the editors of Iskra for a time, before beginning his studies at Berne University. He took part in the 1905 revolution as a strike organizer, but ill health forced him to go abroad again. In 1907, he was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. In 1908, he fled to Switzerland and joined Lenin and Kamenev in organizing various Bolshevik publications, including Pravda. Zinoviev returned to Russia again after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas in 1917 and became the editor of Pravda. Although initially reluctant to join the armed revolution, he nevertheless relented and changed his stance. In February 1917, Zinoviev was elected Chairman of the Council of Commissars of the Petrograd Workers' Commune and in 1919 became the Chairman of the Executive Committee at the First World Congress of the Cominterm. When Lenin died in 1924, Zinoviev joined with Kamenev and Stalin to form a triumvirate that would keep Trotsky out of power. Once that became successful, and with the growth in the power of Stalin, he and Kamenev were expelled from the party. Over the ensuing years, Zinoviev was in and out of the party, until in 1935 he was charged by Stalin as being one of the conspirators in the assassination of Kirov. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but the following year, Stalin accused him plotting to kill Stalin and other leaders and had him executed. Zinoviev's works are primarily speeches and ideological essays and pamphlets including Lenin (1918), A Five Years' Lesson (1922) and Bolshevism or Trotskyism? (1925). |
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