Comintern
Communism
1883–1936
✕ Executed by shooting
He opposed October, vouched for Stalin, and was shot by him
In May 1924 Lenin's testament was read to a plenum of the Central Committee. Kamenev read the document; Zinoviev then spoke for Stalin and moved to re-elect him General Secretary by show of hands, which carried with only Trotsky's small group against. The testament was not reported to the congress.
One of Lenin's long-standing companions in exile and the first chairman of the Comintern's executive committee, he was an early face of international communism. Born Ovsei-Gershon Radomyshelsky to a Jewish dairy-farming family in Yelizavetgrad, today Kropyvnytskyi in Ukraine, he opposed the October 1917 rising publicly alongside Kamenev, yet as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet he controlled the party's northern base and became a full Politburo member in March 1921. After Lenin's death he formed a triumvirate with Stalin and Kamenev to isolate Trotsky, but was defeated at the XIV Party Congress in December 1925 and lost the Leningrad Soviet and Comintern posts in 1926. He then joined Trotsky in the United Opposition; in August 1936 the first Moscow trial sentenced him to death and he was shot, and he was rehabilitated in 1988.
Career timeline
1907–1917Lenin’s closest companion of the exile years
1917.10With Kamenev, opposes the rising; the leak scandal
1919–1926First chairman of the Comintern
1923–1925The triumvirate against Trotsky
1926–1927The United Opposition; expulsions and recantations
ECCI secretary who carried out the Stalinist purges (1928–1943)
In 1939 Stalin told Dimitrov: "Manuilsky is a toady! He was a Trotskyite! We criticised him for keeping quiet and not speaking out when the purges of Trotskyite bandits were going on, and now he has started toadying!" Almost every Old Bolshevik with a Trotsky link was killed or jailed except him.
A Bolshevik from Volhynia, born in the village of Sviatets to a priest's family (English sources say peasants) and a law graduate of the Sorbonne, he was a member of the Vpered group, joined the Mezhraiontsy in 1917, and held Ukrainian and Comintern posts. As ECCI secretary in the 1920s and 1930s he directed the Stalinist purges in the Comintern apparatus and foreign communist parties, and in 1945–46 he led the campaign against 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism'. In 1945 he headed Ukraine's delegation at San Francisco, chaired the committee that drafted the Preamble and Chapter 1 of the UN Charter, and from 1944 to 1952 was Ukrainian foreign minister.
Career timeline
1903Joins RSDLP while studying at St. Petersburg University; aligns with Bolsheviks
1905–1906Agitator for Petersburg Committee; organizes Kronstadt and Sveaborg mutinies
1906Arrested, sentenced to 5 years exile in Yakutia; escapes, emigrates to Paris
1907–1912Paris exile; intermittent illegal returns to Russia for underground work
1912–1913Underground work in St. Petersburg and Moscow; re-emigrates
1914–1917Anti-war position; edits Golos and Nashe Slovo with Trotsky
1917.05Returns to Russia, joins the Mezhraiontsy
1917.08VI Congress: Mezhraiontsy merge into the Bolshevik Party
1921–1922First Secretary of CP(B)U; People's Commissar for Agriculture during the famine
