Lev Kamenev / Leon Rozenfeld
Lev Borisovich Kamenev, was born in 1883 in Moscow to a Jewish family. His father was a train machinist. He was married to Lev Trotsky's sister - Olga Bronstein. He was one of the fathers of the Bolshevik movement - a despotic system based on terror and control of society that claimed millions of innocent lives.
In 1902, he took part in a student demonstration, for which he was arrested and subsequently expelled from his law studies.
In 1923 he allied with Zinoviev and Stalin against Trotsky, helping Stalin to gain unlimited power. "The revolution eats its own children" - in 1926 Stalin moved against Kamenev, removing him from the highest posts. For the rest of his life Stalin played a game with him - getting him to cooperate, forcing him to make self-criticisms, promising to preserve his life. He was finally sentenced to 10 years on a charge of attempting to assassinate Stalin, and later - in 1936 - sentenced to death and executed. Soon his wife, two sons and his brother's family were also executed. The Kamenev-Zinoviev trial marked the beginning of a period of the Great TerrorThe Great Purge or the Great Terror was Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union that occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved large-scale repression of the peasantry; ethnic cleansing; purges of the Communist Party, government officials, and the Red Army; widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Millions of innocent were mordered. Historians estimate the total number of victims of the Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 950,000 and 1.2 million. in the USSR.