European exile. A fiery orator and provocative political writer, during the next ten years Zinoviev edited numerous Bolshevik publications and supported Lenin against opposition from both within the party and other revolutionary groups. In April 1917, after the overthrow of the tsar at the end of February, Zinoviev returned with Lenin to Russia on the “sealed” train through Germany and took over editorship of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda until it was banned in July. During the year, however, Zinoviev increasingly took issue with Lenin’s confidence in Bolshevik strength and his refusal to collaborate with other socialist groups. In October, Zinoviev together with Lev Kamenev opposed the Bolshevik leader’s plans for an armed seizure of power. When Lenin the following month refused to include representatives of other socialist parties in the new Soviet government, Zinoviev (with four others) resigned from the Bolshevik Central Committee in protest. He was readmitted only a few days later after publication of his “Letter to the Comrades” in Pravda, in which he submitted to Party discipline. In January 1918, Zinoviev became head of the Pet-rograd Revolutionary Committee. In March 1919 he was elected chairman of the Executive Committee of the newly founded Communist International (Comintern). By 1921, he was a full member of the Politburo, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and leader of the regional Party organization. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined with Josef Vissarionovich Stalin in a tactical “triumvirate” to counter the aspirations of Leon Trotsky to the Party leadership. After TrotENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
ZUBATOV, SERGEI VASILIEVICH
sky’s defeat in 1925, Stalin turned against his former allies, who strove to maintain their authority by realigning themselves with Trotsky in the United Opposition against Stalin. Politically out-maneuvered, Zinoviev lost control of the Leningrad party organization and the Comintern in 1926 and in November the following year was expelled from the Communist Party. By publicly recanting his opposition to Stalin on several occasions, Zinoviev strove in vain to rehabilitate himself. In January 1935 he was arrested on charges of “moral complicity” in the assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov, tried in secret, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In August 1936, Zinoviev was brought before the public in the first Moscow show trial. Abjectly accepting all the charges of terrorism and treason levelled against him, Zinoviev was condemned to death and executed on August 25, 1936. He was rehabilitated by the Soviet government in 1988. See also: COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; SHOW TRIALS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; UNITED OPPOSITION; ZINOVIEV LETTER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Haupt, Georges, and Marie, Jean-Jacques, eds. (1974). Makers of the Russian Revolution. London: Allen and Unwin. Hedlin, Myron W. (1975). “Zinoviev’s Revolutionary Tactics in 1917.” Slavic Review 34(1):19-43.
Letter of mysterious provenance purporting to have been sent by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International (Comintern), to the British Communist Party with instructions to prepare for revolution.
The letter was first published on October 25, 1924, four days before a general election, in the British newspaper Daily Mail under the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters.” Its appearance caused great embarrassment to the Labour government of Ramsey MacDonald, which on February 2 of that year had bestowed diplomatic recognition on the Soviet Union and on August 10 had concluded a series of trade treaties, now awaiting parliamentary ratification. A conservative vicENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY tory in the October 29 elections signaled instead the launch of a vigorously anti-Soviet line, culminating in the abrogation of diplomatic ties in May 1927. Denounced immediately by the Soviet government as a forgery, investigations at the time and since have failed to discover conclusive proof of the letter’s authorship, which has been variously attributed to White Russian ?migr?s, Polish spies, the British secret services, communist provocateurs, or possibly even to Zinoviev. In January 1999, the British government published a report on the letter based on research in British and Russian secret service archives. This proposed that the document was a forgery instigated by White Russian agents in Berlin, carried out in Riga, Latvia, drawing on genuine intelligence information concerning Comintern activities, and channeled by British intelligence to Britain, where certain right-wing members of the security service proved eager to vouch for its authenticity and ensure it reached the press. The letter and subsequent “Red scare” did not, however, cause Labour’s electoral defeat or discredit the party, which had already suffered a parliamentary vote of no confidence and loss of Liberal support. Indeed, the Labour party’s vote in 1924 grew by one million over the previous year’s election. See also: GREAT BRITAIN, RELATIONS WITH; ZINOVIEV, GRIGORY YEVSEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrew, Christopher. (1977). “The British Secret Service and Anglo-Soviet Relations in the 1920s, Part 1: From the Trade Negotiations to the Zinoviev Letter.” The Historical Journal 20:673-706. Bennett, Gill. (1999). “A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business.” In The Zinoviev Letter of 1924. London: Foreign amp; Commonwealth Office, General Services Command. Chester, Lewis; Fay, Stephen; and Young, Hugo. (1967). The Zinoviev Letter. London: Heinemann.
(1864-1917), senior security police official.
Born and raised in Moscow, the son of a military officer, Sergei Zubatov was a staunch defender of the Russian monarchy who reorganized the Russian security police and created progovernment
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labor organizations. These activities earned him fear and anger from the revolutionary activists with whom he matched wits, as well as from more conservative government officials.
Zubatov had exceptional rhetorical talents and a magnetic personality. He was the best-read student in his high school and the leader of a discussion circle. Although he associated with radical intellectuals, he advocated reform and opposed revolution. A self-proclaimed follower of Dmitry Pis-arev, he believed that education and cultural development offered the best path to social improvement. He left high school before graduation, in 1882 or 1883, worked in the Moscow post office, and married the proprietress of a private self-education library that stocked forbidden books. Yet he developed monarchist views and became a police informant in 1885. He openly joined the security police in 1889 after radical activists discovered his dual role.
As director of the Moscow security bureau from 1896, Zubatov led the antirevolutionary fight. Activists who fell into his snares found a well-read official who argued passionately that only revolutionary violence was preventing the absolutist monarchy from implementing reforms. Using charm and eloquence, he recruited talented, and sometimes dedicated, secret informants who laid bare the revolutionary underground. He systematized the use of plainclothes detectives, created a mobile surveillance brigade staffed with two dozen such detectives, and trained gendarme officers from around the empire. The major revolutionary organizations found it hard to withstand Zubatov’s sophisticated assault.
Zubatov himself was not a gendarme officer, but a civil servant who attained only the seventh rank (nadvornyi sovetnik), or lieutenant colonel in military terms. Had he risen through the hierarchical, regimented military, he probably would not have conceived of “police socialism.” This policy advocated not the redistribution of wealth but the backing of workers in economic disputes with employers. In 1901, with the patronage of senior Moscow officials, he organized societies that provided cultural, legal, and material services to factory workers. Within a year, analogous societies sprang up in other cities, including Minsk, Kiev, and Odessa.
In the fall of 1902 Zubatov was invited to reorganize the nerve center of the Russian security police. As chief of the Special Section of the Police
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Department in St. Petersburg, he created a network of security bureaus in twenty cities from Vilnius to Irkutsk. He staffed many of them with his proteges trained in the new methods of security policing and encouraged to deploy secret informants within the revolutionary milieu.
Meanwhile, however, his worker societies slipped out of control. In July 1903 a general strike broke out in Odessa and labor unrest swept across the south. Zubatov advocated restraint, but the Minister of Interior,
