Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev (, ; – August 25, 1936), born
Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky, known also under the name
Hirsch Apfelbaum , was a
Bolshevik revolutionary and a
Soviet Communist politician. He was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution:
Lenin, Zinoviev,
Kamenev,
Trotsky,
Stalin,
Sokolnikov and
Bubnov. Zinoviev is best remembered as the longtime head of the
Communist International and the architect of several failed attempts to transform Germany into a communist country during the early 1920s. He was in competition against
Joseph Stalin who eliminated him from the Soviet political leadership in 1926. He was the chief defendant in a 1936
show trial, the Trial of the Sixteen, that marked the start of the so-called
Great Terror in the
USSR and resulted in his
execution the day after his conviction in August 1936.