«I WAS IN JAIL IN THE MOST DIFFICULT TIME AND SUFFERED EVERYTHING»: OLGA KAMENEVA'S PRISON YEARS

Abstract

By the mid-1930s, Olga Kameneva, a prominent figure in Soviet cultural construction, had lost most of her former posts. The sister of Leon Trotsky and the wife of Lev Kamenev, two of Joseph Stalin’s biggest opponents, she had practically no chance of avoiding repression, despite the public renunciation of her brother and divorce from her husband. Based on the materials of the investigative cases stored in the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and introduced into academic circulation for the first time, the article reconstructs Kameneva's path through interrogations, prisons and exile. The repressions started in March 1935 with the arrest of Kameneva in the so-called “Kremlin case”. Kameneva tried to assure the investigator and the leadership of the NKVD of her innocence (she was accused of spreading rumors about the unnatural death of Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva) – of course, unsuccessfully. Exiled to Alma-Ata, and then to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), two years later (in 1937) she was arrested for the second time. Despite the terrible conditions of interrogations during the “Great Terror” and hints on the part of the investigator about the ability to influence the fate of her youngest son Yuri (also arrested), Kameneva behaved with dignity, admitting neither her guilt, nor of any of those surrounding her, with the exception of her own husband Lev Kamenev, already executed by that time. Although the accusations against her (of anti-Soviet agitation and that she knew but had not reported Lev Kamenev’s “terrorist” activities) were insignificant by the standards of that time, on February 1, 1938, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and three years later, in 1941, she was shot extrajudicially.