Isaak Zelensky

Isaak Abramovich Zelensky (; 22 June 1890 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet politician, Communist Party official, and a victim of the Great Purge. In 1929, he was briefly Secretary General of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.

Early life Isaak Zelensky was born in 1890, in Saratov as the son of a craftsman's Jewish family. There he completed his schooling, and in 1906 he joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He worked as a party propagandist in several Russian cities, including Orenburg, Penza, Samara, Tsaritsyn and Moscow, and was arrested several times.

In February 1912, he was exiled to the Narym region of Siberia. In 1915, he was arrested again and exiled to Irkutsk in Siberia. However, he managed to escape a year later. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he fought for the Bolsheviks in Moscow.

He was demoted in August 1924 by being sent to Tashkent to participate in building up the party structures. He was secretary of the Central Asian bureau of the Communist Party in 1924–1929. In 1929, he was briefly the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, but in December Akmal Ikramov replaced him as the first ethnic Uzbek in this position. The next year Zelensky tried to depose him, but since the Central Committee supported Ikramov, this attempt failed. Zelensky was recalled to Moscow in 1931 to run the state consumer distribution network. The apparent reason for this stay of execution was that Stalin wanted to use an upcoming show to deflect blame for the shortage of consumer goods. Zelensky was reputedly humiliated and tortured to break him. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Zelensky was whipped with ramrods with his pants pulled down."

In March 1938, he was a defendant in the last and biggest of the Moscow Show Trials, the Trial of the Twenty-One. During the trial, he "confessed" to have been an Okhrana spy, like his brother, since 1911, and that while he was in charge of consumer goods he had arranged to sabotage food distribution by having nails inserted in butter and allowing fifty truckloads of eggs to be spoiled. Zelensky was sentenced to death and was executed on 15 March, 1938.

Legacy In 1959, he was posthumously rehabilitated. In 1988, the Soviet authorities announced that the entire trial had been fabricated.