Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev (September 23 1883  August 25, 1936), born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky, known also under the name Hirsch Apfelbaum, was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician. 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. 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.