[1] During military service, his Jewish father, Semyon Sosnovsky, was beaten, and threatened with drowning unless he agreed to convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, which he refused to do.
[1] Lev Sosnovsky left school early to work in a chemist's shop in Samara, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager, in 1903.
After the revolution was suppressed, he escaped to Odessa, and stowed away on a ship, disembarked in Algiers, and worked in a tobacco factory until he had the money to move to Paris.
After two years, he bribed an army doctor to certify that he was unfit for service, and moved to St Petersburg to work for Pravda and as an organiser of the Metal Workers Union.
In March 1924, a selkor named Grigori Malinovsky, from a village called Dymovka, in the Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) region of Ukraine, was murdered, after sending a report exposing two local officials whom he accused of bribery and intimidation.
In October, Sosnovsky travelled to Nikolaev to deliver a long speech on behalf of the prosecution at the trial of six men accused of the murder, three of whom were executed.
Writing in Pravda, he blamed the sexual references in Yesenin's work for a recent series of gang rapes by members of the communist youth league (Komsomol), and implied that his entire output should be banned.
When the young encountered human feelings in Yesenin's poetry, it was like “escaping from a cellar that reeks of rotten cabbage into the fresh air.”[9] Sosnovsky was one of the signatories of The Declaration of 46, and supported Leon Trotsky in the power struggle that followed the death of Lenin, despite their differences on cultural issues.
[11] He studied local conditions in Barnaul, where he calculated that just eight per cent of peasants were wealthy enough to own a threshing machine, which made the majority utterly dependent on them because "in the entire arsenal of exploitative resources of the kulak, the thresher is the most poisonous.
The OGPU appear to have known about these letters being smuggled abroad, because Sosnovsky was arrested in Barnaul on 29 April 1929, and in May he was sentenced to three years in prison, and transferred to an "isolator" in Chelyabinsk.
By the end of 1929, after most of the leading Trotskyists, including Yevgeni Preobrazhensky and Karl Radek, had capitulated to Stain, Sosnovsky was, after Christian Rakovsky, the best known oppositionist still holding out in exile.
In 1934, following Rakovsky's capitulation, Sosnovsky decided that the completion of the First Five-year plan and the worsening international situation no longer justified his opposition to Stalin.
In January 1937, Bukharin was hauled in front of Stalin and other members of the Politburo, and Sosnovsky was produced as a witness to say that the money was intended to finance terrorism.
In the mid-1930s, she worked in the political education sector of Moscow Zoo, until she was arrested in on 20 July 1937, as the wife of an 'enemy of the people', and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp in Mordvinia.
In July 1939, she was brought back to Moscow, accused of being a member of a terrorist group of wives of "enemies of the people", tortured and forced to confess.