Pyotr Zalutsky

[2] The two of them, with Alexander Shliapnikov assumed leadership of the Bolshevik organisation in Petrograd (St Petersburg), and launched Pravda as a legal publication.

Zalutsky was a political ally of Grigory Zinoviev, the Leningrad party boss who was a member of the triumvirate who assumed control while Lenin was terminally ill, in 1923.

[5] But during 1925, the triumvirate split, as Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed what they regarded as Stalin's turn to the right, and formed the United Opposition with Trotsky.

In October 1925, a party member named Leonov, who may have been working secretly for the Stalin faction, claimed to have been shocked to hear Zalutsky denounce the communist party leadership in private conversation for "creating a bourgeois state" and a "kingdom of peasant narrow-mindedness", treating Leningrad as a 'province', and working to bring about a "Thermidor", while likening Stalin to August Bebel, the German Marxist who tried to take a middle position between communists and social democrats.

In 1928–34, Zalutsky chairman of the Lower Volga economic council, as head of a power plant, and then as manager of the Soyuzpromstroymashina ( All-Union Industrial machines) Trust, Moscow.

[4] Police raided Zalutsky's home on the night of 8–9 December 1934, a week after the assassination of the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov and seized oppositionist literature dating back to 1926.