It still amazes me that two Bolsheviks who were so opposed to the October Revolution (to the point of sabotage) managed to retain such high-ranking positions in the Party until Stalin took them out.
We have to remember that the stereotype of the Bolsheviks as a centralized, monolithic party is derived from *later* experience. In 1917, things were different. To quote an old post of mine:
"Worse still, Zinoviev and Kamenev actually leaked word of the planned Bolshevik coup and of their own opposition to it to the non-Bolshevik press. A furious Lenin demanded their expulsion from the party, but they saved themselves from this fate by backing off from their opposition.
"To compound the damage, Zinoviev and Kamenev again quarreled with Lenin after the insurrection succeeded: they wanted a coalition government of all the socialist parties. When they and a number of other pro-coalition Bolsheviks resigned their functions and pledged an intra-party fight against Lenin, Lenin was again furious: "The comrades who have resigned are deserters...Remember, comrades, two of these deserters, Kamenev and Zinoviev, even before the insurrection in Petrograd acted as deserters and strikebreakers..." Either they will submit or they will be expelled from the party, he warned. And of course they submitted, and were readmitted to grace.
"As Adam Ulam notes (*The Bolsheviks*, p. 384) of the episode of the resignations:
"'Many years later in Stalin's Russia most of the surviving dissenters of 1917 found themselves on the bench of the accused and eventually before a firing squad Among their crimes their behavior in those days was counted as one of the most heinous: they contradicted and fought against Ilych, they deserted their posts. But by the rules and spirit of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 there was nothing illegal or immoral about their behavior. It was open to any Party member who disagreed with its decisions to lay down his functions and to state his dissent. 'Your demand...' wrote the members of the opposition to Lenin, 'that in all our pronouncements we should support the policy of the Central Committee with which we basically disagree represents an unheard-of order to act against our convictions.' And so it was even by the then-prevailing Bolshevik standards.'"