He left for Bolshevist Russia in 1920, in order to be present at the 2nd Comintern Congress and the preliminary sessions of the Profintern - he met Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders.
Grigory Zinoviev | Grigory Shelikhov | Zinoviev | Grigory Yavlinsky | Grigory Potemkin | Grigory Levenfish | Zinoviev letter | "''The Alexander Column in scaffolds''" (1832-1834), by Grigory Gagarin | Grigory Zinoviev's | Grigory Valuyev | Grigory Semyonov | Grigory Romodanovsky | Grigory Pomerants | Grigory Ostrovsky | Grigory Landsberg | Grigory Laguta | Grigory Kramarov | Grigory Kheifets | Grigory Gurevich | Grigory Gamarnik | Grigory Drozd | ''Gondola Races on the Grand Canal of Venice'', by Grigory Gagarin |
Since Maslow and Fischer no longer enjoyed the protection of Grigory Zinoviev, under a directive of Joseph Stalin to favor Ernst Thaelmann, they were relieved of the Party leadership, and on August 20, 1926, were excluded from the KPD.
The troika Grigory Zinoviev-Lev Kamenev-Joseph Stalin wanted a symbolic direction represented by Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and an effective direction represented by Yagoda who was neither a people's commissar nor a central committee member to ensure that the GPU remained loyal to the party.
Despite this complicity, historian Alexander Rabinowitch indicates that Bokii was among the more moderate Bolshevik voices on the question of the use of terror in the summer of 1918, siding with Elena Stasova in opposing Grigory Zinoviev's call for a full scale Red Terror at a critical meeting held in the wake of Uritsky's killing.
Trotskyist writer Samuel Farber, a long-time supporter of the International Socialist Organization in the US, has argued that the internal party regime established by Cliff during this period is "reminiscent of the one established by Zinoviev in the mid-twenties in the USSR" consequently leading to the various crises and splits in the group later on.
The Left of the Zimmerwald Congress was made up of eight out of 38 people: Lenin, Zinoviev (Russia), Jānis K. Bērziņš (Latvia), Karl Radek (Poland), Julian Borchardt (Germany), Fritz Platten (Switzerland), Zeth Höglund and Ture Nerman (Sweden).