All of the pretendedly-mourned-in-the-west "old bolsheviks" that were shot (which ignores all the ones that weren't and lived through the purges, and the ones who died of old age or illness or even anti-Bolshevik assassination a decade or two before the purges, and ignores that half those mfs who were shot that they talk about spent more of their revolutionary careers as mensheviks and SRs against the Bolsheviks than as actual Bolsheviks) Stalin protected a from expulsion constantly. It's actually frustrating in hindsight how many times he voted to keep (now-)obvious wreckers or incompetents in the party against others' judgement.

Including shielding them from Lenin lol. Lenin wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev expelled before the October revolution even, saying he didn't even consider them comrades anymore and would do everything in his strength to secure their expulsion because they betrayed him and the party and the revolution and the workers by leaking that the Bolsheviks were going to call for a general strike and armed insurrection, in order to complain about it in a BOURGEOIS NEWSPAPER after they lost the vote against insurrection in the committee vote proper. Stalin went to bat for them.