In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. This time the charges including forming a terrorist organization that supposedly killed Kirov and tried to kill Joseph Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. This Trial of the Sixteen (or the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center") was one of the Moscow Show Trials and set the stage for subsequent show trials where Old Bolsheviks confessed to increasingly elaborate and monstrous crimes, including espionage, poisoning, sabotage, and so on. Like other defendants, Kamenev was found guilty and shot on 25 August 1936.

Kamenev, Zinoviev and his co-defendants were formally cleared of all charges by the Soviet government in 1988 during perestroika.

After Kamenev's execution, his relatives suffered a similar fate. Kamenev's

• second son, Yu. L. Kamenev, was executed on 30 January 1938, at the age of 17.
• His eldest son, air force officer A.L. Kamenev, was executed on 15 July 1939, at the age of 33.
• His first wife, Olga, was shot on 11 September 1941, in the Medvedev forest outside Oryol, together with Christian Rakovsky, Maria Spiridonova and 160 other prominent political prisoners.

Only his youngest son, Vladimir Glebov, survived Stalin's prisons and labor camps, and died in 1994.