Valerian Osinsky

Valerian Valerianovich Obolensky (Russian: Валериа́н Валериа́нович Оболе́нский; 25 March 1887 – 1 September 1938) (who worked under the pseudonym N. Osinsky) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Marxist theorist, Soviet politician, economist and Professor of the Agricultural Academy of Moscow.

Biography

Smirnov was born in to the family of a minor nobleman. While studying at the Faculty of Law of the Moscow University, Oblensky participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and distributed revolutionary literature among students and was a reporter for the newspaper Izvestiya. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. He graduated from the univerty in 1911. In 1913, Oblensky was exiled in Fver and started to write under the name pseudonym Nikolai Osinsky, in honor of the Russian revolutionary and terrorist Valerian Osinsky.[1]

From 1914 to 1916 he was deputy head of the statistical department of the Kharkiv Agricultural Society's commissioner for coal transportation in Kharkiv. He studied the economics of agriculture, published two books on the subject. In 1916 Osinsky was mobilized in the Imperial Russian Army and served and served as a quartermaster officer.

After the October Revolution he was active amongst the Left Communists around the "Kommunist" journal in 1918[2] and later became a leading member of the Democratic Centralists. Osinsky was the first chairperson of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy but lost that position in spring 1918 due to his opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[3]

He was deputy People's Commissar of Agriculture in 1921. In 1923-1924 he was plenipotentiary of Soviet Russia in Sweden. From July 1925, Osinsky a member of the Presidium of the State Planning Committee of the Soviet Union. In 1926-1927 he director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics at the Communist Academy.

From December 1929 to December 1930, Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Soviet Union. From 1932 to 1935 Head of Central Statistical Directorate of the State Planning Committee as well as deputy Chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee.

He attended the World Social Economic Conference organised by the International Institute of Industrial Relations held at the Vereeniging Koloniaal Institute in Amsterdam. This was the first occasion that Soviet officials had travelled to the West to discuss how the Five Year Plan worked.[4]

In 1932 he was elected Academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the Department of Social Sciences. He became and Academician of Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1935. From 1935 to 1937 he was the director of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

During the Great Purge, Osinsky was arrested on accusations of being part of an underground counterrevolutionary and pro-fascist terrorist group. He was tried alongside Vasiliy Mantsev, Vladimir Karelin, Boris Kamkov, I. N. Stukov, E. V. Artemenko, I. V. Zaporpzhetz, I. M. Savolainen, Grigory Ivanovich Semyonov and S. B. Chelnov.[5] He was sentenced to death on 1 November 1937 and executed on 1 September 1938.[6]

His daughter Svetlana Valerianovna Obolenskaya (1925-2012) was a Russian historian.[1]

Texts
  • “Minority Report on Building the Economy”, quoted in Robert V. Daniels (ed.), A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev, University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH, 1993, p. 98

References
  1. "Радви Саша. Валериан Валерианович Оболенский-Осинский". samlib.ru. Retrieved 2021-09-23.
  2. Boggs, Carl (1977). "Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power". Theory and Society. 4 (3): 367–8. JSTOR 656724.
  3. Carr, E. H. (1966). The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-23. 2. Pelican. p. 91.
  4. Alchon, Guy (1992). "Mary Van Kleeck and Scientific Management". In Nelson, Daniel (ed.). A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
  5. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites". Moscow: Peoples Commissariat of Justice of the USSR. 1938. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  6. Slezkine, Yuri (2017). The House of Government. Princeton University Press. pp. 846–7. ISBN 9780691176949.
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