Bekir Osmanov

Bekir Osmanov (Russian: Бекир Османов; 22 March 1911 – 26 May 1983) was a Crimean Tatar civil rights activist, agronomist, and partisan.

During the purges of 1937, Osmanov, by then a tobacco farmer, was arrested and tried for rebutting Lysenkoist pseudoscience, but the court spared him after the judge issued a statement that legal action was an inappropriate way to handle academic disputes.

However, he was not drafted into the Red Army for health reasons, so he put his skills to use as a scout with the partisan movement to help resist the Nazi occupation of the peninsula.

He went on to participate in other various partisan operations, for which he gained a reputation as a skilled scout due to his knowledge of the local geography, and in January 1942, he was accepted into the Community Party.

For his effective work as a partisan and scout, the Nazi occupiers launched a wide search for him and offered a bounty of 100,000 marks on his head.

In October 1942, he took part in a small-scale sea-based operation, helping fellow partisans hide in "blind spots" from enemy forces to approach the coast.

However, the operation was a failure, with the commander and commissar panicking upon the start of enemy fire and several partisans drowning due to their boats being shelled.

He then moved to Krasnodar, where the Crimean Regional Committee in exile was located, before returning to Crimea as soon as Nazi forces were expelled from the peninsula in April 1944.