Valerian Obolensky
Valerian Obolensky was born in to a minor noble family in the Kursk province, where his father was manager of a stud farm.
[1] While studying at the Faculty of Law of the Moscow University, Obolensky participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution and distributed revolutionary literature among students and was a reporter for the newspaper Izvestiya.
[2] When the Bolshevik faction split over whether to continue participating in the Russian parliament, or Duma, Osinsky backed the otzovists, who supported a boycott, in opposition to Vladimir Lenin.
After the February Revolution of 1917, Osinsky was elected a member of the Moscow bureau of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) – later renamed the All-Russian Communist Party.
[9] In April 1918, he published a long critique in the magazine Kommunist of what he called the 'new orientation' laid down by Lenin, claiming that the newly created Red Army was "too intimately and too dangerously" reliant of former officers of the Tsar's Imperial Army, and arguing that similarly there could be no 'peace treaty' with former factory managers and other middle class specialists, who must be subjected to workers' control.
This was a highly unusual intervention, because it was well known that Akhmatova was not a supporter of the revolution, and that her ex-husband, Nikolai Gumilev had been shot the previous year as a suspected counter-revolutionary.
In the early part of 1924, he was one of the leading figures in the Left Opposition, who supported Leon Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death.
In the mid-1920s, several leading members of the opposition, including Lev Kamenev, Christian Rakovsky and Alexandra Kollontai were sent abroad on diplomatic missions.
[1] When his former comrades Vladimir Smirnov and Timofei Sapronov were sent into exile, Osinsky wrote privately to Stalin, on 1 January 1928, protesting about their harsh treatment, but received a curt reply that he "had no moral right" to criticise decisions made by the party.
In 1928, when Joseph Stalin embarked on a policy of forced collectivisation of agriculture following serious difficulties in collecting grain for the urban population at fixed prices, Osinsky was briefly reunited with Bukharin, leader of the 'right' opposition.
[13] He advocated raising the price of agricultural produce, to improve living standards in the countryside and promote the voluntary sale of grain by peasants, a proposal which was accepted by the Central Committee when it met in July 1928, although Stalin argued against it.
From December 1932 to March 1937, he was a member of the Special State Commission (TsGK) for determining the yield and size of the gross harvest of grain crops.
Arrested on 17 October 1937, four days after her husband, she spent eight years in labour camps run by the gulag in Mordovia, Karelia and Perm.
Their oldest son, Vadim Obolensky (1912–1937) was arrested as a student at military academy in 1935, along with his closest friend, Andrei Sverdlov.
Their daughter, Svetlana, and younger surviving son, Valerian, and Rem Smirnov were all in their teens when their parents were arrested, and were sent to an orphanage.
Valerian Obolensky (1922–1941) studied classics, and joined the people's militia after the German invasion of the USSR, and was lost, presumably killed.
