Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko (Russian: Владимир Александрович Антонов-Овсеенко; Ukrainian: Володимир Олександрович Антонов-Овсієнко; 9 March 1883 – 10 February 1938), real surname Ovseenko, party aliases 'Bayonet' (Штык) and 'Nikita' (Никита), literary pseudonym A. Galsky (А. Гальский), was a prominent Bolshevik leader, Soviet statesman, military commander, and diplomat.

[1] In 1901, he graduated from the Voronezh Cadet Corps and entered the Nikolaev Military Engineering School, but refused to swear “allegiance to the Tsar and the Fatherland,” later explaining this by "an organic aversion to militarism".

After some time, he illegally returned to Poland and, together with Felix Dzerzhinsky, tried to organize a military uprising of two infantry regiments and an artillery brigade in Novo-Alexandria, which ended in failure.

These sports exercises, however, were nothing more than a pre-thought-out and prepared escape plan, which Antonov-Ovseenko carried out during the "leapfrog formation", in which one of the prisoners jumps on the back of another, forming a "ladder".

After ten minutes of this game, Antonov-Ovseenko, having lulled the guards' vigilance completely, turned the direction of the "leapfrog" from a single tree to the prison wall.

Soon after the outbreak of World War I, Antonov-Ovseenko broke with the Mensheviks, and founded the anti-war paper Golos (Голос – 'Voice'), later renamed Nashe Slovo (Наше слово – Our Word), which he co-edited with Leon Trotsky and Julius Martov.

During the Great War, as an emigrant, he led a military review in the Parisian newspaper Nashe Slovo and often demonstrated strategic insight.Antonov-Ovseenko returned to Russia in June 1917, joining the Bolsheviks upon his arrival.

As a member of the Military Organization under the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), Antonov-Ovseenko was sent to Helsingfors to conduct propaganda work among the soldiers of the Northern Front and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet.

After being released on bail on September 4, 1917, the day that the right wing military revolt led by General Kornilov collapsed, Antonov-Ovseenko returned to Helsingfors when Tsentrobalt appointed him as a commissioner to the Governor-General of Finland.

Trotsky, who witnessed him in action, described him as "politically shaky, but personally courageous – impulsive and disorderly, but capable of initiative..."[3] John Reed recalled in his book Ten Days That Shook the World: "In a certain upstairs room sat a thin-faced, long-haired individual, once an officer in the armies of the Tsar, then revolutionist and exile, a certain Avseenko, called Antonov, mathematician and chess-player; he was drawing careful plans for the seizure of the capital."

It also provided the climax of the classic 1928 silent movie October, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, in which Antonov-Ovseenko took a starring role, playing himself.

[5] Antonov-Ovseenko reported to the deputies on the imprisonment of the ministers of the Provisional Government in the Peter and Paul Fortress at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which was taking place at that time on 26 October 1917.

Antonov-Ovseenko was sent to lead the Bolshevik side in the first, relatively bloodless engagement of the civil war at Gatchina, against Kerensky and a detachment of Cossacks led by Pyotr Krasnov, but had to be replaced after he virtually collapsed from nervous exhaustion.

At the end of April 1919, Antonov-Ovseenko made an attempt to reach an agreement with Nykyfor Hryhoriv, the self-declared Otaman of the insurgent forces of "the land of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Taurida".

Hryhoriv complained to Antonov-Ovseenko about the Bolsheviks's policy of war communism, which conscripted Ukrainian peasants into the Red Army and requisitioned food supplies.

[11][12] While Hryhoriv's forces captured a number of Ukrainian cities in May, they were eventually routed by the Red Army under the command of Kliment Voroshilov.

In 1922, Antonov-Ovseenko was given the highly sensitive post of head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army, despite his public opposition to Lenin's New Economic Policy, which he denounced in a speech to the April 1922 Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (CPSU) as a betrayal of the peasants.

In December, after one of his subordinates had been sacked for criticising the leadership of the Bolsheviks, he wrote an angry letter to the Central Committee exclaiming that "we are not courtiers to the throne of party hierarchs!

In this capacity, he participated in the first of the great Moscow show trials, in which Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were the main defendants, and signed an article in Izvestia calling for them to be shot.

During the intensification of Stalin's mandate to purge the Bolshevik party of alleged spies and Trotskyite counter-revolutionaries, Antonov-Ovseenko was recalled to Moscow.