Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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Oberiukhtin, Viktor Ivanovich (31 October 1887–after January 1950). Lieutenant (January 1917), colonel (20 April 1919), major general (12 September 1919). One of the few officers to obtain high positions both in the Red Army and with the Whites, V. I. Oberiukhtin was born in the factory town of Votkinsk, in Viatka guberniia (although some sources give his place of birth as Kazan′). He was the son of a worker in the local armory and was a graduate of the Kazan′ Officer School (1908) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War (from July 1914), he served on the staff of the 1st Rifle Corps in Belorussia. In January 1917, he was named chief of the operational staff of the Western Front.

Following the October Revolution, Oberiukhtin chose to serve the Soviet government; after a brief period as a prisoner of German forces in February–March 1918, following the Eleven-Days War, he joined the Red Army on 25 April 1918. He was subsequently captured by White forces at Kazan′ and switched sides, becoming a staff officer in Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army, rising to the posts of chief of staff of the Western Army and its successor, the 3rd Army (22 June–10 October 1919), and chief of staff of the Eastern Front (8 November 1919–4 January 1920). As the latter collapsed, Oberiukhtin attempted to again switch sides, at Krasnoiarsk in January 1920, but he was soon arrested by the Cheka and sentenced to a five-year prison term. On 5 November 1920, the Bolsheviks’ Sibrevkom decreed that he should be restored to the Red Army, and thereafter he occupied teaching posts at the Red Military Academy in Moscow. In 1937, he was arrested and sent to the Gulag as a counterrevolutionary; he is known to have been alive as late as January 1950, but his subsequent fate is unknown.

OBER OST. The Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten (“The Supreme Command of All German Forces in the East”), universally known as Ober Ost, was created in 1914 under General Paul von Hindenburg, and from 29 August 1916 was commanded by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. By early 1918, it controlled all of what had been Russian Poland and Lithuania, as well as much of Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, while its authority was dramatically extended across all of Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus, and even parts of Transcaucasia, as forces of the Austro-German intervention occupied those areas in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). As such, Ober Ost had a significant impact on the “Russian” Civil Wars.

Seeking to exploit the region under its command economically, Ober Ost’s requisitioning and taxation policies inflamed the populations of the occupied regions and inspired resistance to the Soviet government and the Brest-Litovsk settlement by Russians and non-Russians alike, notably in southeast Ukraine, where the nucleus of what was to become the Insurgent Revolutionary Army of Ukraine was formed to resist the Austro-German interventionists. Yet at the same time, and although Ober Ost refused to deal with them on anything like an equal footing (or even honestly), its presence (and the concomitant separation of much of the Baltic and Ukraine from Soviet Russia) allowed the germination of the nationalist forces that would flower in those regions once the Central Powers were obliged to withdraw, following the armistice of 11 November 1918.

oblastnichestvo. See Siberian regionalism.

OCTOBER REVOLUTION. In the October Revolution of 1917 (or what in Soviet Russia, from 1927, was officially termed “The Great October Socialist Revolution” and in the West is routinely referred to as “the Bolshevik Revolution”), the Bolsheviks and their allies (chiefly the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries and various proponents of anarchism) toppled the liberal-socialist Russian Provisional Government that had ruled Russia since the February Revolution of 1917. Over a period of a few days (roughly 24–27 October 1917), they established Soviet rule in Petrograd and its environs (in the shape of Sovnarkom, although, initially, the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was probably more influential) and laid the foundations of the Soviet state in the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, and other such pronouncements. The Bolshevik Party had been urged to seize power by V. I. Lenin, in a series of letters he sent to its Central Committee in September and in speeches he made at Central Committee meetings on 10 and 16 October 1917. However, the idea had been resisted by some (notably L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinov′ev), while other Bolsheviks exhibited caution or inertia.

The chief organizer of the seizure of power was L. D. Trotsky, operating through the machinery of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This body dispatched forces to seize key installations in the city (the Central Post Office and Telephone Exchange, the State Bank, the Peter and Paul Fortress, etc.) and to arrest government ministers gathered in the Winter Palace on 25 October 1917. (This last action was a rather anticlimactic affair that bore little relation to the heroic manner in which it was subsequently portrayed in films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s October, 1927.) It is also worth noting that in the end, the revolt had been triggered as a defensive measure against a perceived attack on the Bolsheviks by Prime Minister A. F. Kerensky; on 24 October 1917, he had ordered the rearrest of Bolshevik leaders who had earlier, in the aftermath of the July Days, been detained under suspicions of treason, and attempted also to close down Bolshevik newspapers in the Russian capital. This was widely believed to presage a broader governmental attack on the soviets (and specifically the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which was about to go into session)—an attack that, it was feared, might involve the surrender of Petrograd to the Germans in order to stifle the revolution. Over the next two to three months, the Soviet government spread its authority across almost all of the former Russian Empire, in what Lenin called “The Triumphal March of Soviet Power.” (In point of fact, Bolsheviks in Revel, led by Jaan Anvelt, had seized power on 23–24 October, a day before the events in Petrograd.)

The October Revolution is sometimes held to be the opening stage of the “Russian” Civil Wars, for although there was remarkably little bloodshed, there were pockets of resistance and serious fighting in some areas in late 1917: around Orenburg and Irkutsk, in Moscow, and around Kiev (in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War). Equally, in and around Petrograd itself the revolution was resisted by the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, the Junker revolt, and a general strike by civil servants. Finally, in the Bolsheviks’ sabotage of the Vikzhel talks, which were aimed at establishing an all-socialist government, one can discern (even before the closure of the Constituent Assembly) Lenin’s party closing itself off from other, more moderate socialists (chiefly the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Party of Popular Socialists, and the Mensheviks), who (with the exception of the Mensheviks) were to become the Soviet government’s military opponents in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918. On the other hand, both left- and right-wing forces in Russia had been girding themselves for armed conflict long before October; it can be argued that the Bolsheviks had attempted an armed insurrection during the July Days of 1917, while the Right and Right-leaning Kadets were certainly contemplating a military coup and the establishment of a military dictatorship during the Kornilov affair in the following month. Moreover, in the Red Guards, who defended Petrograd from the advancing forces of General L. G. Kornilov in August, can be discerned the germ of the Red Army, while many of the pro-Kornilov officers and cadets who joined the underground Alekseev Organization in September–October 1917, before the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, would form the nucleus of the White’s Volunteer Army.

As might be expected of one of the seminal and divisive events in modern times, the historiography of the October Revolution is contentious. For half a century after the events (and especially during the early Cold War), most Western historians portrayed it as a cynical and ruthless coup d’état, in which a monolithic Bolshevik dictatorship was imposed by force on either a reluctant or a cruelly deceived Russian people. That view was challenged by a new generation of “revisionist” historians in the West during the 1970s and 1980s, who (influenced by the New Left and the hopes for détente) were concerned to demonstrate that the Bolsheviks were a popular party, whose seizure of power reflected the aspirations of broad segments of the population (workers, peasants, and soldiers) who had become disillusioned with the prevarications of the Provisional Government regarding land reform, workers’ control of industry, and other issues, and who, above all, wanted an end to the war. This approach tended to partially reinforce a preexisting strain of libertarian writings on the revolution (by the likes of Voline), which portrayed it as a popular movement that was at first encouraged and then hijacked by the Bolshevik Party. Meanwhile, throughout the existence of the USSR, Soviet historians, bound by a strictly enforced historical orthodoxy that was designed to legitimize the Soviet state and its leadership, faced the not always reconcilable tasks of demonstrating that the October Revolution was a popular uprising—indeed, that it was an inevitable consequence of imperial Russia’s historical development, shaped by universal laws of history as formulated by Karl Marx and Lenin—while at the same time emphasizing the indispensability to its successful outcome of the far-sighted and fearless leadership of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Their task was further complicated by the need, from the mid-1920s onward, to downplay, distort, or simply ignore the role of Trotsky, who was demonized following the rise to power in the USSR of J. V. Stalin.

Odessa Soviet Republic. This short-lived polity was proclaimed at Odessa, on 18 January 1918, as the successor to Rumcherod. Like its predecessor, it claimed control of the Kherson and Bessarabia gubernii of the former Russian Empire. Partly in deference to its many Romanian members, who were suspicious of Ukraine’s designs on Bessarabia, its executive committee, led by V. G. Iurovskii, subordinated the republic directly to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic rather than to V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko’s Ukrainian People’s Republic at Khar′kov. It attempted to introduce measures for the Sovietization of the region (workers’ control of industry, the nationalization of large enterprises and banks, etc.), but was largely preoccupied with defending Odessa against local Whites, various Ukrainian formations, and the Romanian Army to the west. To that end, it created the 3rd Revolutionary Army, which came under the command of M. A. Murav′ev. On 9 March 1918, a delegation of the republic met with Romanian representatives at Jassy (Iaşi) and negotiated an agreement whereby Romanian forces would withdraw from Bessarabia within two months, but Bucharest reneged on that agreement.

The Soviet leadership fled from Odessa on 13 March 1918, as forces of the Austro-German intervention occupied the city in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), but continued to operate at Nikolaevsk, then Rostov-on-Don, and finally Eisk, until the institution was formally dissolved in May 1918.

odintsov, sergei ivanovich (2 July 1874–10? June 1920). Lieutenant colonel (22 July 1907), colonel (10 April 1911), major general (1 August 1916). One of the Red Army’s foremost military specialists of the civil-war era, S. I. Odintsov was the son of a noble and graduated from the Alekseev Cadet Corps, the Nicholas Cavalry School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1902). He saw action during the Russo–Japanese War and, from 19 August 1906 to 1 November 1911, served with the Main Directory of the General Staff. He was then head of the Aviation Officer School at Sevastopol′ (May 1911–8 November 1912). During the First World War, he commanded the Maritime Dragoon Regiment (from 24 July 1915), was chief of staff of the Amur Cavalry Division (from 24 October 1916), and commanded the 3rd Caucasus Cossack Division (from 16 April 1917). In the aftermath of the October Revolution, he volunteered for service with the Red Army and served as head of the chancellery of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs (December 1917–March 1918) and as inspector of cavalry in Ukraine. He was briefly arrested by the Cheka in March 1918, but was soon released, then joined the Soviet delegation to Kursk for negotiations with representatives of the Ukrainian National Republic. From April to June 1919, he was military commander (voenruk) of the Odessa Military District, and from July 1919 was inspector of cavalry of the Red Army. During October–November 1919, he served with distinction as commander of a group of forces of the 7th Red Army, during its defense of Petrograd against the advance of the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich, and was subsequently commander of the 7th Red Army (17 November 1919–10 February 1920) and commander of the Petrograd Revolutionary Labor Army (10 February–15 April 1920), before returning to the command of the reconstituted 7th Red Army (from 15 April 1920). On 9 June 1920, Odintsev left Petrograd for an assignment in Odessa and appears to have died en route.

ODISHELIDZE, ILIA (ODISHELIDZE, IL′IA ZURABOVICH) (25 March 1865–?). Colonel (6 December 1904), major general (16 July 1910), lieutenant general (11 October 1914). Georgian military leader of the civil- war era Ilia Odishelidze was a graduate of the Tiflis Cadet Corps, the Third Alexander Military School (1887), and the Academy of the General Staff (1894). He participated in the Russo–Japanese War and, from 9 November 1911 to 9 January 1914, was governor-general of Samarkand. Thereafter, he served as chief of staff of the Turkestan Military District. During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 10th Army (from 13 November 1914) and the 1st Army (from 23 December 1914), and as commander of the 15th Army Corps (from 16 January 1917) and the 3rd Army (from 12 September 1917), then on 2 October 1917 was named commander of the Caucasus Army.

As the imperial forces collapsed in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Odishelidze resigned his post and began to organize Georgian national forces. In March 1918, he was briefly made deputy minister of war of the Transcaucasian Commissariat, but the following month, at the insistence of the Armenian delegates, was dismissed for his overtly nationalist leanings (and reportedly pro-German sentiments). In the Democratic Republic of Georgia, he was a signatory of the Treaty of Batumi with Turkey on 4 June 1918 and held a number of prominent military posts, including second assistant minister of war and commander in chief of the Georgian Army from late 1920 until the collapse of the republic in February 1921.

Ohandjanian (“Mher”), Hamazasp (Hamo) (1873–1947). One of the key political figures in independent Armenia during the civil-war era, Hamazasp Ohandjanian was born at Akhalkalak, in southern Georgia, and attended the Russian Gymnasium at Tiflis and the medical faculties of Moscow and Lausanne Universities. He moved to Baku in 1902, to practice medicine, and joined the Dashnaks’ Eastern Bureau in 1905. He was arrested by the tsarist authorities and sent into exile at Novocherkassk in 1909, and in 1912 was the chief defendant in the trial of 159 leading Dashnaks. The following year, he was exiled again, this time to Siberia. He returned to Armenia in 1915 and served as a medical officer with Russian and Armenian units around Van.

During the rule of the Transcaucasian Commissariat, Ohandjanian was commissar for public health, and in November 1917, he was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly as a Dashnak representative. In June 1918, following the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Armenia, he was sent to Berlin as a quasi-ambassador, seeking (unsuccessfully) international recognition of the new state and to persuade Germany to temper its Turkish ally’s territorial ambitions in Transcaucasia. He subsequently served as an Armenian representative to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, before returning to Yerevan, where in January 1920 he was named minister of foreign affairs in the cabinet of Alexander Khatisyan. On 5 May 1920, during the suppression of an uprising by local Bolsheviks, he became prime minister. He retired from that office on 25 November 1920, as the 11th Red Army invaded Armenia.

Ohandjanian was subsequently arrested during the Sovietization of Armenia, but was sprung from prison during the Dashnaks’ February Uprising of 1921 and fled to Persia and thence to Egypt. Until his death (at Cairo) in 1947, Ohandjanian remained a leading member of the Dashnaks. During the Second World War, he was a stern critic of the collaborationist activities of General Dro (Drastamat Kanayan) and others.

Okulov, Aleksei Ivanovich (22 September 1880–10 January 1939). A leading Red military organizer of the civil-war period, A. I. Okulov was born at Minusinsk, Eniseisk guberniia, the son of a worker in a gold mine. Educated in the revolutionary tradition by his radical mother (Ekaterina Nikiforovna), he met a number of political exiles in his youth (including V. I. Lenin) and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903. In 1905, he led a revolutionary militia that arrested the mayor of Minusinsk and for a few days held power in the town. Prior to the First World War, he undertook party work in Kiev, Ekaterinburg, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and spent some years in exile in Paris, before returning illegally to Russia in 1913. There, he was immediately arrested. Released and sent to the army in 1916, he was quickly rearrested for political activity and exiled to Krasnoiarsk. Following the February Revolution, he was one of the organizers and later chairman of the executive committee of the Krasnoiarsk soviet, as well as being a member, then chairman, of the Bolsheviks’ Eniseisk gubkom.

Okulov was elected to VTsIK in November 1917, and from January to May 1918 sat on its presidium. He was released from that work upon the outbreak of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia to become chairman (May–June 1918), then (from July 1918) military commissar, of the Military-Operational Staff of Red forces in Western Siberia. In that capacity, he was one of the organizers of the unsuccessful defense of Omsk and Tiumen′ against the anti-Soviet forces of the Siberian Cossack Host and the Czechoslovak Legion. Having subsequently made his way back to European Russia, Okulov worked simultaneously on the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (October–December 1918) and that of the 10th Red Army. He was also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (3 January–8 July 1919) and sat on its military tribunal (February–17 May 1919), serving also as a member of the Revvoensovet of the Western Front (17 May–8 July 1919). He then rejoined the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front, working also as an inspector of Red forces in Ukraine, as extraordinary plenipotentiary of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense (8 July–August 1919). He then served as commandant of the Tula Fortified Region and of the 43rd Rifle Division (September 1919–February 1920), playing a leading role in turning the advance on Moscow of the Armed Forces of South Russia.

From February 1920, Okulov was regional military commissar of the East-Siberian Military District (and later commander of forces of that district) and from 1923 was occupied with a variety of party and administrative posts—lecturing at the University of the Toilers of the East (1923–1926) and working on the board of the gold-mining trust Glavzolota (1926–1927)—before retiring on the grounds of ill health. He became known too, in this period, as a talented writer of fiction and literary theory. He was expelled from the party in 1936, as a suspected Trotskyist, and in December 1937 was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labor. He died in the town of Svobodnyi, part of the Amurlag camp system.

OL′DEROGGE, VLADIMIR ALEKSANDROVICH (24 July 1873–20 May 1931). Major general (6 February 1915). One of the most prominent and successful military specialists of the Red Army, V. A. Ol′derogge was born at Lublin into a Baltic German family of noble background. He was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps (1889) and the Academy of the General Staff (1901), and served in the Finnish Life Guards Regiment and in the Kiev Military District before seeing action in the Russo–Japanese War, as chief of the transportation directorate of the Manchurian Army (from 31 October 1904). He remained thereafter in military engineering commands, from Sevastopol′ to Irkutsk. During the First World War, he was commander of the 113th Infantry Regiment (from 27 October 1914) and (from 12 March 1916) of a brigade of the Turkestan Rifle Division. From 7 July 1917, he was commander of the 1st Turkestan Rifle Brigade.

Ol′derogge volunteered for service in the Red Army in March 1918, and after commanding the Novorzhevsk Screen, from May 1918 to March 1919 was commander of the Novorzhevsk (later Pskov and then Lithuanian) Rifle Division on the Western Front. On 15 August 1919, he was named commander of the Eastern Front. He was initially castigated as a “scoundrel” by V. I. Lenin, but remained in that post until 15 January 1920, overseeing the defeat and pursuit eastward from the Urals of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. He was then named commander of the West Siberian Military District, before (from 25 October 1920) being assigned to the Southern Front, as assistant to M. V. Frunze during the Red Army’s invasion of Crimea and the expulsion of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army from the peninsula. He subsequently (from 18 January 1921) became inspector of infantry forces in Ukraine and Crimea, and from 1 June 1921 served as chief inspector of military-educational establishments of the Kiev Military District. He thereafter held a number of senior educational-administrative positions in Ukraine.

Ol′derogge was arrested on 7 December 1930, as one of the targets of Operation “Spring,” and on 20 May 1931 was charged by the Military Collegium of the OGPU with leading a “counterrevolutionary officers’ organization” in Ukraine. He was executed at Khar′kov that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated by the Military Tribunal of Kiev Military District on 30 April 1974.

OLONETS GOVERNMENT. This anti-Bolshevik regime was established by White Finnish forces in southern Karelia on 13 May 1919, following their incursion into the region the previous month (part of the Kinship Wars). The government was led by the powerful local merchant German Kuttaev and had as its aim the unification of southern Karelia (i.e., the former Olonets guberniia of the Russian Empire) with Finland, the government of which subsidized the Olonets regime and its associated Olonets Volunteer Army. In July 1919, a Finnish representative joined the government. When forces of the 6th Red Army repulsed the Olonets Volunteer Army’s offensive against Petropavlovsk and advanced into the Olonets region in August 1919, the government transferred its operations to Finland, where it continued, formally, to exist until 10 October 1920, when its members merged with the Provisional Government of White Sea Karelia to form the Karelian United Government.

OLONETS VOLUNTEER ARMY. Formed in early April 1919 from anti-Bolshevik volunteers (chiefly former officers of the Imperial Russian Army), this White force soon came to number some 3,000 men. Commanded by General V. S. Skobel′tsyn, it cleared Red forces from much of southern Karelia during April 1919, capturing Vidlitsa (21 April 1919), Tuloksa (23 April 1919), and Veshklitsa (24 April 1919), and by the end of that month was approaching Petropavlovsk, but was driven back by the 6th Red Army. In October 1919, it was combined with the Forces of the Murmansk Region (formerly the Murmansk Volunteer Army) and remained in the field until February 1920, when most of its men fled across the border into Finland.

OMEL′IANOVYCH-PAVLENKO, IVAN VLADIMIROVICH (31 August 1881–7/8 September 1962). Colonel (July 1917). The Ukrainian military commander I. V. Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko (the younger brother of M. V. Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko) was born at Baku into the family of a lieutenant general of the Russian Army. He was a graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps, the Constantine Artillery School (1901), and the Cavalry Officers School (1911) and served in the Russo–Japanese War with the 43rd Artillery Brigade. During the First World War, he rose to the command of the 11th Horse-Artillery Battery (from November 1916), the 1st Horse-Artillery Battery (from May 1917), and the 1st Horse-Artillery Division (from August 1917).

Following the “Ukrainization” of some units of the Russian Army in the wake of the February Revolution, Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko commanded the 8th Lubensk Hussar Regiment (from September 1917) and in February 1918, led that unit’s withdrawal from the Romanian Front to help defend Kiev from Bolshevik attacks during the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. His force then joined the Hetmanite Army, as the Lubensk-Serdiutsk Cavalry-Cossack Regiment. Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko commanded that unit until 8 October 1918, when he was made Koshevyi ataman (“Camp Commander”) of the Ukrainian Cossacks and (from 5 November 1918) a member of the General Rada of the Ukrainian Cossacks. From 24 February 1919, he worked in the war ministry of the Ukrainian National Republic, then returned to the front as commander of the 1st Western Cavalry Brigade of the Ukrainian Army in March 1919. From May 1919, he was inspector of cavalry of the Ukrainian Army.

Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko fell ill with typhus in November 1919 and remained at Proskurov when it was captured by the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). Having traveled via Odessa to the Kuban, he joined the Whites as commander of the 3rd Line Cossack Regiment of the Kuban Army. As the AFSR collapsed, in April 1920 he led that unit into the Democratic Republic of Georgia, before traveling across the Black Sea to Sevastopol′. He subsequently headed the Ukrainian delegation that negotiated with General P. N. Wrangel regarding possible joint Ukrainian–White operations against the Red Army. He then journeyed, via Romania, to Poland, where he rejoined the Ukrainian Army in exile as commander of the Independent Cavalry Division and inspector of cavalry (from 30 June 1920). From 1923, he lived in Prague.

During the Second World War, Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko was a collaborator with the Nazis, working initially with a Ukrainian intelligence unit attached to the Wehrmacht. After the war, he emigrated to the United States. He died in Chicago in 1962 and is buried in the Bound Brook cemetery in Somerset, New Jersey.

OMEL′IANOVYCH-PAVLENKO, MYKHAILO VOLODIMIROVICH (8 December 1878–29 May 1952). Lieutenant general (Ukrainian Army, 1946). The Ukrainian military commander Mykhailo Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko (the elder brother of I. V. Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko) was born at Tiflis, the son of an officer in the Russian Army and a Georgian princess, and was a graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps (1896), the Pavlovsk Military School (1900), and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). In 1901, he joined the Volynsk Life Guards Regiment and subsequently commanded a company during the Russo–Japanese War. During the First World War, he commanded a regiment, was chief of staff to an army corps, and then became head of the Odessa Officer Training School. In 1917, as an advocate of Ukrainian independence, he commanded a Ukrainian brigade at Ekaterinoslav and helped found Ukrainian military academies at Zhitomir and Kamenets-Podol′skii. This brought him to the attention of the Ukrainian Central Rada, which named him as inspector of Ukrainian forces on the Romanian Front, enabling him to pursue his Ukrainization policies with even greater vigor and effectiveness.

During the Soviet–Ukrainian War, Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko commanded the 3rd Ukrainian Rifle Division at Poltava (1918), the Zaporozhian Kish, and then the Ukrainian Galician Army (10 December 1918–7 June 1919). He then returned to the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) to take command of first the Zaporozhian Corps (7 June–December 1919) and then the entire Ukrainian Army (December 1919–November 1920), overseeing the first of its Winter Campaigns. Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko then went into emigration, initially serving as war minister in the government-in-exile (in Poland) of the UNR (10 February–11 June 1921) before, having clashed with Symon Petliura, resigning all his posts and settling in Prague, where he headed the Union of Ukrainian Veterans’ Associations. During the Second World War, he offered support to collaborators with the Nazis and encouraged the formation of the 14th Waffen (1st Ukrainian) Grenadier Division of the SS Galizien (the SS Division Galicia). He later served as minister of defense in the Ukrainian government-in-exile in Germany (1945–1948). Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko was the author of numerous memoirs and histories of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. He died in Paris, where he had resettled in 1950.

OMSK DIPLOMATIC CONFERENCE. This gathering of senior Allied diplomatic and military representatives in Siberia opened on 26 July 1919 and closed on 20 August 1919. First mooted in mid-June 1919, it was intended as a forum to determine how the Allies could “further assist” the Omsk government and Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, in accordance with the Big Four’s note to him of 12 June 1919 from the Paris Peace Conference. At a key session of 29 July 1919, Kolchak’s foreign minister, I. I. Sukin, presented a “wish list,” which the assembled delegates calculated would require expenditure on the Allies’ part of $420 million to buy guns, ammunition, etc. for the White forces, plus the dispatch of 40,000 troops to replace the Czechoslovak Legion as guardians of the Trans-Siberian Railway, so as to ensure that supplies could be transported into Siberia from the Pacific coast. Having agreed that all this was vital for Kolchak’s survival, however, the Allied representatives could not agree on whether they could recommend that their governments make such a commitment. The U.S. ambassador to Japan, R. S. Morris, was cautiously favorable, but the two most long-serving Allied military personnel in Siberia, Generals Alfred Knox and Maurice Janin, were firmly against it; neither believed that Kolchak was capable of inspiring a new offensive and were stunned by the tactical errors his forces had made in losing Cheliabinsk even as the conference was proceeding.

In the event, the debate proved pointless, as on 24 July 1919 the British War Cabinet had decided to withdraw all its forces from North Russia and Siberia and to concentrate on supporting only the White forces of General A. I. Denikin in South Russia. Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak government in Prague determined to withdraw the legion in September 1919, even though no arrangements had been made by the Allies to replace it.

OMSK GOVERNMENT. This is the term usually used to denote the White Provisional All-Russian Government of “Supreme Ruler” Admiral A. V. Kolchak that was established in the aftermath of the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918 and the toppling of the Ufa Directory. It was initially led by P. V. Vologodskii, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, and was largely composed of right-wing, rather provincial Kadets and conservative proponents of Siberian regionalism—although in truth, it was the Siberian military that governed “Kolchakia,” and it was the small Council of the Supreme Ruler that advised Kolchak on policy throughout much of his term of office. The government has often been characterized as one overloaded with ministers who were either ambitious but incompetent (notably, I. A. Mikhailov, V. I. Lebedev, and I. I. Sukin) or time-serving and corrupt (N. S. Zefirov), all unrestrained by an aged and ill premier.

Following the collapse of Kolchak’s forces in the autumn of 1919, the government was transferred to Irkutsk (10 November 1919) and reorganized under a new prime minister, V. N. Pepeliaev, to include figures with a more all-national reputation (e.g., S. N. Tret′iakov and A. A. Cherven-Vodali). With Kolchak’s resignation from office (4 January 1920) and the seizure of Irkutsk by forces of the Political Center, many of the ministers of the Omsk government emigrated to Harbin, although some fell into the hands of the Soviet government and were tried alongside a number of more junior figures from the regime (23 in all) at Omsk in May 1920.

Omsk Government, Ministry of war of the. This organization was founded as the war ministry of the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk on 1 July 1918, and from September 1918 served as the war ministry of the All-Russian Provisional Government (the Ufa Directory), before its appropriation by the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak on 18 November 1918. Based on the institutions of the former (tsarist) West Siberian Military District, it consisted of the following main directorates: artillery, engineering, quartermaster, military-sanitation, military-veterinary, legal-financial (from 26 November 1918), military communications (from 6 January 1919), and Cossack forces. There were also directorates of military justice, military education, and military remount. From 30 November 1918 to 24 May 1919, the war ministry at Omsk also incorporated Kolchak’s main staff (the Staff of the Supreme Ruler). In early November 1919, the establishment was evacuated from Omsk to Irkutsk, where it continued to operate until the collapse of the Kolchak regime in January 1920.

Directors and ministers of war were Colonel A. N. Grishin-Almazov (1 July–5 September 1918), Major General P. P. Ivanov-Rinov (5 September–2 November 1918), Vice Admiral A. V. Kolchak (4–18 November 1918), Major General V. I. Surin (acting, 21 November–5 January 1919), Major General N. A. Stepanov (3 January–23 May 1919), Major General D. A. Lebedev (23 May–12 August 1919), Lieutenant General M. K. Diterikhs (12 August–6 October 1919), and Lieutenant General M. V. Khanzhin (from 6 October 1919).

OMSK MASSACRE. On 30 November 1918, allegedly in response to protests against the Omsk coup from the residual body of Komuch at Ufa (the Council of Heads of Department), Supreme Ruler Admiral A. V. Kolchak issued his Order No. 56, urging “all Russian military leaders to curtail the criminal work of these people by the most decisive means.” Subsequently, on 2 December 1918, 27 leading members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries were arrested at Ufa, while the veteran SR and cooperative leader Nils Fomin and his assistant, M. V. Lokt′ev, were arrested at Cheliabinsk. All those arrested were imprisoned at Omsk, pending trial. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks’ obkom at Omsk had planned an uprising in the workers’ district of that city for 22 December 1918. Their plans, however, were betrayed, and during the night of 21–22 December, 88 party members were arrested. Of them, 33 were executed on the spot by Kolchak’s militia. When the uprising nevertheless went ahead, it was leaderless and easily quashed. Estimates of the number of rebels killed on 22 December by units commanded by P. P. Ivanov-Rinov range from an official figure of 247 to John Ward’s probably exaggerated 1,500–2,500. Subsequently, according to official figures, a further 166 rebels were executed and 37 sentenced to hard labor following courts martial.

The rebels had succeeded, however, in freeing 134 political prisoners from the Omsk prison, including the SRs arrested at Ufa and Cheliabinsk. When the commander of the Omsk garrison, General V. V. Brzhezovskii, ordered the escapees to return, promising them safety if they did so, most did. That night (22–23 December 1918), batches of the returnees, numbering a dozen or more (and including several elected members of the Constituent Assembly), were removed from the prison by officers of the Siberian Cossack Host, who later claimed to be acting on the orders of Brzhezovskii. They were either shot or hacked to pieces with sabers on the banks of the Irtysh River. Fomin’s wife could only identify his body from the monogram she had stitched onto his shirt. A subsequent investigation by the Omsk government failed to identify the perpetrators of this massacre.

ONEGA MILITARY FLOTILLA. This unit of the Red Fleet was created on 4 May 1918 on Lakes Onega and Ladoga from vessels and sailors transferred from the Baltic Fleet and was subsequently subordinated to the 7th Red Army on the Northern Front in its battles against the Whites’ Northern Army and forces of the Allied intervention in Northern Russia. Included in it, in May 1919, were 8 gunboats, 3 minesweepers, 12 patrol boats and other vessels, and a squadron of 4 seaplanes. The flotilla was disbanded on 10 March 1920. Its commanders were D. I. Fedotov (June–November 1918) and E. S. Pantserzhanskii (November 1918–March 1920).

OPERATION “SPRING.” This purge of the Red Army by the organs of the OGPU in 1930–1931 focused on the military specialists of the civil-war era and decided the fate of many of them. In total, more than 3,000 former voenspety were arrested, and many were executed. Among those arrested and imprisoned for various lengths of time were Generals S. D. Kharlamov, M. S. Matiiasevich, D. N. Nadezhnyi, A. V. Novikov, F. F. Novitskii, S. A. Pugachev, N. I. Rattel′, A. E. Snesarev, and A. A. Svechin (most of whom, even if they survived imprisonment, were soon thereafter rearrested and executed during the Terror). Among those immediately executed were Generals V. I. Motornyi and V. A. Ol′derogge. This purge was one of a series of contemporaneous measures instigated by J. V. Stalin and his supporters to promote the proletarization of Soviet society and to reduce the influence of “former people” (i.e., members of the ruling class of tsarist times).

OPERATION “TRUST.” This counterintelligence “pseudo-operation,” propagated from 1921 to 1926 by the Cheka (and its successor, the OGPU), involved the establishment of a fake anti-Bolshevik underground network, the Monarchist Union of Central Russia (headed by A. A. Iakushev) to facilitate the unveiling of real anti-Bolsheviks within Soviet Russia and to weaken the potential of a revival of hostilities from the Whites in emigration. The operation was masterminded by A. A. Artuzov (Frauchi), head of the OGPU’s counterintelligence section. Its successes included persuading much of the leadership of ROVS that a powerful anti-Bolshevik organization was being built within Russia (and that, therefore, there was no need to launch guerrilla attacks from abroad) and apparently, enticing both B. V. Savinkov and Sydney Reilly to return to Russia, where they were quickly arrested (although doubts have been cast on the operation’s real influence over these and similar returnee cases). The “Trust” also made use of existing monarchist and right-wing organizations within Soviet Russia, including “sleepers” left behind by the White forces, often choosing to penetrate, co-opt, expand, and even finance their operations rather than liquidating them. An interesting fictional treatment of the subject, Operatsiia “Trest” (dir. S. N. Kolosov, 1967), was screened in the Soviet Union.

ORAKHELASHVILI, MAMIA (IVAN DMITRIEVICH (29 May 1881–11 December 1937). The Georgian revolutionary Mamia Orakhelashvili was born into a petit noble family at Shoropansk uezd, Kutaisi guberniia, and studied at the Medical Faculty of the University of Khar′kov before transferring to the St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy (from which he graduated in 1908). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903, gravitated toward the Bolsheviks, and was active in party work in St. Petersburg. He was arrested and exiled on several occasions, and from 1908 worked as a doctor in Transcaspia. He was then mobilized, on the outbreak of war in 1914, and served as a doctor with the Russian Army. In 1917, he was elected chairman of the Vladikavkaz Soviet and from October of that year was a member of the Bolsheviks’ Caucasus Committee.

Orakhelashvili was arrested by the authorities of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in November 1918 and imprisoned until May 1920, when he was released under the terms of the Soviet–Georgian Treaty of Moscow (7 May 1920). Following his release, Orakhelashvili chaired the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party and was one of the main organizers of the overthrow of the Georgian republic in February 1921. From February 1921, he chaired the Georgian Revolutionary Committee and from March of that year chaired the Georgian Sovnarkom. From 1922 to 1927, he chaired the Sovnarkom of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and from July 1923 to May 1925 was deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom of the USSR.

Orakhelashvili thereafter remained in senior governmental and party positions in Georgia, but in the 1930s fell foul of the leadership in Moscow for authoring a number of historical works that portrayed prerevolutionary Bolshevik activity in the region in a manner that did not correspond with the line laid down by J. V. Stalin. He was arrested in April 1937 and, after a brief exile in Astrakhan, was returned to Tblisi, where he was either shot or died under torture (accounts differ). Most of his family were also purged and executed. Orakhelashvili was posthumously rehabilitated on 1 July 1955. His daughter, Ketevan (who survived in the Gulag until 1955, when she was released), was portrayed in the feature film Pokaianie (“Repentance,” dir. Tengiz Abuladze, 1984), which was to become one of the cultural peaks of glasnost′ in late Soviet Russia.

ORDER OF THE RED BANNER. See Military decorations (RED).

ORDZHONIKIDZE, GRIGORII (SERGO) KONSTANTINOVICH (12 October 1886–18 February 1937). Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the energetic Bolshevik leader who played an important role in bringing Soviet power to Ukraine and Transcaucasia during the civil wars, was born at Goresha, in Kutaisi guberniia (western Georgia), the son of an impoverished nobleman. He trained to be a Feldscher at the Mikhailov hospital in Tiflis and there became involved in the revolutionary movement, joining the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903. After graduating (1905), he undertook party work across Transcaucasia, often in association with J. V. Stalin (whom he met in a Baku prison). He was exiled from 1907 to 1909 and then undertook revolutionary work in Persia, gaining some experience of guerrilla warfare. In 1911, he attended V. I. Lenin’s party school at Longjumeau, near Paris, and in 1912 was elected to the Bolsheviks’ Russian Bureau. From 1912 to 1915, he was again imprisoned in Russia and in 1915 was then exiled to Siberia. Having been freed by the amnesty proclaimed by the Russian Provisional Government, he returned to Petrograd in May 1917 and became a member of both the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee and the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

After participating in the October Revolution, Ordzhonikidze was made Sovnarkom’s provisional extraordinary commissar for Ukraine (December 1917) and then for the entire Southern Region, including the Caucasus (April 1918). He then played a prominent role in the struggle against the White forces of General A. I. Denikin, as chairman the Council of Defense of the North Caucasus (December 1918–June 1919), a member of the Revvoensovet of the 16th Red Army (July–September 1919) and of the 14th Red Army (October 1919–January 1920), chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (October 1919–January 1920), and a member of the Revvoensovet of the Caucasian Front (February 1920–May 1921). On 8 April 1920, he was made chairman of the Bolsheviks’ Caucasian Bureau, directing political and military forces in the invasion and Sovietization of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as offering advice to the leaders of the Soviet Republic of Gīlān. Working in close association with People’s Commissar for Nationalities Stalin, Ordzhonikidze imposed Russian-style practices across the region and planned to establish a single Transcaucasian federation, against Lenin’s wishes, earning him criticism from the Bolshevik leader during the “Georgian affair” in 1922.

Ordzhonikidze was a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1921 and first secretary of its Transcaucasian Regional Bureau from 1922 to 1926. From 1926, he headed the party’s Central Control Commission and in December 1930 joined the Politbiuro. At the peak of his power, he then became deputy chairman of VSNKh (1930) and people’s commissar for heavy industry (1932), as well as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom.

Throughout the leadership struggles of the 1920s, Ordzhonikidze had supported Stalin, but he began to urge moderation in purging and advocated a more cautious approach in the industrialization program in the mid-1930s. He died in early 1937, officially of a heart attack. It is now held to be virtually certain, however, that he died from a single gunshot wound; either he committed suicide or, more likely, he was forced to shoot himself by Stalin’s henchmen in the NKVD. He is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Numerous locations in the Soviet Union were subsequently renamed in Ordzhonikidze’s honor (including, from 1931 to 1944 and from 1954 to 1990, the city of Vladikavkaz).

Orenburg Army. This White force was created on 17 October 1918, from a variety of detachments of the Orenburg Cossack Host that had been engaged in fighting against the Bolsheviks since the Dutov Uprising of November 1917. It initially formed part of the forces of the Ufa Directory and was at first known as the South-West Army, before being renamed the Independent Orenburg Army on 28 December 1918, after its incorporation into the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak.

As of 1 January 1919, the army consisted of the 1st Orenburg Cossack Corps (commanded by Major General G. P. Zhukov from 8 October 1918, and by Major General I. G. Akulinin from 17 July to September 1919), the 2nd Orenburg Cossack Corps (commanded by Major General V. N. Shishkin from 16 February 1919, and by Major General I. G. Akulinin from 7 March to 24 May 1919), the 4th Orenburg Army Corps (commanded by Major General V. N. Shishkin from 5 December 1918, and by Major General A. S. Bakich from 19 February 1919 to May 1920), and the 5th (Composite) Sterlitamak Army Corps (commanded by Major General V. I. Pechenkin from 2 April 1919, Major General Tsereteli from 10 May 1919, and Major General A. V. Ellerts-Usov from 23 July 1919). The Bashkir Corps (commanded by A. Z. Validov) was also attached to the Orenburg Army until 15 February 1919, when it switched allegiances and joined the Red Army.

On 28 November 1918, Dutov’s forces captured the city of Orenburg and by 1 January 1919 had also taken Verkhneural′sk and were approaching Troitsk. Now some 7,000 strong, the army engaged in action against the southern group of Red forces on the Eastern Front, in the region of Buzuluk–Iletsk–Orsk. However, on 29 January 1919, the Orenburg Army suffered a significant defeat near Kargala, and two days later withdrew from Orenburg in the face of a Red Army advance and a workers’ uprising in the city. It continued its offensive operations in the southern sector of the spring offensive of Kolchak’s forces, but with little success, and on 23 May 1919, the force (by then some 10,000 strong) was reformed into the Southern Army under the command of General G. A. Belov.

The Orenburg Army was commanded throughout its existence by General A. I. Dutov.

ORENBURG COSSACK HOST. Occupying lands in the southern part of Orenburg guberniia and dwelling in 61 stanitsy, 553 farmsteads (khutora), and over 500 smaller settlements, the Orenburg Cossack Host controlled territory that was divided into three administrative divisions (Orenburg, Verkhneural′sk, and Troitsk) and had its capital at Orenburg. By 1917, the Host population was 533,000, of which 30,000 were under arms. The Host was one of the first to refuse to recognize the Soviet government (by order of its Host Ataman, General A. I. Dutov, on 26 October 1917) and provided the manpower of the subsequent Dutov Uprising.

When Soviet forces captured Orenburg from the rebels on 18 January 1918, Dutov and the Host government moved to Verkhneural′sk, accompanied by a partisan unit of some 300 Cossacks, most of them officers. By late March 1918, the rising had spread across most of the Host territory, and on 4 April 1918, Orenburg was briefly recaptured from the Reds, but could not be held. When Cossack forces again drove the Reds from Orenburg on 17 June 1918, Dutov began the creation there of what would become the Orenburg Army, which was mostly composed of Orenburg Cossacks and whose fate the Cossacks then shared. In total, the Orenburg Cossacks contributed 36 mounted regiments, 3 foot regiments, and 9 batteries to the White cause in the civil wars, most of them serving in the Orenburg Army and later the Southern Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak.

When Red forces overran the Host territory in the summer of 1919, the Cossack forces found themselves divided. Some retreated southeast into the territory of the Semirech′e Army and later crossed with it into Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang), where Dutov was killed. Other elements of the Host endured the Great Siberian (Ice) March east through Siberia to Transbaikalia and the Maritime Province, where an Orenburg Cossack Brigade formed part of the Far Eastern (White) Army from 1920 to 1922. In emigration, many Orenburg Cossacks settled in China, with some of them later moving on to Australia to become farmers around Brisbane.

Atamans of the Orenburg Cossack Host were General A. I. Dutov (5 September 1917–March 1921); Major General N. S. Anisimov (acting, March 1921–16 February 1923); and Major General I. G. Akulinin (from 16 February 1923).

ORPHANS. Homeless and orphaned children (besprizornye [deti], or bezprizorniki) became a serious problem in Soviet Russia during and after the civil wars. One estimate has it that there were 4,500,000 of them in 1921; another that, following the great famine, there were 7,000,000 of them in 1922. Efforts were made to ameliorate the problem, through the creation of the State Council for the Defense of Children (headed by A. V. Lunacharskii) in 1919 and the Commission for Improving the Life of Children (headed by Feliks Dzierżyński) on 27 January 1921. As late as 1926, however, Sovnarkom was still issuing decrees “On Measures for the Struggle with Child Homelessness,” and gangs of feral, criminalized children were causing serious disorder in Soviet cities. Only on 31 May 1935 was a Sovnarkom decree issued that claimed the “elimination” of the problem, but even that was a fiction.

OSET′SKII, OLEKSANDR VIKTOROVICH (24 July 1873–26 February 1937). Major general (27 March 1917). The Ukrainian commander Oleksandr Oset′skii was born into a noble family at Kremenets, Volyn guberniia, and was a graduate of the Pavlovsk Military School (1894), the Academy of the General Staff (1900), the St. Petersburg Archeological Institute (1903), and the Officers’ Rifle School (1912). He served in the Russian Army as a junior adjutant on the staff of the 15th Infantry Division (from 1900), a junior officer with the 6th Finland Rifle Regiment (March–May 1902), and an adjutant at the Officer Rifle School (from May 1902). In 1904, he joined the St. Petersburg Life Guard Regiment, from 1907 commanded the Preobrazhenskii Life Guards, and from 1912 taught at the Officers’ Rifle School. He saw action, and was twice wounded, in the First World War and rose to the command of a brigade of the 2nd Grenadier Division of the Grenadier Corps (from May 1917), then the 2nd Sich Zaporozhian Corps (from September 1917). In the latter capacity, he was involved in 1917 in the “Ukrainization” of units of the Russian Army.

In late 1917, as the Russian Army disintegrated, Oset′skii offered his services to the Ukrainian Central Rada and became chief of the Ukrainian General Staff (from 12 February 1918) during the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. Subsequently, in the Hetmanite Army, he led Ukrainian forces (the 6th Corps) in the Poltava region (April–June 1918), but Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii did not trust him, and he was transferred to the command of the Railway Guard Corps, which was in the process of formation. When the Ukrainian National Republic Directory toppled Skoropadskii in November–December 1919, Osts′skii aligned himself with the insurgency and, as practical commander in chief of the rebel forces, secured the success of the coup. From 15 November 1918, he was acting otaman of the Ukrainian Army and simultaneously chief of the general staff of the directory. He was also, briefly (from 22 January 1919), deputy minister of defense of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). In the Ukrainian–Polish War, he commanded forces in the Kholm region (7 April–26 July 1919), again as acting otaman. He then switched to diplomatic duties as head of the Ukrainian mission to Italy (from July 1919), although due to lack of funds that mission never left the UNR headquarters at Kamenets-Podol′skii.

On 26 April 1920, in the wake of the Polish–Ukrainian Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), Osets′skii was named by Simon Petliura as head of the Ukrainian mission in Poland. Later in 1920, he headed a UNR mission to Belgium. When the Soviet–Polish War failed to result in the liberation of Ukraine, Osets′kii remained in emigration, settling in France in 1923. He died and is buried in Paris.

OSINSKII (OBELENSKII), NIKOLAI (VALERIAN VALERIANOVICH) (25 March 1887–1 September 1937). Nikolai Osinskii, a key member of the early Soviet administration, was born into the family of a factory manager at L′govsk in Kursk guberniia and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1916). He was active in the revolutionary movement from 1905, joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1907, and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. He was exiled on two occasions before the First World War and in 1916 was mobilized into the Russian Army.

In 1917, Osinskii was engaged in party work in Moscow and Khar′kov and, following the October Revolution, was made head of the State Bank (November–December 1917). He was also the first chairman of VSNKh (5 December 1917–28 March 1918) and was prominent among the Left Bolsheviks in his opposition to signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He resigned his posts when the treaty was signed and thereafter worked in regional administration in Tula and Penza.

Osinskii later served as deputy people’s commissar for agriculture (2 March 1921–9 January 1922) and deputy chairman of VSNKh (1923), before being assigned to diplomatic postings in Sweden (4 June 1923–7 October 1924) and the United States (1924–1925). During the power struggles of the 1920s, he was a supporter of L. D. Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but recanted and worked in a variety of economic management posts in the Soviet government. On 29 March 1932, he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was arrested on 13 October 1937, appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the third of the Moscow show trials in 1938 (“The Trial of the 21”), and on 1 September 1938 was found guilty of espionage by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and sentenced to death. Osinskii was shot that same day, in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957.

OSIPOV, KONSTANTIN PAVLOVICH (1896–?). Ensign (1916). K. P. Osipov, the leader of a damaging rebellion against Soviet power in Central Asia, was born at Krasnoiarsk and educated at a local school before being mobilized into the army. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1913. During the First World War, he spent two years in a reserve regiment before being posted to Tashkent. There, in October 1917, he was elected to the local soviet. In 1918, he participated in Red Guards units that were fighting with the Kokand Autonomy and was subsequently named people’s commissar for war of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In January 1919, he organized and led an uprising (the Osipov Rebellion) that was aimed at the overthrow of Soviet power in the region. When that rising failed, he and his accomplices fled into the mountains, eventually arriving in Bukhara, where they joined the forces of the emir (Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan). Some reports state that Osipov was sighted in Afghanistan thereafter, but his subsequent fate is not convincingly documented.

OSIPOV (TASHKENT) REBELLION. This anti-Soviet uprising was launched on 19 January 1919, at Tashkent, by K. P. Osipov and other members of the Turkestan Military Organization, with the support of a sizable portion of the local garrison (2,000 men, by some counts, of that 5,000-strong force) and Allied agents in the region, such as Colonel F. M. Bailey. In the preceding months, relations within the government and between it and the Tashkent populace had become strained, due to food shortages, the brutal imposition of Red Terror against perceived enemies, and the perception that Russian Bolsheviks in the regime were too eager to kowtow to Moscow. By 20 January 1919, the rebels had control of most of the city and had captured and executed a number of Bolshevik members of the government of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (the so-called Fourteen Turkestan Commissars), but failed to gain control of several key strategic points (notably the railway station) or any of the local arsenals, allowing Red forces to regroup and drive them from Tashkent on 21 January 1919 (although not before they had robbed the State Bank). The rebels subsequently joined the Basmachi fighters loyal to the emir of Bukhara, Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan.

Oskilko, Volodymyr Panteleimonovich (1892–26 May 1926). Lieutenant colonel (1916), ensign general (Ukrainian Army, January 1919). The Ukrainian nationalist leader Volodymyr Oskilko was born near Rovno, in Volyn guberniia, and was a schoolteacher by profession. Having served in the Russian Army in the First World War and acted as a provincial commissar at Tula for the Russian Provisional Government following the February Revolution, he returned to Ukraine and was active in creating Ukrainian military units to defend the Ukrainian Central Rada in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War.

In November–December 1918, Oskilko emerged as one of the leading organizers of the overthrow of the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and was subsequently appointed commander of the Northern Group of forces of the Ukrainian Army of the reestablished Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). On 29 April 1919, he made an unsuccessful attempt at a coup against the UNR at Rovno (Rivne), demanding the resignation of S. V. Petliura and other “traitor generals” from the Ukrainian Army and the summoning of a Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. When this led to nothing (despite support from the Ukrainian Party of Independents-Socialists), Oskilko fled into Poland. He subsequently returned to Rovno, where he edited the semiweekly journal Dzvin (“The Bell”), which had a pro-Polish line. He was assassinated at Rovno in 1926 (according to Polish investigators, by Soviet agents).

OSTAPENKO, SERHIY (November 1881–1937). The Ukrainian economist and statesman Serhiy Ostapenko was born into a peasant family at Trovaniv, near Zhitomir. After graduating from an agricultural school at Bilokrynytsa, he worked as a teacher from 1904, but in 1905 was arrested for his activities with the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and was imprisoned for three years. He subsequently resumed his studies, graduating from the Kiev Commercial Institute (1913), where he was working as a lecturer when the February Revolution occurred. He subsequently served the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) as an expert economic advisor to its diplomatic mission, which negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918), and occupied a similar post in the mission of the Ukrainian State at Kiev, which negotiated with the delegation from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (23 May–7 October 1918).

Following the overthrow of the Hetmanate by forces controlled by the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, Ostapenko joined the cabinet of Volodymyr Chekhivsky as minister of trade and industry of the UNR, and on 13 February 1919, when the Ukrainian government was forced to relocate to Vinnytsa, became chairman (prime minister) of a reconstructed Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic. In that capacity, he sought Allied recognition of the UNR; having failed to achieve it, he resigned his post as premier on 9 April 1919. He subsequently returned to academic work as a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and Statistics of Kamenets-Podilskii State University. With the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Ostapenko was imprisoned in 1921. His subsequent fate is unknown.

OSVAG. This was the acronym by which, from September 1918, the Information-Agitation Agency (Osvedomitel′noe-agitatsionnoe agentsvo) of the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin was known. It undertook propaganda work (much of it blatantly anti-Semitic) in areas occupied by White forces in South Russia and at the same time fulfilled the functions of a counterintelligence service, attempting to mold and control the political sympathies of the population. (In some respects, it was a competitor of Azbuka.) Its sections and departments at town and city level numbered 232 by August 1919 (including major branches at Rostov-on-Don, Novocherkassk, Odessa, and Khar′kov) and published pamphlets, posters, and newspapers, such as Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), Svobodnaia rech′ (“Free Speech”), Zhizn′ (“Life”), and Narodnaia gazeta (“The People’s Gazette”). Osvag also published fake “Bolshevik” newspapers to blacken the reputation of the Soviet government and organized public meetings to spread word of the “White cause” (Beloe delo). Efforts were made also to establish foreign sections in the major Allied capitals. In February 1919, Osvag was formally reorganized into the Department for Propaganda of the Special Council, but the latter and its local agencies were still routinely called “Osvag” by the White regime, the population, and the Soviet government. Both Osvag and its successor tended to be dominated by Kadets, among them its successive leaders S. S. Chakhotin (from October 1918), N. E. Paramonov (from January 1919), and K. N. Sokolov (from March 1919), although the éminence grise behind much of its work was the notorious right-wing anti-Semite V. V. Shul′gin.

According to Soviet figures, Osvag had a staff of 10,000 at its peak, but that is probably an exaggeration. In theory, each Osvag branch had an information section, an agitation section, an organizational section, a literary publications section, an artistic publications section, a technical section, and a general directorate, but that was rarely, if ever, the case in practice. In fact, Osvag was poorly organized, understaffed, and underfunded; the 25 million rubles assigned to it by the Special Council in January 1919 would not have gone very far in those inflationary times, although it did publish a number of posters and brochures and succeeded in inculcating at least the germ of a cult of martyred White heroes (such as General L. G. Kornilov) among the White soldiers. Among those employed by Osvag were the writer and dramatist E. N. Chirikov, the philosopher Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, the artists I. Ia. Bilibin and E. E. Lansere, and the poet S. A. Sokolov. The organization was widely criticized for failing to attract popular support to the White movement and was shut down by Denikin in March 1920.

OTAMAN. This Ukrainian term (of Turkic origin) referred, historically, to the (usually elected) leaders of all or parts of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host, the fiercely independent Cossack group that was forcibly disbanded by Catherine the Great in 1775. It was resurrected in the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii in 1918, and in the Ukrainian Army, “otaman” was the title given to a divisional, corps, or army group commander. In 1920, the rank replaced that of general, while the head of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory was known as the supreme otaman (holovnyi otaman). Symon Petliura held that rank from November 1918 until his death in 1926. An acting otaman (nakaznyi otaman) was a temporary commander of the Ukrainian Army, who had been appointed by the supreme otaman to command the forces at the front. Generals Oleksandr Osetski and Oleksandr Hrekiv filled that role. The commanders of various partisan detachments that roamed Ukraine in the civil-war period (Nykyfor Hryhoriiv, Nestor Makhno, Danylo Zeleny, and others) were also sometimes called otamans.

ozakom. See special transcaucasian committee.

Ozanian, Andranik toros (25 February 1865–31 August 1927). Major general (Transcaucasian Army, January 1918). A prominent figure in the Armenian national movement (he is revered in his homeland as “the Garibaldi of Armenia” or “the George Washington of Armenia”), Andranik Ozanian (known affectionately by his men as “General Andranik”) was born at Şebinkarahisar, in Ottoman Armenia, and after finishing at the local Musheghian school, was apprenticed to his father as a carpenter. He became involved in Armenian secret organizations in his teens, joined the Dashnaks in 1892, and by 1899 was the acknowledged leader of the Armenian fedayeen guerrilla groups. After commanding fedayeen forces in a number of successful operations in eastern Anatolia around the turn of the century, he fled to Persia and then Russia in 1904, and in 1905 moved to Geneva. During the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), he fought at the head of an Armenian volunteer detachment with the Bulgarian Army against Turkey. He then went to Transcaucasia to raise and command Armenian volunteer units for the Russian Army during the First World War (from August 1914).

From March to April 1918, as governor of the Administration for Western Armenia, Ozanian helped organize the flight of thousands of Armenians to Eastern Armenia, thereby enabling them to escape persecution by the Ottoman Army of Islam that was advancing into the region under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He refused to accept the terms of the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918) between the Armenian Democratic Republic and the Ottoman Empire, declared his base in Nakhchivan to be part of Soviet Russia (July 1918), and continued to engage with the Turkish forces throughout 1918 (as head of the putative Republic of Mountainous Armenia). In January 1919, he was finally persuaded that a settlement favorable to Armenia would be reached at the Paris Peace Conference and withdrew from Karabakh to Zangezur. In March 1919, he was forced to disband his forces by the British authorities in the region.

The following month, having become disillusioned with the Dashnaks’ refusal to consider his demands that an amicable relationship be established with Soviet Russia (he had resigned from the Dashnak party in 1907), Ozanian left Armenia and moved to France, in an attempt to persuade the Allies to recognize a greater (“Wilsonian”) Armenia. He subsequently, in 1922, emigrated to the United States, settling at Fresno, California, where he worked to provide relief for Armenian refugees. He died at a sanatorium in Chico, California, in 1927, and was buried at the Ararat cemetery, Fresno. In 1928, when permission could not be obtained from the Soviet authorities to take his remains to Armenia, they were taken to Europe and reburied at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In 2000, Ozanian’s remains were again reburied, beneath a large monument to his honor at the Yerablur military cemetery, near Yerevan. Many statues of him exist in contemporary Armenia, including one in front of the St. Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral in Yerevan. In September 2011, a monument to him was erected at Varna, in Bulgaria.