Osinskii
Osinskii
N. (real name Valerian Valerianovich Obolenskii). Born Mar. 25 (Apr. 6), 1887, in the village of Byki, L’gov District, Kursk Province; died Sept. 1, 1938. Soviet party leader and government figure; economist. Member of the Communist Party from 1907.
The son of a veterinarian, Osinskii studied at Moscow University in 1905 and in Germany in 1906. Between 1907 and 1917 he engaged in party work in Moscow, Tver’, and Kharkov and was arrested a number of times. After the February Revolution of 1917 he became a member of the Moscow oblast bureau of the RSDLP(B). He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). In October 1917 he was a member of the Kharkov military revolutionary committee.
After the triumph of the October Revolution of 1917, Osinskii became director of the State Bank of the RSFSR and chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy, a position he occupied until March 1918. He then worked on the editorial staff of Pravda and in the Supreme Council on the National Economy. In the spring of 1918 he participated in the writing of the platform of the Left Communists. He was chairman of the Tula provincial executive committee and a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat for Foodstuffs in 1920. Osinskii played an active role in the antiparty Democratic Centralism faction in 1920 and 1921.
From 1921 to 1923, Osinskii was deputy people’s commissar of agriculture and deputy chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy. He joined the Trotskyite opposition but then parted company with it. In 1923 and 1924 he served as plenipotentiary of the USSR in Sweden. From 1925 to 1928 he was a member of the presidium of the State Planning Committee of the USSR; he was also director of the Central Board of Statistics. In 1929 he became deputy chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy of the USSR.
Osinskii was a delegate to the Seventh through Eleventh and Fourteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. At the Tenth and Fourteenth through Seventeenth Congresses he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. He served as a delegate to the First Congress of the Comintern in 1919. Osinskii was the author of a number of works on economics.