Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovsejenko

Antonov-Ovsejenko (before 1937)

Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko ( Russian Владимир Александрович Антонов-Овсеенко , Ukrainian Володимир Олександрович Антонов-Овсієнко Volodymyr Oleksandrowytsch Antonov Owsijenko ; born March 9 ^{. Jul} / 21st March  1883 ^greg. In Chernigov , Chernigov Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 8th or February 11, 1938 in Moscow , Soviet Union ) was a Soviet military commander and later diplomat .

Youth and early years of revolutionary activity

Antonov-Ovsejenko was of Ukrainian descent and was born into an officer's family. In line with family tradition, he graduated from a cadet school in Voronezh in 1901 and enrolled at the Nikolai military engineering college in Saint Petersburg . However, within a month he was expelled from the technical school because he refused to take the oath on the tsar. In the same year he was admitted to the Vladimir Infantry Technical School in Voronezh and graduated in 1904 with the rank of ensign . During his military training in late 1902, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party , which was a forerunner of the Communist Party in Russia. In 1904 he was posted to the 40th Kolywanski Infantry Regiment in Warsaw , where he founded a military-revolutionary organization under the Social Democratic Labor Party.

He resisted being transferred to the Far East, deserted the army and became one of the organizers of the military revolt in Poland during the 1905 revolution . After the labor party split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks , he joined the latter and went to St. Petersburg, where he participated in several uprisings. He was arrested several times, but always released after a few weeks of detention. Since May 1905 he was in the Crimea in the city of Sevastopol , where he illegally published a newspaper Soldat . Antonov-Ovsejenko was arrested there in June 1906 and sentenced to death under one of his pseudonyms in May 1907 , which was then converted into 20 years ' imprisonment . But after a few weeks he managed to escape.

Life as a professional revolutionary

After fleeing, he continued his revolutionary activities in Finland , then moved to Moscow , where he was actively involved in founding several revolutionary circles and clubs from 1908–1909. Antonov-Ovsejenko changed his identity more than ten times, took on a dozen pseudonyms, including Nikita , Stefan Doljnizki , Styk , Anton Galjski , Anton G. , AS Kabanow . In 1909 he was arrested twice, released from prison after six months of pre-trial detention, and in February 1910 he emigrated to Paris . After the start of the First World War , he joined the internationalist wing of his party, which protested against the war. This led him to openly adopt the position of the Bolshevik leadership and Lenin as his own and to distance himself more and more from the Menshevik party.

Revolution and civil war

In May 1917 he returned to Russia from exile and joined the Bolsheviks in Petrograd . He became a member of the military organization of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and was sent to Finland to carry out active propaganda against the First World War among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and the soldiers of the Northern Front. At the same time he was one of the editors of the newspaper Wolna (German: Welle). After the Bolsheviks were banned by the Provisional Government , he was arrested and spent a month in custody with other prominent Communists while Lenin fled to Finland. Antonov-Ovsejenko was released on bail on September 4. During the turmoil that preceded the October Revolution , he was appointed commissioner of the ZENTROBALT sailors' association , with responsibility for the Finnish government. On September 30th he was elected a member of the Finnish Bureau of the Bolshevik Party. In mid-October he was first elected to the Executive Committee of the Congress of Councils of the Russian North and a few days later to the Secretary of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee .

From October 24th he was a member of the mobile staff of the Military Revolutionary Committee and one of the commanders of the storming of the Tsar's residence, the Winter Palace, on October 26th. After demonstrating his determination in imprisoning the Provisional Government , he was elected to the military committee of the Council of People's Commissars with the rank of People's Commissar and quickly rose to high positions in the Red Army . In November / December 1917 he was the commander of the Petrograd Military District, active organizer of the crushing of the Krasnov and Kerensky uprisings . The situation at that time was confusing and very dangerous. On November 28, Antonov-Ovsejenko was picked up by White Guards on the street in Petrograd, the only reason they did not shoot him was because they promised to exchange his person for 50 arrested like-minded people. The next day he was freed from the sailors through the mediation of an American journalist.

From December 1917 to March 1918 he was chief of Soviet troops fighting against the uprising of Tsarist General Kaledin and the army of the newly formed state of Ukraine , whose territory had been liberated from Russia by the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty . Antonov-Ovsejenko was supposed to start a partisan war against the occupiers. However, this attempt failed. Since March 1918 he was Commander-in-Chief of Soviet troops in southern Russia, since May 1918 a member of the Supreme Military Council, in September and October coordinator of several Red Armies and since November 1918 commander of the special military group whose aim was the conquest of Kursk , at the same time he was the commander of the soviet army in ukraine. From September 1918 to May 1919 he was a member of the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic , from January 1919 Commander of the Ukrainian Front and People's Commissar for Military Affairs of Ukraine. After the dissolution of the Ukrainian Front and the creation of the 14th Army, he became a member of the military council of this army. From 1918 to 1919 Antonov-Ovsejenko led a victorious campaign against Ukrainian nationalists and White Army troops .

In the meantime, Antonov-Ovsejenko was active in the diplomatic field. From the end of August to the beginning of September 1918 he was head of the Soviet delegation in the negotiations with the German Reich in Berlin, where the issue was the possible participation of the German troops in the fight against the English in the European part of Russia on the side of the Red Guards (see also : Company keystone ). The British forces invaded several cities and areas in northern Russia in mid-1918 with the aim of fighting the Bolshevik Revolution. The negotiations did not come to a conclusion and were broken off.

From October 1919 to April 1920 he was chairman of the Executive Committee of the Tambov region . From April 1920 to February 1921 he was a member of several Soviet administrative bodies, including the People's Commissariat for Labor and Employment, the People's Commissariat of the Interior and Deputy Chairman of the Small Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In February 1921 he was sent back to Tambov, where, as chairman of the Special Commission to Combat Enemies of the Soviet Power in the Tambower Gouvernement, together with Tukhachevsky, he suppressed the local peasant uprising of Tambov against the Soviet regime from 1920 to 1921.

1922-1937

Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovsejenko with family (Prague, 1925)

From 1922 to 1924 he was head of the political department of the Military Council of Soviet Russia, from August 23, 1923 of the USSR. In this post he was one of the initiators of the establishment of the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda ( Red Star ), which was the mouthpiece of the Ministry of Defense until the end of Soviet power. In the course of 1923 he wrote three letters to the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, in which he openly criticized the leadership of the party, especially Stalin and Kamenev . Politically he came very close to Leon Trotsky during the 1920s . With its increasing loss of power, the former civil war hero also lost political importance. He had been accused of so-called fractionism, accused of all possible sins, and in 1925 dismissed from all his posts on the Central Committee. A year earlier, Antonov-Ovsejenko had been deported to diplomatic work, first from 1924 to 1928 as ambassador to Czechoslovakia and then to Lithuania and Poland , where he played a major role in the conclusion of the Polish-Soviet non-aggression treaty (1932).

In 1934, however, his career appeared to be recovering when he was appointed senior prosecutor for the RSFSR . Between 1936 and 1937 he served as the Soviet Union's special envoy in Barcelona . There he coordinated the cooperation with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War . He was then unexpectedly appointed People's Commissar for Justice of the RSFSR in 1937 , but only stayed in that post for a few months, as he was soon arrested during the Great Terror . After a show trial, he, one of the most important fighters for the establishment and expansion of Soviet power, was executed as an alleged traitor by shooting. In the course of de-Stalinization , he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. His son Anton Antonov-Ovsejenko (1920–2013) became a historian and in the 1980s published the book “Stalin. Portrait of a Tyranny ” .

Fonts

• Pod wympelom Oktyabrja. Moscow, 1923. (German: Under the Wympel des October )
• Stroiteljstwo Krasnoi Armii v Revoljuzii. Moscow, 1923. (German: The establishment of the Red Army during the Revolution )
• Sapiski o grazhdanskoi voine. 4 vols. Moscow, 1924–1933. (German: records of the civil war )
• V semnadzatom godu. Moscow, 1933. (German: In the year seventeen )
• V revoluuziya. Moscow, 1957. (German: n der Revolution )

literature

biography

• A. Rakitin. Antonov-Ovseenko. Leningrad, 1989.

Further literature

• VV Šelochaev: Političeskie partii Rossii. Konec XIX - pervaja tret 'XX veka. Enciklopedija . Rosspen, Moskva 1996, ISBN 5-86004-037-7 .
• PV Volobuev (ed.): Političeskie dejateli Rossii 1917. Biografičeskij slovarʹ. Naučnoe izd. "Bol'šaja Rossijskaja Ėnciklopedija", Moskva 1993, ISBN 5-85270-137-8 , ( Biografičeskie slovari i spravočniki ).
• Bol'šaja Rossiyskaya Ėnciklopedija . 3. Edition. Naučnoe izd. "Bol'šaja Rossijskaja Ėnciklopedija", Moskva 1972ff. (2010 running), ISBN 5-85270-320-6 .
• Voennaja enciklopedia . Volume 1. Moscow, 1997.

Web links

Commons : Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseyenko  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Vladimir Antonov-Ovsejenko in the catalog of the German National Library