Valerian Valerianovich Obolensky

In the spring of 1918, Obolensky (Osinsky) served as a theoretical leader of the Left Communist group alongside Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, and was a principal contributor to its journal Kommunist. The group not only opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty but raised fundamental concerns about the social direction of the revolution. In his articles for the journal, Osinsky warned that reliance on former capitalists and tsarist officers risked a regression into state capitalism, and criticized the displacement of workers' control by bureaucratic management. For him, socialism could not be decreed from above: it could only be built through the initiative of the working class itself. Defending Lenin's own earlier position that 'socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the Party. It can be implemented by tens of millions when they have learned to do it for themselves,' Osinsky nevertheless weakened his case by linking the production question with opposition to Brest-Litovsk, allowing Lenin to dismiss him as a 'revolutionary phrasemonger.' After the treaty was signed in March 1918, he resigned from all his posts alongside Bukharin, Vladimir Smirnov, and others. Though the Left Communist group was defeated, Osinsky's analysis of the dangers of state capitalism has come to be seen as a pioneering insight into the trajectory of the Soviet bureaucratic state.

In 1922 Osinsky published an article in Pravda defending Anna Akhmatova, judging her in these terms: "Although we are dealing with a person not of our way of life, she has what is most important, most necessary to a poet — an honourable soul and civic consciousness."

It is a rare instance of an economic official and Left Communist theorist, whose working life ran through VSNKh and Gosplan, putting his name to a literary quarrel.

In October 1923 Osinsky was one of the signatories of the Declaration of the 46, which called for inner-party democracy, and in early 1924 he was one of the leading figures of the Left Opposition supporting Trotsky in the struggle after Lenin's death. He soon split with that opposition. The Russian reference records that he adhered to Trotsky in 1923-24, then broke with him and recanted - the documented turn from opposition to conformity. Sent abroad like other opposition figures, he was Soviet plenipotentiary in Sweden from March to October 1924, then was dispatched on an extended trade mission to the United States. Fascinated by the car industry there, he saw motor transport as a means of overcoming the divide between town and country, and he became one of the founders of the Gorky car plant.

After returning he split with the opposition, and in December 1925 he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee, entering the governing apparatus. In 1928, when Stalin launched forced collectivisation, he was briefly reunited with Bukharin's right opposition: he advocated raising agricultural prices to improve rural living standards and promote voluntary grain sales, which the Central Committee accepted in July 1928 over Stalin's objection, while his argument against setting up large collective farms before knowing whether they were profitable had less success.

He served as deputy chairman of Vesenkha from December 1929 to December 1930. In the summer of 1930 he tried to stop the People's Commissar for War, Voroshilov, from taking control of the aviation industry away from Vesenkha, but Stalin ruled in Voroshilov's favour, accused Osinsky of "impudence", and he lost the post four months later. From December 1932 to March 1937, as a member of the state commission for determining the yield and size of the gross grain harvest, he set crop-planting targets in various provinces, directive-assigning norms that, acting on party decisions, often disregarded local tradition and soil suitability. This was the period when forced collectivisation and centralised agricultural control led to catastrophes such as the Holodomor in Ukraine.

Osinsky was a pioneer of Soviet Marxist analysis of the world economy in the 1920s. Amid the debates over the Ruhr crisis and capitalist stabilization, he published The World Agricultural Crisis (1923) and followed it with World Economy and Crises (1924), a systematic examination of the general crisis of capitalism that was widely referenced in Comintern analysis. His Essays on the World Agricultural Market (1925) was a monumental comparative study of grain, cotton, meat, and other major commodity markets, while his works on American agriculture (1925–26), including field reports from North America, became foundational texts for Soviet understanding of US farming methods and technology. In 1926 he became director of the Institute of World Economy and World Politics at the Communist Academy, institutionalizing international economic analysis, and in 1928 published empirical research on intercontinental migration. What set Osinsky's world-economy work apart was its insistence on concrete statistical and field-based analysis rather than abstract schemas: an empirical orientation that shaped the development of economic research and planning methodology in the Soviet Union.