Nikolai Osinsky

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.

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.