The engineer who became the first person in Soviet history to run against a sitting General Secretary
At the First Congress in May 1989, he stood before the microphone and offered himself as a candidate against Gorbachev. 'To set a precedent,' he said. By 1,415 to 689, the assembly voted to keep his name off the ballot.
Born in Oryol in 1943, Obolensky was a geophysical engineer who spent twenty years at the Polar Geophysical Institute on the Kola Peninsula, where in 1987 he founded the first informal reform group in the region, the Voluntary Society for Assistance to Perestroika. Elected a People's Deputy of the USSR in 1989, he made history at the First Congress by putting forward his own candidacy for Chairman of the Supreme Soviet against Mikhail Gorbachev: the first alternative candidacy against a sitting General Secretary in Soviet history. After the August 1991 coup attempt, he was elected chairman of the parliamentary commission investigating it, and he opposed the dissolution of the USSR, regarding the Belovezha Accords as unconstitutional.
Career Timeline
- 1960–1965Lathe operator in Oryol; Soviet Army service in East Germany
- 1971Graduated Leningrad Mining Institute, geophysical engineering
- 1971–1992Engineer and design engineer, Polar Geophysical Institute, Kola Science Centre
- 1987–1989Founded and chaired the Voluntary Society for Assistance to Perestroika (DOSP) in Apatity
- 1989–1992People's Deputy of the USSR (Leningrad Rural District No. 20)
- 1990–1994Co-chairman, later chairman, Social Democratic Party of Russia (SDPR)
- 1991Chairman, Parliamentary Commission investigating the August coup attempt
- 1993–1996President and editor-in-chief, TeleRadioCorporation Vostok, Oryol