1943–
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
- 1985–1991Perestroika and Glasnostfirst alternative candidate to challenge the General Secretary in an electionAt the First Congress of People's Deputies, he ran against incumbent General Secretary Gorbachev for the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet but was not included on the ballot. The mere act of an alternative candidacy was itself a political rupture.
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSROpposed dissolution and sought an emergency CongressHe opposed the dissolution of the USSR and sought an emergency Congress in December 1991.
Chairman of the August Coup Investigation Commission
On 29 August 1991, days after the coup attempt collapsed, Obolensky was appointed to the parliamentary commission tasked with establishing the causes and circumstances of the attempted state overthrow, and at its first session he was elected its chairman. In that role he directed the inquiry into how the coup had been prepared and how state bodies had responded.
The investigation was never allowed to finish. On 20 January 1992 the commission, on Obolensky's initiative, adopted a decision that it could not continue its work because of obstruction by the Russian authorities, and transferred all the material it had gathered to the state archive for temporary storage. The man who had pressed hardest for a full accounting also recorded, as an official act of his own commission, the process by which that accounting was blocked.
In the same period Obolensky treated the dissolution of the USSR itself as a further coup. Speaking at the Fifth Congress of People's Deputies in September 1991, he called the ultimatum that union-republic leaders presented to the Congress a second phase of the attempted state overthrow, and proposed that President Gorbachev be dismissed immediately and that the Congress assume full power and set a date for nationwide elections of a new Soviet president. On 10 December 1991 he signed the demand by one fifth of the People's Deputies to convene an emergency Congress, a demand delivered personally to Gorbachev on 21 December. He attended all six Congresses of People's Deputies, including the session at Voronovo on 17 March 1992 that the Russian authorities declared illegal and that lacked a quorum. During his term he introduced more than fifty legislative drafts and proposals.