Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko

Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the son of a tsarist officer and a military school graduate himself, chose revolution over the officer's career prepared for him. He organized military mutinies in 1905–1906, was sentenced to death and escaped, and after long years of exile returned in 1917, joined the Bolsheviks and became secretary of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee.

On the night of 7 November 1917 (25 October Old Style) he directed the final operation against the Winter Palace together with Podvoisky, and shortly after two in the morning he entered the small dining room of the palace and declared: "In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare the members of the Provisional Government under arrest." He then protected the ministers from enraged soldiers and escorted them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. With that scene, recorded in John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, his name was written into the history of October.

Immediately after the Winter Palace, Antonov-Ovseenko, one of the few Bolshevik leaders with a military education, was sent south. In December 1917 he was assigned to direct operations against Kaledin's Cossacks and the Ukrainianised units backing the Central Rada. On 6 (19) December the Sovnarkom created the Southern Revolutionary Front against counter-revolution and named him commander-in-chief, with the Revolutionary Field Staff directly subordinate to him. Entering Kharkiv at the head of the Southern Group, he stood as a congress of Soviets proclaimed Soviet power in Ukraine; he then handed the Ukrainian forces to his chief of staff Muravyov and took charge of the fighting against the Don Cossack forces. From March to May 1918 he was Supreme Commander of Soviet Forces of the South of Russia, comprising the armed formations of the Ukrainian, Odessa, Donetsk-Krivoy Rog and Taurida soviet republics.

Sources divide over his status in the middle of that year. English Wikipedia states that he opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and was dismissed from the Red Army in May 1918 for fomenting guerrilla warfare against the advancing German army, then reinstated as People's Commissar for War in Ukraine in September 1918. The Russian account instead has him as Supreme Commander of Soviet Forces of the South of Russia and, in late August to early September 1918, leading a Soviet delegation to Berlin to negotiate the possible participation of German troops in armed struggle against Entente contingents landed in the Northern region. Neither version can be presented as settled.

In September–October 1918 he commanded an Eastern Front group suppressing the Izhevsk–Votkinsk revolt, coordinating the 2nd and 3rd armies and the Volga military flotilla, and from 17 to 30 November 1918 was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Special Group of Kursk-direction forces. From 30 November 1918 to 4 January 1919 he commanded the Ukrainian Soviet Army, from 4 January to 15 June 1919 the Ukrainian Front, and in May–June 1919 all armed forces of the Ukrainian SSR. He took an active part in establishing Soviet power across almost all Ukrainian territory, in forming the Ukrainian SSR's armed forces, in operations against the Directory's army, and in liquidating the Hryhoriv mutiny. According to Ukrainian historians, mass repressions against class enemies and nationalists were widely applied on Soviet Ukrainian territory while he was commander. That framing is an attribution to those historians, not an established finding.

Several episodes here carry competing accounts. Per the documents of the Denikin-era Special Commission for the Investigation of Bolshevik Atrocities, General P. K. Rennenkampf was shot in Taganrog on 1 April 1918 on Antonov-Ovseenko's personal instruction, after ill-treatment and torture. The Russian article presents this as the commission's assertion rather than an established fact, while the English article places the order after Rennenkampf refused to serve the Bolsheviks. In late April 1919 he attempted an agreement with the self-declared Otaman Nykyfor Hryhoriv, who commanded the largest troop grouping on the front; he tried to redirect him into a Bessarabian campaign against Romanian troops, and Hryhoriv agreed on 23 April. Instead Hryhoriv's forces looted and attacked the Jewish population and communist officials, sparking mass peasant riots; the uprising was routed by Red Army forces under Voroshilov and Hryhoriv was killed by Makhno. The planned Soviet march to Bessarabia and intervention in Hungary were largely thwarted. The Russian article records only that he took part in liquidating the Hryhoriv mutiny, and the two characterisations should be represented as differing accounts. A legend, recorded as such, has him put fifteen Kharkiv industrialists in a railway carriage and demand a million in cash when factory owners refused to pay workers in protest at the eight-hour day, threatening otherwise to send them to work in the mines; Lenin is said to have approved by telegram. A separate Ukrainian-language claim that he first used combat poison gas during the assault on Kyiv is not mentioned by the Russian article on the 1918 fighting for Kyiv and remains disputed.

In 1921, as chairman of the Plenipotentiary Commission for the suppression of the Tambov peasant rising, he signed the appeal of 11 June 1921 stating that the Commission had decided to smoke the bands out of the forests with suffocating gases. The researcher David Feldman published documents in 1989 arguing that the proposal to use chemical agents came from the Commission he headed; this remains a scholar's argument, not a court finding. Appointed head of the Red Army Political Directorate in 1922, he opposed Stalin's growing power, backed Trotsky and joined the Left Opposition, and was removed on 17 January 1924. He then moved to diplomacy as representative in Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Poland, served as a prosecutor from 1934, was arrested in October 1937 and shot on 10 February 1938.

In the Civil War Antonov-Ovseenko commanded Soviet forces on the southern front and in Ukraine, and in 1921 he chaired the plenipotentiary commission that directed the suppression of the Tambov peasant rising, one of the darkest tasks revolutionary power faced in those years. In the 1920s he headed the Red Army's Political Administration until his support for Trotsky's Left Opposition cost him the post in 1923; he then served as a Soviet diplomat in Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Poland.

In August 1936, as the Spanish Civil War intensified, he arrived in Barcelona as Soviet consul general. Coordinating Soviet military aid with the Catalan government and chasing supplies to the front, he was the most visible Soviet figure in Catalonia. Recalled in 1937, he was named People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR, only to be arrested weeks later in October; he was shot on 10 February 1938. According to his son Anton, his last request was: "Tell them that Antonov-Ovseenko was a Bolshevik and remained a Bolshevik to his last day." He was rehabilitated in 1956.