Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko (actual surname Ovseenko) (Russian: Владимир Александрович Антонов(-Овсеенко), Ukrainian: Володимир Антонов-Овсєєнко; March 9 1883 – February 10 1939) was a prominent Soviet Bolshevik leader and diplomat. Ethnically he was a Ukrainian, born in Chernihiv into an officer's family. In 1903, Antonov-Ovseenko joined the Menshevik party. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, he led an uprising in Novo-Alexandria in Poland and Sevastopol in the Crimea. He was subsequently arrested and sentenced to twenty years' exile in Siberia. He soon escaped and by 1910 had emigrated to Paris. Soon after the outbreak of World War I, Antonov-Ovseenko became an Internationalist Menshevik in protest at the conflict. In May 1917, he joined the Bolshevik party and returned to Russia, taking part in the October stage of the 1917 Revolution. After the Bolsheviks had taken over the Winter Palace, he arrested the Russian Provisional Government. He was elected to the Military Committee of Sovnarkom and soon thereafter given a high position in the Red Army. In December 1917, Antonov-Ovseenko was put in charge of the Red Army in Ukraine and southern Russia. The army subsequently captured Kharkov, where Soviet power in Ukraine was proclaimed. In 1918 and 1919, Antonov-Ovseenko oversaw the defeat of Ukrainian nationalist and White Army forces in Ukraine, ensuring the creation of the Ukrainian SSR. By the end of the Russian Civil War, Antonov-Ovseenko was in charge of the Tambov region, brutally suppressing the 1920-1921 Tambov Rebellion alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky. His policies for the region also saw the mass execution of many civilians. During the 1920s, Antonov-Ovseenko was close ally of Lev Trotsky in the Soviet government and was later appointed consul for Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Poland. In 1934, Antonov-Ovseenko became the Russian SFSR's chief prosecutor and later the special Soviet consul in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, where he directed the supply of Soviet aid to the Spanish Republican government. He was arrested in 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge and executed the following year.
