Osip Piatnitsky was a revolutionary.

He was an associate of Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 since 1902, when he smuggled Lenin's propaganda into Russia from abroad.

He became head of the Otdel mezhdonarodnoi sviazi (OMS)

Otdel mezhdonarodnoi sviazi (OMS)

The International Liaison Department , or OMS , was one of the most secret departments of the Comintern. It was founded at the Third Congress of the Comintern in July 1921. It mission was to provide support, guidance, and funding to Communist parties outside Russia.The head of the OMS was Osip...

 of the Comintern

Comintern

The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...

 when it was founded in 1921.

In 1937 he attempted to organize opposition within the Central Committee

Central Committee

Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...

 of the Bolshevik party to Stalin's "Great Terror

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

." He was arrested and executed.

Sources

• Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, Harper & Row, 1991.
• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of Destiny, William Morrow, 1974.
• Osip Piatnitsky, Memoirs of a Bolshevik, International Publishers, 1935.
• Leopold Trepper, The Great Game, McGraw Hill, 1977.
• Boris Starkov, The Trail that was not Held, Europe-Asia Studies, Dec. 1994.