Bekir Osmanov

Osmanov was born in Crimea on 22 March 1911 in Buyuk Ozenbash village. His father, who was a teacher at a local madrassah, died in 1915, leaving their mother Khaniapte a widow with five children to raise. Growing up in extreme poverty, the children began working from a very young age, processing coal and tending to crops. When he was six to seven years old he suffered from smallpox with a prolonged high fever, and was not expected to survive, but lived through it. He grew up to be a studious child, and eventually his family sent him to Yalta to attend agricultural school. In 1935 he married fellow student Mariya Gushchinskaya, a Belarusian. During the purges of 1937, Osmanov, by then a tobacco farmer, was arrested and tried for rebutting Lysenkoist pseudoscience, but the court spared him after the judge issued a statement that legal action was an inappropriate way to handle academic disputes. Before the war his wife gave birth to their daughter Tamila and first son Yuri; for their safety, they were evacuated from the peninsula to Azerbaijan before German troops completely took over the peninsula.[2][3]

Growing wary of the imminent German occupation of Crimea, Osmanov insisted that collective farms in Crimea harvest their crops early and prepare to defend themselves for the ensuing war, but was berated by a local official for sharing his sober analysis of the situation. He then attended brief combat training courses in which he learned to accurately fire a revolver and throw grenades. However, he was not drafted into the Red Army for health reasons, so he put his skills to use as a scout with the partisan movement to help resist the Nazi occupation of the peninsula. His first mission was to deliver a radio to a group of partisans located deep within the forest. He went on to participate in other various partisan operations, for which he gained a reputation as skilled scout due to his knowledge of the local geography, and in January 1942 he was accepted into the Community Party. For his effective work as a partisan and scout, the Nazi occupiers launched a wide search for him and offered a bounty of 100,000 marks on his head. He was twice nominated for the Order of Lenin, but Vladimir Bulatov obstructed the award on both occasions. With Kuibyshev detachment having suffered heavy losses and unable to continue on, he was transferred to the Sevastopol detachment, where he became a political instructor and took part in more risky operations. In October 1942 he took part in a small-scale sea-based operation, helping fellow partisans hide in "blind spots" from enemy forces to approach the coast; however, the operation was a failure, with the commander and commissar panicking upon the start of enemy fire and several partisans drowning due to their boats being shelled. Nevertheless, Osmanov and the rest of the partisans maintained their composure and continued for Cape Kikeneiz, where they landed and made their way to the forest. However, his work as a partisan did not last much longer; later that month he sustained severe shrapnel wounds from a mine, and so he was evacuated from Crimea on 26 October 1942.[2][4][5][6]

Originally taken to Sochi, he was soon transferred to a hospital in Sukhumi, where he remained until reuniting with his family in Aghdam. He then moved to Krasnodar, where the Crimean Regional Committee in exile was located before returning to Crimea as soon as Nazi forces were expelled from the peninsula in April 1944. Upon return to Crimea he was appointed first deputy commissar of regional agriculture and started to draw up a plan for development of local agriculture in the war-torn peninsula, he did not remain in Crimea for very long; since he was a Crimean Tatar, he was deported from Crimea on 18 May 1944 and sent to Central Asia. Initially he was to the Pakhta Uchun Kurash collective farm, but he was allowed to move to a state farm in Ferghana where his wife and children were deported to. In exile he worked in agriculture, eventually getting a job at nursery, where he developed several pear varieties.[2][6]