Osvald Tuul
Tuul, Osvald
Born Mar. 14 (27), 1906, in the region now under the jurisdiction of the Ahja village soviet, Tartu Raion, Estonian SSR; died 1942 (?). Estonian revolutionary. Member of the Communist Party from 1923.
The son of a farm laborer, Tuul became a metalworker in 1921. In 1922 and 1923 he was instrumental in organizing the Communist Union of the Young People of Estonia in the district of Tartu. From 1923 to 1926, Tuul was a political prisoner in bourgeois Estonia. He began studying in the USSR in 1926 at the J. Marchlewski Communist University of National Minorities of the West.
In 1930, Tuul became deputy secretary, then secretary, of the underground bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia (CPE). In 1931 he became second secretary of the party’s Central Committee; later in the same year he was arrested and sentenced to 12 years at hard labor. Tuul was granted amnesty in 1938 and came to the USSR, where he worked in factories in Leningrad. He was an instructor for the Central Committee of the CPE in 1941, and during World War II he served as a deputy to the Estonian defense committee for the Tartu District and as a member of the Estonian staff for partisan detachments. Tuul was executed by the fascist occupying forces.