Iosif Konstantinovich Okulich, 1871 - 1949

I. K. Okulich was born on 13 November 1871 (O.S.). He received his degree in agricultural engineering from the Swiss Polytechnic in Zürich in 1894. In 1896 he began government service in the Ministry of Agriculture, and was appointed the following year as Government Agronomist of the Tomskaia guberniia. In 1905 he was appointed head of the Agricultural Section of the Department of Agriculture in the same ministry, a post he had held as acting director since 1903. In 1906 he was appointed Acting Director of State Property for the Eniseiskaia guberniia (confirmed in this post in 1909), simultaneously serving as Vice-Inspector of the Forester's corps of the Irkutskaia guberniia. The years 1912-1913 he spent in the Balkans as a special agent of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, returning to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1913 as Assistant Director of the Department of Agriculture in charge of the Fishing and Game Hunting Section.

With the onset of the First World War, Okulich became responsible for forage and food supplies for the army within his ministry. In 1916 he was appointed a member of the Council of the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the administrative secretary for the Chief Food Supply Committee (Glavnyi prodovol'stvennyi komitet). Sent on a mission to Siberia in 1917 to increase fuel supplies, he remained there until April 1918, when the Siberian Creamery Union directed him to Great Britain for the purposes of expanding trade. In 1919, he was appointed a special representative of the government of Admiral Kolchak, responsible for financial oversight in the United States, Great Britain and France. In 1920-1921 he continued in this role for the Priamur government, based in Vladivostok.

Following the conclusion of the Civil War in Russia, he spent 1923-1926 in Yugoslavia involved in the timber export business, and then settled in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where he lived until his death on 21 January 1949. In Canada, Okulich devoted himself mainly to farming and journalistic work, writing often for the émigré press on agricultural, political, economic, and other issues concerning Russia and Siberia.

Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Museum of Russian Culture. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives. The original materials and copyright to them (with some exceptions) are the property of the Museum of Russian Culture, San Francisco.

Iosif Okulich Register