 Unlike his colleagues from the Constitutional Democratic Party, chose to spend the rest of his life in Russia following the Bolshevik seizure of power.Based on his acquaintance with Vladimir Lenin, he was able to develop an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Russian ethnographers, the former being more interested in nationalism amongst European peoples of the former Russian Empire, the ethnographers focusing more on the national question amongst its Asian peoples.Although he was briefly apprehended by the Cheka in 1919, Oldenburg was allowed to run the Academy of Sciences until 1929, when, in connection with the ongoing Bolshevization of the Academy, he was ousted from his posts.