Oles Obertas was born in a family of Ukrainian dissidents Evhen and Nina Obertas. He is a philologist and the author of numerous publications on the Ukrainian dissident movement and Ukrainian samizdat, including the monograph Ukrains’kyi Samvydav: Literaturna crytyka ta publitsystyka (1960 – pochatok 1970 rokiv) (The Ukrainian Samizdat: Literary Criticism and Journalism, 1960s – early 1970s). He obtained his PhD in philology from the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Obertas was the first director of the Museum-Archive and Documentation Centre of Ukrainian Samvydav in Kyiv, taking the most active part in classifying and archiving Smoloskyp collections after their relocation in Ukraine. As the director of the Museum-Archive, he organized a series of international exhibitions and conferences, promoting Smoloskyp collections. In 2004, under his guidance, the Museum-Archive joined the International Samizdat Research Association (ISRA), an informal network of over twenty research institutions and archives, studying and preserving samizdat collections.