Gevork Alikhanyan

Gevork Sarkisovich Alikhanyan (Armenian: Գևորգ Սարկիսովիչ Ալիխանյան) (1897–1938), also known in Russian as Georgy Alikhanov (Russian: Георгий Алиханов), was a Soviet Armenian politician and statesman. Alikhanyan is best known for being the founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from 1920 to 1921. He was also a high-ranking member of Comintern before his arrest and execution during the Great Purge.

Gevork Alikhanyan
Head of the Cadre Department of the Executive Committee of Communist International
In office 1935–1937
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia
In office December 31, 1920–April 1921
Preceded by	position created
Succeeded by	Askanaz Mravyan
Personal details
Born	Gevork Sarkisovich Alikhanyan 1897 Tiflis, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (now Tbilisi, Georgia)
Died	February 13, 1938 (aged 40–41) Kommunarka Shooting Ground, Moscow, Russian SFSR, USSR
Political party	Communist Party of Armenia
Children	Yelena Bonner

Early life

Gevork Alikhanyan was born in 1897 in Tiflis in the Russian Empire (modern day Tbilisi, Georgia) to an Armenian worker's family. He studied at Nersisian School in Tbilisi, where he befriended Anastas Mikoyan, a fellow Armenian student with similar communist ideals who would later become head of state of the Soviet Union.^[1] Alikhanyan graduated in 1917.

Alikhanyan began his career in politics when he joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Inspired by Mikoyan, he switched parties and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).^[2]

Soviet career

In 1917–1918 Alikhanyan worked in the Tiflis Committee of the party; in 1918 the Caucasus Regional Committee sent him to Lori. He then moved to Baku and worked there as a party organizer for one of the city's districts.^[3]

Alikhanyan was an active participant in the Baku Commune. After the fall of the Baku Commune, he remained in the city as a professional underground worker. Later he moved to Tiflis and was elected a member and secretary of the Tiflis Committee in 1919. It was in this position that he was arrested and thrown into prison.

Alikhanyan was an active participant in the Baku Commune. After the fall of the Baku Commune, he remained in the city as an underground organizer. Later he moved to Tiflis and was elected a member and secretary of the Tiflis Committee in 1919. It was in this position that he was arrested and thrown into prison.

When the Communist Party of Armenia was established on December 31, 1920, Alikhanyan was chosen as its inaugural First Secretary. He served in this position for the first four months of 1921, before being succeeded by Askanaz Mravyan in April of that year.^[1]

After the February Uprising, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as the head of the agitation and propaganda department of the Bauman regional committee of the party. In 1923-1925 he worked in Leningrad as the head of the organizational department of the Vasileostrovsky regional committee. As a deputy from the Leningrad party organization, he participated in the 12th and 13th Congresses of the party.

In Leningrad, Alikhanyan sharply criticized Grigory Zinoviev at meetings and in the press, for which he was expelled from the region and sent to work in Siberia. Here he was elected secretary of one of the regional committees of the city of Chita.

By decision of the Central Committee, Alikhanyan was recalled in 1926 and returned to work in Leningrad, first as the head of the organizational department of the Volodarsky District Party Committee and then as the head of the Vyborg District Party Committee. In 1927, he was elected a deputy to the 15th Party Congress.

It was during this period that his pamphlet "On Self-Criticism and Intra-Party Democracy" was published. In 1929, Alikhanyan studied at the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Armenia (Bolsheviks) on Marxism-Leninism. During this period, his pamphlet "Issues of Regulating the Social Structure of the Party" was published, signed Gevorg.

After the 15th Congress, he was sent to Tashkent, where he worked as the head of the organizational department of the Party's Central Asian Bureau until June 1931. Then he was recalled to Moscow, where he was promoted to the Executive Council of the Communist International (ECCI) as the head of the Cadre Department.^[4] As an employee of the Comintern, he protected Josip Broz Tito from repression.

During his time in the ECCI, he was one of the few senior members responsible for perpetrating the false allegations that led to the arrest and execution of Hungarian communist Lajos Magyar for allegedly assassinating Soviet politician Sergei Kirov.^[5]

Arrest, death and rehabilitation

In 1937, he himself was repressed. In June 1937, Alikhanyan and his wife were arrested by the NKVD on the orders of Ivan Serov and Lavrentiy Beria, charged with allowing "undesirables" into the organization and suppressing criticism of his department.^[4] He was found guilty of "participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization" by the Supreme Court and subsequently sentenced to death.^[6]

His execution took place on February 13, 1938, at Kommunarka Shooting Ground in Moscow, where he was shot and killed.

He was rehabilitated in 1954.^[6]

Family

Around 1924, Alikhanyan married Ruth Bonner, a Jewish pro-communist activist from Siberia. Bonner had previously been married to an Armenian man named Levon Kacharyan, with whom she had a daughter named Lusik. Kocharian died a year after Lusik's birth and Ruth married Alikhanyan, who adopted Lusik. Alikhanyan and his family resided in Moscow and Leningrad.^[7]

Ruth, arrested with her husband, was sentenced to eight years in a Kazakhstani gulag and was released in 1946. She became one of the first Purge survivors to be rehabilitated by the Khrushchev government, along with her husband's posthumous rehabilitation shortly thereafter. She died in Moscow in 1987.^[8]

Lusik Alikhanova grew up to be known as Yelena Bonner, a prominent Soviet dissident and human rights activist. She married Nobel Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1972 and faced internal exile several times.^[7]