Kaigisyz Atabaev

Born October 1887; died 1937. Soviet state figure, an active participant in the struggle for the establishment and consolidation of Soviet power in Middle Asia. CPSU member after 1918.

Atabaev was born in the village of Miane, near the city of Tendzhen, into the family of a peasant and graduated from a teachers’ seminary in Tashkent. Until 1917 he worked as a teacher and bank official. From 1917 to 1918 he was a leader of the Turkmen section of the Merv district Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and chairman of the district food committee; he was vice-chairman and, from June 1919, chairman of the executive committee of the Merv soviet. He served as deputy chairman of the Transcaspian Oblast revolutionary committee from November 1919 until July 1920, then as Turkestan ASSR people’s commissar of agriculture. He was a member of the Executive Bureau of the Turkestan Communist Party from July 1920. In September 1920 he became chairman of the Turkestan ASSR Council of People’s Commissars. He was deputy chairman of the Council of Nazirs (commissars) of the Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic from June 1923. In October 1924 he became a member of the Turkmen Revolutionary Committee (first government of the Turkmen SSR) and in February 1925 chairman of the Turkmen SSR Council of People’s Commissars. He was a delegate to the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth congresses of the ACP (Bolshevik). From 1924 to 1937 he was a member of the bureau of the Turkmen Communist Party Central Committee. He was awarded the Order of Lenin. In 1967 a monument to Atabaev was erected in Ashkhabad.