Levon Mirzoian

Born November 1897 in the village of Ashan, Shusha District, Gandzha Province (in what is now the Azerbaijan SSR); died Feb. 26, 1939. Soviet party leader. Member of the Communist Party from March 1917. Son of a peasant.

Mirzoian joined the revolutionary movement in 1912 in Baku. He worked in trade unions in 1917–18 and was a deputy to the Baku soviet. After the temporary fall of Soviet power in Baku on July 31, 1918, he worked in the underground in Transcaucasia. From 1920 to 1925 he was chairman of the Azerbaijan Council of Trade Unions and then people’s commissar of labor of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic and secretary of the Baku committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party (Bolshevik). From 1925 to 1929 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party (Bolshevik). Between 1929 and 1933 he was secretary of the Perm’ district committee and then second secretary of the Urals oblast committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1933 he became first secretary of the Kazakhstan Krai Committee of the Party, and in 1937, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Kazakhstan Communist Party (Bolshevik).

Mirzoian was a delegate to the Tenth, Eleventh, and Fourteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). He was elected a candidate member of the Party’s Central Committee at the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses, and a full member at the Seventeenth Congress. A member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, he was awarded the Order of Lenin.