Lavrentii Kartvelishvili

(party pseudonym, Lavrent’ev). Born Apr. 16 (28), 1890; died Aug. 22, 1938. Soviet statesman and party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1910. The son of a peasant.

Kartvelishvili was born in the village of Ianeti, in the present-day Georgian SSR. He first became active in the revolutionary movement in 1905. Kartvelishvili studied at the Kiev Commercial Institute from 1911 to 1914. He conducted party work in Saratov in 1915–16 and was chairman of the Kiev municipal district committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in 1917–18. Kartvelishvili became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine in July 1918. He was a member of the Odessa Oblast and municipal committees of the CP(B) of the Ukraine and a member of the Odessa revolutionary committee from late 1918 to August 1919. Kartvelishvili was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the southern group of the Twelfth Army in 1919 and head of the organization section of the Odessa Oblast committee and editor of the newspaper Kommunist in 1920. From 1921 to 1923 he was secretary of the Kiev Provincial committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine, and from 1923 to 1928 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of Georgia, second secretary of the Transcaucasus Krai committee of the party, and then chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Georgia.

In 1929 and 1930, Kartvelishvili was chief of the political directorate of the Ukrainian Military District, then becoming second secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B) of the Ukraine. From 1931 to 1933 he was secretary of the Transcaucasus Krai committee and then secretary of the Western Siberian Krai committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and a member of the Military Council of the Special Far Eastern Army. Kartvelishvili was secretary of the Crimean Oblast committee of the ACP(B) from January to July 1937. He was a delegate to the Tenth and Eleventh and to the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the party. He was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee at the Sixteenth Congress.