Rukhulla Ali Ogly Akhundov

Born Jan. 1 (13), 1897, in the village of Shuveliany, Baku District; died 1938. Soviet Party and state figure, publicist, and scholar.

Akhundov was born into the family of a teacher. He graduated from a madrasah (Muslim school), a Realschule, and a commercial school; he knew several oriental and Western languages. He was a member of the Communist Party after 1919. In 1917 he was a member of a group of Azerbaijani “left” Socialist Revolutionaries; In 1918 he was editor of Izvestiia, the newspaper of the Baku soviet, and in 1919 of Kommunist, the Azerbaijani clandestine Bolshevik newspaper. After the Soviet power was definitely established in Azerbaijan in 1920, Akhundov served as chief of the Azerbaijan CP (Bolshevik) Central Committee’s department dealing with work in rural areas, secretary of the Baku Party committee, and editor of the newspaper Kommunist and other periodical publications. From 1924 to 1930 he was secretary of the Azerbaijan CP (Bolshevik) Central Committee, director of Azerneshar (the state book publishing house), and Azerbaijan SSR peoples’ commissar of education. In 1930 he was elected secretary of the Transcaucasian Krai Party Committee. He was a delegate to the Tenth through the Seventeenth Party Congresses and to the second congress of the Comintern. In the last years of his life he worked at the Institute of Party History of the Azerbaijan CP (Bolshevik) Central Committee, was director of the Art Department of the Azerbaijan SSR Council of Peoples’ Commissars, and was one of the founders and leaders of the Azerbaijan branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was one of the first translators of the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin into Azerbaijani. He is the author of a number of works on history, art, and literature and the editor of a two-volume Russian-Azerbaijani dictionary (1928–29). He was awarded the Order of Lenin.