Prokofii Aprasionovich Dzhaparidze

(party pseudonym, Alesha). Born Jan. 3 (15), 1880; died Sept. 20, 1918. Member of the revolutionary movement in Russia, leader of the struggle for Soviet rule in Azerbaijan. Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

Dzhaparidze was the son of a landowner in the village of Shardometi in what is now Oni Raion, Georgian SSR. While studying at the Alexander Teachers’ Institute in Tbilisi from 1896 to 1900, he was prominent in organizing the May Day demonstration of the Tbilisi workers in 1900 and a railroad workers’ strike in August 1900. He was expelled from the institute, arrested, detained for 11 months at Metekh Fortress, and then deported to Kutaisi Province. Between 1900 and 1904, Dzhaparidze was a member of the Imeretian-Mingrelian and Caucasian Union committees of the RSDLP. A leader of the Baku oil workers in August 1904, Dzhaparidze was elected to the Baku Committee of the RSDLP. He was a cofounder of the Azerbaijani social democratic group Gummet (Energy) and headed the Baku general strike in December 1904. In 1905 the Baku party organization sent him as a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP, where he met V. I. Lenin.

Between 1906 and 1908, Dzhaparidze helped publish the Bolshevik newspapers and magazines Bakinskii rabochii, Prizyv, Koch-Devet, Gudok, and Volna. Secretary of the board of the Oil Workers’ Union from 1906 to 1909, he organized the struggle for concluding a collective agreement with the entrepreneurs and conducted party work in Rostov-on-Don and in Kuban’. Between 1908 and 1911, Dzhaparidze was repeatedly arrested; he was finally deported for three years to Velikii Ustiug. Taking up work in the Tbilisi Bolshevik organization in June 1914, he was again arrested in May 1915 and deported to the village of Kamenka in Enisei Province. He soon escaped and returned to Tbilisi.

Dzhaparidze conducted revolutionary work among soldiers of the Russian Army in Trebizond (now Trabzon, Turkey) under the pseudonym of Baratov. Arriving in Baku after the February Revolution of 1917, Dzhaparidze was elected to the Baku Committee of the RSDLP and, together with S. G. Shaumian, N. N. Narimanov, M. Azizbekov, S. M. Efendiev, and I. T. Fioletov, headed the struggle of the Baku proletariat for the socialist revolution. In August 1917 he was a delegate from the Baku party organization to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik), where he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (B). Chairman of the strike committee in September 1917, Dzhaparidze led the victorious general strike of the Baku workers. He became vice-chairman of the Executive Committee of the Baku Soviet in December 1917 and chairman of this body in January 1918. In March 1918 he became a member of the Committee of Revolutionary Defense, which was in charge of suppressing the counterrevolutionary revolt of the supporters of the Musawat Party. While retaining this post, he became commissar of internal affairs of the Baku Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) in April 1918. In June 1918 he was appointed commissar of food supplies. After the temporary collapse of Soviet power in Baku on July 31, 1918, Dzhaparidze was arrested and shot by the Socialist Revolutionaries and British interventionists with the other Baku Commissars at the 207th verst (1.07 km) of the Trans-caspian Railroad on the night of Sept. 20, 1918.