Chodrishvili, Mikhail Iosifovich

(also Mikha Chodrishvili). Born Aug. 15 (27), 1853, in Signakhi, in what is now the Georgian SSR; died Dec. 25, 1929, in Tbilisi. Figure in the Russian revolutionary movement. Member of the Communist Party from 1896.

The son of an artisan, Chodrishvili became a worker in Transcaucasia in 1868. He began taking part in Narodnik (Populist) circles in 1873 and became an organizer of social democratic workers’ circles in 1895. From 1904 to 1909 his joiner’s workshop in Tbilisi was the clandestine meeting place of the Caucasian Union and Tiflis committees of the RSDLP.

Chodrishvili undertook party work in Rostov-on-Don in 1910 and in Tbilisi in 1913. Between 1917 and 1920 he was a member of the Tiflis party committee. He was arrested a number of times, first by the tsarist authorities and later by the Georgian Menshe-viks. In 1921 he became a member of the collegium of the Peoples’s Commissariat of Justice, a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia, and the chairman of the republic committee of the Society for Assistance to Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Construction. Chodrishvili was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Georgian SSR and of the Transcaucasian Federation.