Danush Shaverdian

(also Daniel Aleksandrovich Shaverdov). Born Jan. 11 (23), 1882, in the village of Igaat, in what is now the Armenian SSR; died Oct. 24,1941. Figure in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia. Member of the Communist Party from 1902.

The son of a dvorianin (nobleman), Shaverdian graduated from the faculty of law of the University of St. Petersburg in 1911. In 1902 he helped found the Union of Armenian Social Democrats, and in 1904 he began conducting party work in St. Petersburg and Tbilisi. He became a member of the executive committee of the Tbilisi soviet in March 1917, and in October of the same year he became a member of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the RSDLP(B). From 1918 to 1920, Shaverdian performed underground party work in Georgia, which was then controlled by the Mensheviks, and in Armenia, which was under the power of the bourgeois nationalist party Dashnaktsutiun. In 1919 he became a member of the Armenian Committee of the RCP(B) and the Foreign Bureau of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Armenia.

In 1921 and again from 1924 to 1928, Shaverdian was the trade representative of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in Turkey, and he organized the mass repatriation of Armenian working people. In 1922 and 1923 he served as people’s commissar of justice and deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Armenian SSR. Beginning in 1929 he was associated with the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade of the USSR.

Shaverdian was a delegate to the Fourteenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1925.