Ivan Dmitrievich Orakhelashvili

Born May 29 (June 10), 1881, in Kutaisi; died Dec. 11, 1937. Soviet governmental figure and party leader. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

Orakhelashvili was of dvorianstvo (noble or gentry) origin. He studied in the medical faculty of the University of Kharkov and entered the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1902.

While in St. Petersburg, he took part in the Revolution of 1905–07. In 1906 he was arrested in connection with the Avlabar Press affair. After graduating from the Military Medical Academy in 1908, Orakhelashvili worked as a doctor in Transcaspian Oblast and from 1914 to 1917 served as a medical officer with the field army. In 1917 and 1918 he was chairman of the Vladikavkaz committee of the RSDLP(B) and the Vladikavkaz soviet and a member of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the RSDLP(B). He was arrested in 1918 by the Menshevik government of Georgia.

From 1920 to 1921 Orakhelashvili was chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia and a member of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B). From 1921 to 1925 he was chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Georgia, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Georgia, and chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

Orakhelashvili was deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR between 1923 and 1925. From 1926 to 1929 he was first secretary of the Transcaucasian Krai Committee of the ACP(B) and at the same time editor in chief of the newspaper Zaria Vostoka. He was on the editorial board of Pravda in Moscow in 1930. The following year he again became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Transcaucasian Republic; he also served as first secretary of the Transcaucasian Krai Committee of the ACP(B). From 1932 to 1937 he was deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the ACP(B). He was on the chief editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia from 1927 to 1930.

Orakhelashvili served as a delegate to the Twelfth and the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Party Congresses. He was elected a candidate member to the Central Committee of the ACP(B) at the Twelfth and Fourteenth Party Congresses and a member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) at the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses. At the Seventeenth Congress (1934) he was elected a member to the Central Auditing Commission.

Orakhelashvili was the author of works on the history of Bolshevik organizations and socialist construction in Georgia and Transcaucasia.