Kerim Mamedbekov

Born Mar. 15 (27), 1899, in the village of Ersi, in present-day Tabasaranskii Raion, Dagestan ASSR; died Sept. 7, 1938. One of the leaders in the struggle for Soviet power in Dagestan. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1917. The son of a clerk.

Mamedbekov joined student revolutionary circles in Derbent in 1915. In 1917 he helped organize the committee of the Social Democratic group Gummet. In 1918, Mamedbekov became a member of the executive committee of the Derbent soviet and people’s commissar for transport in the Derbent Council of People’s Commissars. In August 1918 he moved to Astrakhan, where he became a member of the Muslim section of the provincial committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), a member of the bureau of the organization Gummet, and a member of the provincial executive committee. Later he was a military commissar in the Red Army. In 1920, Mamedbekov was made the chief of the Gortsy division of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) for the Restoration of Soviet Power in the Northern Caucasus. He was also oblast military commissar of Dagestan, a member of the oblast committee of the RCP(B) and the Revolutionary Committee, and commissar extraordinary of southern Dagestan.

From 1921 to 1931, Mamedbekov was chairman of the Dagestan Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), which became the Dagestan branch of the OGPU in 1922, and people’s commissar for internal affairs of the Dagestan ASSR. At the same time, from 1925 to 1928, he was people’s commissar for finance, and from 1928 to 1931 chairman of the State Planning Commission and first vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Dagestan ASSR. From 1931 to 1937 he was chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Dagestan ASSR. Mamedbekov was a member of the Caucasus krai committee of the ACP (Bolshevik) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Dagestan ASSR and the USSR. He was a delegate to the Seventeenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1934. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.