Ivan Sturua

Born Dec. 18 (30), 1870, in the village of Kulashi, now Nabakevi, Samtredia Raion, Georgian SSR; died Apr. 13, 1931, in Tbilisi. Soviet party and state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1896.

Sturua, the son of peasants, worked in railroad workshops in Tbilisi from 1889. One of the founders of the Social Democratic organization in Tbilisi, he was a member of the RSDLP committee. In 1900 he became a member of the Baku committee of the RSDLP. He worked in underground printing shops of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Baku (1902–05), St. Petersburg (1906), and Vyborg (1907) and was repeatedly arrested and exiled. Having served as chairman of the soviet of Kulashi Volost (small rural district) in 1917, Sturua headed the Samtredia Bolshevik organization after the October Revolution of 1917. In 1918–19, after the Mensheviks seized power in Georgia, Sturua worked in the underground and was a member of the Kutaisi district and provincial committees of the RSDLP(B) and of the committee of Western Transcaucasia. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia in 1920–21 and chairman of the party collegium of the Transcaucasian regional control commission of the ACP(B) from 1921 to 1931, serving concurrently as people’s commissar of agriculture of the Georgian SSR from 1922 to 1924. Sturua was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) at the Thirteenth through Sixteenth Party Congresses and was a member of the central executive committees of the Georgian SSR, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, and the USSR.