Narimanov, Nariman Kerbalai Nadzhaf Ogly

Born Apr. 2 (14), 1870, in Tbilisi; died Mar. 19, 1925, in Moscow. Soviet government and party figure; writer and publicist. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.

The son of a petty merchant, Narimanov graduated from the Gori Teachers’ Seminary in 1890 and from the medical faculty of Novorossiia University in Odessa in 1908. He worked first as a teacher, then as a physician in Baku and Tbilisi. In 1905 he joined the Social Democratic organization Gummet and became a publicist, translating the program of the RSDLP into the Azerbaijani language. In 1909 he was arrested and exiled to Astrakhan.

From 1913, Narimanov did party work in Baku. In 1917 he became chairman of the local Gummet committee, a member of the Baku committee of the RSDLP(B), and editor of the newspaper Gummet. In the spring of 1918, Narimanov was made commissar for the city economy under the Baku Council of People’s Commissars. In 1919 he became head of the Near Eastern division of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR and a deputy people’s commissar of the RSFSR. In 1920 he was chairman of both the Azerbaijan Revolutionary Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Azerbaijan SSR. He was a member of the Soviet delegation to the Genoa Conference of 1922. From 1922, Narimanov was president of the Union Soviet of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic and was a cochairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. He was a member of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and of its Transcaucasian Regional Committee. Narimanov was a delegate to the Twelfth (1923) and Thirteenth (1924) Congresses of the RCP(B), at which he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee.

Narimanov was a founder, in 1894, of the first Azerbaijani public library and reading room that had literature in the native language. He wrote textbooks on Azerbaijani and Russian and translated N. V. Gogol’s The Inspector-General. The drama Ignorance (1894), the comedy Shamdanbek (1895), and Nadir-shakh (1899), the first historical tragedy in Azerbaijani literature, were all aimed against the feudal order. The realistic novel Bakhadur and Sona (parts 1 and 2, 1896) relates the tale of a tragic love and condemns national prejudices. Narimanov discussed problems of realism in his essays on literary criticism. He was the author of a memoir about V. I. Lenin. Narimanov is buried in Red Square near the Kremlin wall.