Musabekov, Gazanfar Makhmud Ogly

Born July 14 (26), 1888, in the village of Pirebedil’, Kuba District, Baku Province (present-day Divichi Raion, Azerbaijan SSR); died Feb. 9, 1938. Soviet state and party figure. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1918.

The son of a peasant, Musabekov graduated from the faculty of medicine of the University of Kiev in 1917 and then worked as a doctor. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became chairman of the executive committee of the Kuba soviet, and in December he was named deputy chairman of the Baku Provincial Food Committee. From August 1918, Musabekov practiced medicine in Astrakhan, where he also served as chairman of the Muslim section of the Astrakhan committee of the RCP(B) and as one of the leaders of the city’s branch of the Azerbaijani social democratic organization, Gummet (Energy). From 1920 to 1922 he was a member of the revolutionary committee of the Azerbaijan SSR and the republic’s people’s commissar for foodstuffs. Between 1922 and 1928, Musabekov served as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and from 1929 to 1931, as chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR. In 1925 he became one of the chairmen of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and in 1931 was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Trans-caucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Transcaucasian Federation).

Musabekov was a delegate to the Fourteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the RCP(B), where he was repeatedly elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. He was a delegate to the Third Congress of the Comintern (1921) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Musabekov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.