Sergei Kavtaradze

Born Aug. 15, 1885, in the village of Zovreti, in present-day Zestafoni Raion; died Oct. 17, 1971, in Tbilisi. Active participant in the Russian revolutionary movement; Soviet statesman. Member of the Communist Party (1903).

Kavtaradze came from a family of the nobility. He graduated in 1915 from the law department of the University of St. Petersburg, having engaged in party work in Kutaisi, Batumi, Tbilisi, Baku, and St. Petersburg. Between 1904 and 1906 he was a member of the Imeretia-Mingrelia Committee of the RSDLP and was persecuted by the government. Between 1912 and 1914 he was a contributor to Pravda. After the February Revolution in 1917 he became a member of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the RSDLP and editor of its newspaper, Kavkazskii rabochii. He was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). He became chairman of the Executive Committee of the Vladikavkaz Soviet in 1918. Beginning in 1919 he engaged in party work in Menshevik Georgia, where he was arrested several times. He worked as a representative of the RSFSR to the Menshevik government up until the establishment of Soviet power in Georgia in February 1921. Until May 1921 he was chairman of the Batumi and Adzhar revolutionary committees; he then became deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Georgia and people’s commissar of justice. In 1922–23 he was chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Georgian SSR. In 1923–24 he was an advisor with the Soviet Embassy in Ankara. From 1924 to 1928 he was first deputyprocurator of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In 1927 he was expelled from the party for participation in the Trotskyist opposition. He was reinstated in 1940. In 1941 he began to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR and became the country’s deputy minister of foreign affairs. Kavtaradze took part in the Yalta, Potsdam (1945), and other international conferences. From 1945 to 1952 he was the USSR ambassador to Rumania. In 1961 he was a delegate to the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU. Kavtaradze was awarded three Orders of Lenin, 2 other orders, and various medals.