Tskhakaia, Mikhail

(also Mikha G. Tskhakaia). Born Apr. 22 (May 4), 1865, in the village of Khuntsi, in what is now Gegechkori Raion, Georgian SSR; died Mar. 19, 1950, in Moscow; buried in Tbilisi. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1898.

Tskhakaia was the son of a priest. After graduating from the Kutaisi Religious School he entered the Tbilisi Religious Seminary, from which he was expelled in 1886 for disseminating revolutionary propaganda. He subsequently engaged in revolutionary work in Tbilisi, Batumi, and Kutaisi, and in 1892 and 1893 he helped establish the Social Democratic organization Mesamedasi. In 1897 he was exiled from the Caucasus, and in 1898 he began working for the Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) committee of the RSDLP and the newspaper Iuzhnyi rabochii. From 1900 to 1902 he was in prison.

In 1903, Tskhakaia became a leader of the Caucasian Union Committee of the RSDLP. In 1905 he was a delegate to the Third Congress of the RSDLP and helped organize the Baku soviet. He was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP in 1907, and from 1907 to 1917 he lived as an émigré in Geneva. He was a delegate from the RSDLP to the Seventh (Stuttgart) Congress of the Second International. In April 1917 he returned to Russia with V. I. Lenin.

Tskhakaia became a member of the Caucasian Regional Soviet in May 1917 and a member of the Caucasian Regional Committee of the RSDLP(B) in October. From 1917 to 1920 he served on the Tbilisi committee of the RSDLP(B). He was arrested in June 1919 in Kutaisi by the Menshevik government but was released in May 1920; he subsequently became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia. In 1921 and 1922 he served as a representative of the Georgian SSR in the government of the RSFSR.

From 1923 to 1930, Tskhakaia was chairman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Georgian SSR and a chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Transcaucasian SFSR, as well as a member of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. In 1920 he was named to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, and in 1931 he became a member of the International Control Commission.

Tskhakaia was a delegate to the Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP(B) and to the Second through Seventh Congresses of the Comintern. He served as a deputy to the first through third convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Tskhakaia was awarded the Order of Lenin.