Silvestr Iasevich Todriia

Born Jan. 4 (16), 1880, in the village of Ianeuli, now in Chokhatauri Raion, Georgian SSR; died June 8, 1936, in Tbilisi. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia; Soviet state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1901.

Todriia was born into a peasant family. Between 1901 and 1915 he was engaged in setting up the RSDLP’s illegal printing presses in Baku and Batumi; he also worked for the Bolshevik underground press in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vyborg, and Tbilisi. He participated in the Moscow armed uprising of December 1905.

Todriia was subjected to repression on the part of both the tsarist and the Georgian Menshevik governments. In 1917 he became a member of the Tbilisi and Caucasian regional committees of the RSDLP. He was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. After the establishment of Soviet power in Georgia in February 1921, Todriia became chairman of the Tbilisi revolutionary committee. He served as people’s commissar of social security and of agriculture in 1921–22 and as people’s commissar of labor from 1927 to 1929. In 1929 he became secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Georgian SSR and of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Todriia was also a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.