Bekzadian, Aleksandr

(also A. Arutiunovich Bekzadian). Born 1879; died Aug. 1, 1938. Soviet statesman and party leader. Member of the Communist Party from 1903.

Bekzadian was born in the city of Shush to the family of a civil servant. He studied in the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and graduated from the University of Zurich (1911). In 1904 he became a member of the Baku Union Committee and in 1905 a member of the Transcaucasian Union Committee of the RSDLP. He was chosen as a delegate to the fourth congress of the RSDLP (1906) but was arrested en route to the congress. After escaping from prison he emigrated (1906). He took part in the Paris conference of the Bolsheviks (1911), at which he was chosen as a candidate to the Committee of Foreign Organizations of Bolsheviks. He participated in the Basel congress of the Second International (1912) and was a delegate of the RSDLP to the congress of the German Social Democratic Party in Jena (September 1913). He returned from abroad in 1914 and carried out party work in the Transcaucasus. After the February Revolution he worked in Baku and then in the Northern Caucasus. In 1919–20 he was a member of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1920–21 he was acting chairman of the Revolutionary Committee and peoples’ commissar of foreign affairs of Soviet Armenia. He was a delegate to the tenth congress of the RCP (Bolshevik) in 1921. In 1922 he was a member of the Soviet delegation to the Genoa conference. From 1922 to 1926 he worked in the Trade Agency of the USSR in Germany. From 1926 to 1930 he was vice-chairman of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars and peoples’ commissar of trade of the Transcaucasian SFSR. From 1930 to 1934 he was the ambassador of the USSR to Norway, and from 1934 to 1937 he was the ambassador to Hungary.