Avis Nurijanyan

Avis (Avetis) Soghomoni Nurijanyan (; 3 December 1896 – 16 September 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician of Armenian origin who served as the People's Commissar for Military Affairs of the Armenian SSR from 1920 to 1921 and People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in 1921. He is infamous for his role in carrying out mass repressions immediately following the Sovietization of Armenia.

Biography Avis Nurijanyan was born in 1896 in the village of Vachagan (now a part of the city of Kapan) to a peasant family. He graduated from the Shusha Real School, then studied at the faculty of economics of the Kiev Commercial Institute from 1913 to 1917. During World War I, he served in the Russian Army on the Caucasus front. He was one of the chief perpetrators of the forced exile and repression of numerous political and military figures of the First Republic of Armenia in January 1921.

Bakhshi Ishkhanyan, an Armenian Marxist author, described Nurijanyan as "the Herostratus of Armenia. A sick young student operating under the influence of his constantly agitated brain, a total sadist and degenerate." The repressions that Nurijanyan conducted were one of the causes of the February Uprising of 1921, when Soviet power in Armenia was briefly overthrown by an ARF-led rebellion. The harsh methods of the Armenian Bolshevik leadership prompted Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin to send Alexander Miasnikian to take leadership and stabilize the situation in Armenia.

Later years and death Nurijanyan left Armenia and held various positions in the Communist Party bureaucracy in Leningrad and Ryazan from 1923 to 1930. He was a supporter of the Trotskyist Left Opposition and was consequently expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, although his party membership was restored in 1929.

Starting in 1930 he worked as the chairman of the kolkhoz center of the Transcaucasian SFSR, but as of 1937 he was not working. He worked in Tbilisi until 1937, when he returned to Armenia. Nurijanyan fell victim to the Great Purge of 1937–1938.

According some sources, he was arrested in June 1937 and died in prison that year, while another source reports that he was sentenced to death on 19 July 1938 and executed on 16 September 1938.