Gevork Alikhanov

Gevorg Sargsi Alikhanyan (1897–1938), also known in Russian as Gevork Alikhanyan or Georgy Alikhanov , was a Soviet Armenian politician and statesman. Alikhanyan is best known for being the founding First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from 1920 to 1921. He was also a high-ranking member of Comintern before his arrest and execution during the Great Purge.

Early life Gevorg Alikhanyan was born in 1897 in Tiflis in the Russian Empire (modern day Tbilisi, Georgia) to an Armenian worker's family. He studied at Nersisian School in Tbilisi, where he befriended Anastas Mikoyan, a fellow Armenian student with similar communist ideals who would later become head of state of the Soviet Union. Alikhanyan was expelled for revolutionary activity in 1915.

During World War I, Alikhanyan volunteered to serve in the Imperial Russian Army on the Caucasian Front. he switched parties and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in March 1917. In 1935, he was a delegate to the 7th World Congress of the Comintern. However, as an employee of the Comintern, he also protected Josip Broz Tito from repression.

He was executed on February 13, 1938, at the Kommunarka shooting ground in Moscow. He was rehabilitated posthumously on October 24, 1954, during Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw.

Lusik Alikhanova grew up to be known as Yelena Bonner, a prominent Soviet dissident and human rights activist. She married Nobel Prize winning physicist Andrei Sakharov in 1972 and faced internal exile several times.