Nariman Narimanov

Nariman Karbalayi Najaf oghlu Narimanov (14 April 1870 – 19 March 1925) was an Azerbaijani writer, physician, Bolshevik revolutionary and statesman, a pioneer of modern Azerbaijani literature who founded Baku's first public reading room in 1894, headed the government of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic (1920–1922), and sat as a chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR from 30 December 1922 until his death in Moscow. ^{1 2}

He was born at Tiflis into a middle-class Azerbaijani merchant family, which sent him to the Gori Teachers Seminary, from which he graduated. ¹ He moved to Baku in 1891 and became involved in cultural, educational, literary and political work; in 1902 he passed an external examination for a diploma from the Baku Boys' Gymnasium, enrolled in the medical faculty of the Imperial Novorossiya University at Odessa, and graduated in 1908. ^{1 2}

In 1894 he established the first public national reading room for the Turkic-Muslim community in Baku, stocked with books and periodicals sent from Istanbul, Sofia, Cairo, Tehran, Tabriz and elsewhere; it became an enlightenment centre for the Muslims of the Caucasus, and the Sheikh-ul-Islam denounced it as a dangerous hotbed, as the Russian article recounts. ^{1 3} He taught at a school in the village of Gizel-Adjal in Tiflis province, where he became closely acquainted with the hard life of the peasantry, and wrote the play Ignorance (1894, staged at Baku in 1895), Shamdan Bey (1895), the novel Bahadir and Sona (1896–1908), regarded as the first national novel in Azerbaijani literature, and the historical tragedy Nadir Shah (1899). ¹ As a fourth-year medical student he wrote a treatise titled Medicine and Islam, which the Arabic article lists among his works under the year 1910. ^{4 2} The English article's observation that his early novels advocated the abandonment of tired customs and religious superstitions is an attributed literary position, and is set out in the perspectives section below rather than in his faith record. ¹

During the 1905 Revolution he joined the Bolshevik party and led the student movement in Odessa; in 1909 he was arrested and sentenced to five years' internal exile in Astrakhan, returning to Baku on 15 July 1913, where he worked in hospitals as a doctor and administrator while continuing his literary and social work. ¹ In April 1917 he took part in the All-Caucasus Muslim Congress at Baku under the guidance of the Hummet committee; after the October Revolution he became chairman of the Azerbaijani social democratic party Hummet and People's Commissar of National Economy under the Baku Soviet, escaped the fate of the 26 Baku Commissars by fleeing to Astrakhan, and there headed the Near East Division of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat before becoming Deputy People's Commissar for Nationalities. ¹ He is widely viewed as instrumental in the Politburo's July 1919 decision to recognise Azerbaijan as an independent Soviet republic. ¹

In 1920 he was appointed chairman of the Azerbaijani Revolutionary Committee and then Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic; he took part in the Genoa Conference of April–May 1922 in the Soviet delegation, was elected chairman of the Union Council of the Transcaucasian Federation, and on 30 December 1922 was elected one of the four chairmen of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, becoming a candidate member of the party Central Committee in April 1923. ¹ The Azerbaijani article records that under his government the people's customs were respected and religious and traditional holidays were official non-working days. ⁴ The charismatic moderate nationalist clashed with Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin's associate in Transcaucasia, who had him transferred to posts in Moscow to remove him from the Caucasus. ¹

He died at Moscow on 19 March 1925 — the English article reports a heart attack in bed, while the Azerbaijani and Arabic articles call the death mysterious, and the museum records the disagreement rather than settling it — and he is buried in Mass Grave No. 7 of the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Red Square. ^{1 4 5} Trotsky called his death the second-biggest loss for the Eastern world after Lenin's, and Ordzhonikidze described him as "the greatest representative of our party in the East". ¹ During the purges of the late 1930s he was posthumously denounced, with all the members of Hummet, for alleged nationalism; after 1953 the denunciation was reversed, and in 1972 he was fully rehabilitated in his homeland. ¹ Azerbaijan Medical University, a Baku metro station, districts, streets and parks across Azerbaijan and other post-Soviet states bear his name. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

His faith. No source names a school for Nariman Narimanov. Stated exactly, the sources give, in both directions: the English article says his early novels advocated the abandonment of "tired customs and religious superstitions"; the Russian article calls one of his works a model of agitational, anti-religious propaganda literature — a characterisation of a work, not an attestation of its author's belief — and recounts the Sheikh-ul-Islam's denunciation of his library, which is his opponents' position. ^{1 3} On the other side, the Azerbaijani article records his government's respect for religious holidays and his student treatise Medicine and Islam. ⁴ The name-element Karbalayi is his father's pilgrim title — family background, not attestation. None of this amounts to two independent attestations of a school, nor to two independent attestations of personal atheism (the bar set by the wave-32 Akhundov precedent), so under the doubt rule his faith is recorded as unknown, with the positions preserved here as positions. Wikidata carries no religion value for him. ⁵

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.