Said Gabiev

He was born on 28 May 1882 in the town of Opochka, Pskov Governorate. By nationality he was a Lak. His father, Ibragim Gabiev, was the headman of the village of Kumukh and was among the 30,000 condemned who were exiled to Pskov Governorate for taking part in the Dagestan uprising of 1877; he was permitted to take his family with him. In 1903 Said graduated from the gymnasium in Stavropol and entered the physics and mathematics faculty of St Petersburg University. ^{1 2}

He took an active part in the revolution of 1905. In 1912–1914 he edited and published in St Petersburg the newspapers Zarya Dagestana ("Dawn of Dagestan") and Musulmanskaya Gazeta ("The Muslim Newspaper"), and published in the Russian journal Musulmanin, edited by Khadzhet-Lashe Islamov and issued in Paris. In May 1917 he took part in the First Mountain Congress at Vladikavkaz (1–7 May 1917), where he delivered a report on public education, and was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Union of Highlanders of the North Caucasus and Dagestan. ¹

From the end of May 1917 he was a member of the Dagestan Socialist Group (leader Djelal ed-Din Korkmasov), and from August 1917 a member of the provisional Dagestan regional executive committee under Korkmasov. From May 1918 he headed the internal-affairs department of the Military Revolutionary Committee and then of the Dagestan regional executive committee. When Lazar Bicherakhov invaded in August 1918 he left Dagestan; at Vladikavkaz, until its capture by the White Cossacks, he edited the newspaper Revolyutsionny Gorets ("The Revolutionary Highlander"). During Denikin's occupation of the North Caucasus he went to Transcaucasia, where from November 1919 to March 1920 he agitated for volunteers for the Dagestan front organised under the Security Council headed by Korkmasov and Sheikh Ali-Hajji Akushinsky. In 1918–1919 he also chaired the People's Council of the Terek Soviet Republic, and he took an active part in defeating Najmuddin Gotsinsky's anti-Soviet revolt. ^{1 2}

In September 1920 he took part in the First Congress of the Peoples of the East at Baku and entered the "Council of Action" formed by the congress. During Korkmasov's absence on the Soviet–Turkish negotiations, Gabiev acted as chairman of the Dagestan Revolutionary Committee (December 1920 – March 1921); he was then People's Commissar of Education from April 1921 to 1922 and People's Commissar of Finance of the Council of People's Commissars of the Dagestan SSR from 1923 to 1926, and a member of the Dagestan Central Executive Committee. From 1927 he worked in administrative posts in Transcaucasia, as director of a factory in Tbilisi. He was subjected to Stalinist repression and spent a long time in NKVD prisons, but was released. ¹

He died on 18 February 1963 in Tbilisi, in his eightieth year, and was buried, in accordance with his will, in the village of Kumukh. ^{1 2}

He began writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, producing the scholarly work "The Laks, Their Past and Way of Life" and a number of revolutionary poems. In 1912–1913 he wrote in Russian the allegory "The Madman" and the unfinished tale "To the People". In 1927 his collection of poems "Sounds of the Lak Chungura" (Lakku chugurdannul chu) was published. He also translated a number of fables by Ivan Krylov and poems by Mikhail Lermontov into Lak. ¹

Streets in Makhachkala, Buynaksk and Derbent and in the villages of Shamkhal-Termen and Kumukh are named after Gabiev, as is a collective farm in Kumukh. Khasbulat Khasbulatov's biography Said Gabiev was published in Makhachkala in 1972, and S. A. Musaev's Said Gabiev: At the Sources of Dagestan's Autonomy in 2007. ¹

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