Sultan Majid Afandiyev

Sultan Majid Afandiyev (26 May 1887 – 21 April 1938) was an Azerbaijani physician, revolutionary and statesman, among the first Azerbaijani Marxists and a founder of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, and an organiser of the Hummet party, created to bring Muslim workers into the social-democratic movement. ^{1 2} He rose to chair the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (1931–1937), was arrested in the Great Terror and executed at Baku, and was rehabilitated posthumously in 1956. ^{1 3}

He was born at Shamakhi — the Azerbaijani and Russian articles give 14 [26] May 1887, Old Style and New Style, and the English and Arabic articles give 26 May — the son of a merchant and grandson of the Transcaucasian mufti. After his father's trading business collapsed following the 1902 Shamakhi earthquake, the family moved to Baku. ^{1 3} In Baku he was sent to a six-year school, where he first became acquainted with Marxism, and in 1904 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. His first encounter with the police came when he arrived at the search of a social democrat's apartment carrying leaflets, tore them up and threw them into a corner, where a neighbour who was a police agent picked up the scraps and informed on him. ¹ He later enrolled in the medical faculty of Kazan University, was imprisoned for taking part in student protests, qualified as a physician in 1915, and worked at a medical observation point — the "cholera barracks" — at Vasilsursk and then at Vladimirovka. ¹

He became one of the organisers of the Hummet party in 1904, created to bring Muslim workers into the social democratic movement, and recalled performing in it the duties of agitator, propagandist, organiser and newspaper worker, printing proclamations and illegal newspapers in Turkic by hectograph and typographic methods. ¹ He took part in the general strike of Baku workers in 1904 as a delegate at the negotiations with the oil industrialists that ended on 30 December 1904 in the first collective bargaining agreement in the history of the Russian labour movement — the so-called "fuel oil constitution" — reducing working hours and raising wages. ¹ In the 1905 Revolution he distinguished himself as a publicist, and in 1906 he spoke at the two-month strike of textile workers at Zeynalabdin Taghiyev's firm, which ended with the workers' demands fulfilled. ¹

After the February Revolution of 1917 he became a member of the Baku Council, the Hummet Committee and the Bolshevik committee, and in the Civil War he took part in the defence of Astrakhan. ¹ From 1918 to 1931 he held many posts: Commissar for Muslim Affairs of the Transcaucasus under the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Nationalities, deputy chairman of the Central Bureau of the Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East, extraordinary commissioner in Ganja province, where he led the suppression of the anti-Bolshevik revolt, People's Commissar of Lands (1921–1924) and then of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (1924–1927) of the Azerbaijan SSR, member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, deputy chairman and from 1931 chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR, and one of the chairmen of the Central Executive Committee of the Transcaucasian SFSR. ^{1 3 4}

At the 22nd Baku Party Conference in May 1937 he was accused of harbouring enemies of Soviet power, and at the 13th Congress of the Azerbaijan Communist Party on 5 June he rejected the charges; the first secretary, Mir Jafar Baghirov, confronted him over having named Mahammad Amin Rasulzade in a 1924 article, and when Afandiyev answered that historical truthfulness required it, Baghirov replied that this was "the language of Trotsky". ¹ He was arrested on 24 June 1937; witness accounts carried in the English article describe brutal beatings in interrogation to extract the required testimony, but at his trial he pleaded not guilty and retracted his statements as false, and on 21 April 1938 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death and he was executed at Baku the same day. ¹ In November 1955 the Prosecutor General Rudenko sent a note proposing his rehabilitation, the Presidium of the Central Committee accepted the proposal, and he was formally exonerated in 1956; the verdict at Baghirov's own trial in April 1956 found that Afandiyev and other leading workers of Soviet Azerbaijan had been groundlessly arrested "on the criminal orders of Baghirov". 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 Sultan Majid Afandiyev, and no source attests atheism for him personally either. Stated exactly, the sources give: the English article calls him a merchant's son and the grandson of the Transcaucasian mufti — family background, echoed in his party pseudonym Mufidzade, "the mufti's descendant", recorded by the Russian article; the articles record his offices, among them organising Hummet and the Commissariat for Muslim Affairs, which are posts, not attestations; and the Azerbaijani and Russian articles call him one of the first Azerbaijani Marxists, a political ideology, which under the museum's rule does not by itself attest personal unbelief (the wave-32 Akhundov precedent is two independent sources of the Encyclopaedia Iranica and scholarly kind). ^{1 3 2} Wikidata carries no religion value for him. ⁵ His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, on exactly what the sources give.

• 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.