Levon Isayevich Mirzoyan

Mirzoyan was born on 14 November 1897 to an Armenian peasant family in the village of Ashan, Shusha district, Elisavetpol Governorate. He joined the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) in 1917, went into party work in 1919, and from 1920 chaired the Azerbaijan Council of Trade Unions and sat on the collegium of the Azerbaijani Workers' and Peasants' Inspection. As secretary of the Baku Committee he and Sergei Kirov, without authorization, ordered that the processions of Shia flagellants on Ashura in the month of Muharram be stopped by force.

In January 1925 the Azerbaijani party organ Kommunist published an article complaining of language discrimination against Turks (Azerbaijanis) in Baku, criticizing a Komsomol cell in the village of Binagadi whose members had opposed translating Russian speakers' remarks into Turkic. Mirzoyan, as secretary of the Baku Committee, reported the results of the inquiry to Lazar Kaganovich in person and called the newspaper's criticism an invention. From 1926 to 1929 he was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.

Baku's workers, mostly Azerbaijanis, were then hungry and short of clothing and medical supplies. Azneft, the core of the Baku economy, answered directly to the centre, dumped oil on the world market at the oil workers' expense and paid no taxes, and the local party organization had no right to control it. Mirzoyan repeatedly asked the Central Committee to pay part of Azneft's revenue into the local budget. In 1927, during a conflict between Turkic workers and Russian and Armenian specialists paid ten times as much, he took the workers' side and backed their priority right to skilled jobs, that is, indigenization. He nevertheless opposed radical indigenization that would put Turks in every key post, and thought it wrong to require Russian and Armenian engineers to speak Turkic. In March 1927 he told the Central Committee members: "After all, in Russia they don't require foreign specialists to speak Russian either."

Nepotism was common in the Azerbaijani leadership, with powerful families placing relatives in the state apparatus. The historian Jörg Baberowski notes that Mirzoyan too placed relatives in lucrative local government posts, but that the communists had no alternative if they did not want to lose their influence. On 1 July 1929 the Politburo decided to replace Azerbaijan's party and state leadership. Stalin and his circle considered the party organization "healthy" but its political leadership "unsatisfactory," and laid the main responsibility on Mirzoyan, who through the Baku Committee effectively ruled the republic's multi-ethnic centre. He was removed along with Karayev, Kasimov and others, and in 1929–1933 served as secretary of the Perm district committee and then second secretary of the Ural regional committee.

On 21 January 1933 Mirzoyan succeeded Filipp Goloshchyokin as First Secretary of the Kazakh Regional Committee. Between 1931 and 1933 from 1 million (Robert Conquest's estimate) to 2 million people (the estimate of Abylkhozhin, Kozybayev and Tatimov, 1989) had starved to death in Kazakhstan, and 48 percent of the native population had died or left the republic. He wrote to Kaganovich: "I left Moscow convinced that the situation in Kazakhstan was difficult, but what I saw here exceeded all my expectations." He reported that on the roads and even in the towns the militia picked up the bodies of the starved almost every day.

A memorandum he sent Stalin and Molotov in 1933 effectively began Union aid to the Kazakh ASSR, including livestock bought in China. In 1933 the harvest was decent, the mass slaughter of livestock stopped, and on Mirzoyan's orders 1,117,000 head of livestock were distributed to collective farmers over three years. The historian Sarah Cameron points out, however, that soon after his arrival he declared those who fled or stole grain "enemies" of the Soviet state and announced "severe measures" against them — a definition that could cover any starving refugee — and pushed for brutal punishments such as shootings. He sacked cadres who sent "teary telegrams" asking for more food and cut their regions off from aid, and, copying a technique used against starving Ukrainians, blacklisted several regions, trapping starving Kazakhs where no food could be found. Cameron also credits the end of the famine largely to good weather and a large harvest in 1934.

During his tenure construction of the Ulba hydroelectric station began, work continued on the Ridder combine, the Chimkent lead works and the Karaganda coal basin, and at the end of 1935 the roughly 800-kilometre Guryev–Orsk oil pipeline was completed. By the mid-1930s the native population made up 46.5 percent of the industrial workforce. The first congress of Kazakhstan's writers was held, the Kazakh Musical Theatre, the State Philharmonic and the Kazakhstan base of the Academy of Sciences were founded, and the poet Abai was "rehabilitated." In 1936 the Kazakh ASSR became a Union republic, and in 1937 the Kazakh constitution drafted under his direction was adopted. He received the Order of Lenin on 20 December 1935, and was a candidate member (1927–1934) and full member (1934–1938) of the VKP(b) Central Committee. His wife, Yulia Tevosyan, sister of Ivan Tevosian, headed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Kazakhstan.

At the February–March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin and Malenkov criticized Mirzoyan, along with several other regional leaders, for inflating a local "cult of personality" and for nepotism. On his initiative the republic's highest peak, Khan Tengri, had been renamed "Mirzoyan Peak," and in 1936–1938 the city of Taraz was called Mirzoyan. The former Chekist Mikhail Shreyder recalled that on public holidays in Kazakhstan buildings carried portraits of Mirzoyan several times larger than the official images of Stalin. Baberowski reads the criticism as a warning to a man who kept enlarging his personal power instead of putting it at the service of the centre.

He also carried out the Great Purge with initiative. In his report to the First Congress of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan in 1937 he said: "All our party propaganda work was saturated with the struggle against the anti-Leninist and anti-Bolshevik groups of Trotskyists, Zinovievites and Rightists, who have turned into a fascist band of terrorists, saboteurs and spies." On 27 July 1937 he telegraphed Stalin naming Uzakbay Kulumbetov, chairman of the Kazakh Central Executive Committee, as a leader of the conspiracy and asking permission to arrest him; Stalin wrote "no objections," and Kulumbetov was arrested and shot. When Pravda on 22 September rebuked the Kazakh leadership, in the article "Led by the Bourgeois Nationalists," for not arresting prominent people in the republic, he retorted that the article was "70 percent lies." Yet on 3 October he signed a cipher telegram asking for an additional execution quota for 3,500 "anti-Soviet elements," then the Kazakh Central Committee bureau decision "On Anti-Soviet Elements" of 19 November and a telegram of 1 December asking to raise the repression limit by 1,600 people. He sat on the special troika created under NKVD Order No. 00447.

At the same time, knowing he could not change the centre's course, he tried to resist groundless accusations against some local leaders and held that cadres should be educated rather than destroyed. According to Grigory Pomerants, in 1937 he warned Suren Agamirov and Olga Shatunovskaya, who had criticized his authoritarian style, of their impending arrest, and the Kazakh journalist Bigeldy Gabdullin writes that he warned the writer Mukhtar Auezov of arrest and insisted he leave Kazakhstan. In the winter of 1938 he telegraphed Stalin and Molotov objecting to an order to move Koreans deported to the south of the republic to the north, where they could not grow rice, and voiced doubts about the NKVD's methods.

On 15 May 1938 he received a telegram from Stalin summoning him to Moscow, and the next day the Kazakh Central Committee relieved him as First Secretary. He was arrested on 23 May on the way to Moscow and held in Lefortovo prison, and on 26 February 1939 he was shot on a sentence of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. His ashes were buried in the "grave of unclaimed ashes" at Moscow's Donskoy Cemetery. He was rehabilitated in 1958.

Judgements of him still diverge. In 1997, at the initiative of Kazakhstan's Armenian community, a street in Aktobe was named after him for his centenary and a stele erected. The compilers of a 2001 documentary collection published by the Archive of the President of Kazakhstan wrote that he helped Kazakh agriculture out of deep crisis, furthered industry, culture and national cadres, and at first tried to restrain the repressions, but took an active part once he realized he was a potential victim himself. After documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History were published, Kazakhstan's onomastic commission on 26 June 2014 renamed Mirzoyan Street in Astana after Kanysh Satpayev, recording that "historians have proved that Mirzoyan contributed to the destruction of the Kazakh intelligentsia." Mirzoyan streets in Taraz (2015), Almaty (2016), Aktobe (2018), Kokshetau (2018) and Uralsk (2022) were renamed in turn, and the Aktobe monument was removed in 2018. The Armenian ambassador saw this as erasing his memory purely because of his ethnicity.