Levon Mirzoyan

Levon Isayevich Mirzoyan (Լևոն Եսայիի Միրզոյան; Левон Исаевич Мирзоян) (November 14, 1897 – February 26, 1939) was the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Azeri SSR from January 21, 1926 to August 5, 1929 and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR from December 5, 1936 to May 3, 1938. He was executed during the Great Purge.

History
Mirzoyan was born in the village of Ashan in Shusha District of the Elisabethpol Governorate in an Armenian peasant family. In 1917, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1926–1929, he was the First Secretary of the Communist Part of Azerbaijan. In 1929–1933, he was the Secretary of the Perm Regional Committee, then the 2nd Secretary of the Ural Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In 1933, he became the 1st Secretary of the Regional Committee of the Party of Kazakhstan. In 1937, he became the 1st secretary of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Kazakhstan. He was a member of the CEC of the USSR.

According to Aimdos Bozjigitov, Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Armenia, Mirzoyan "He did very much for the formation and development of Kazakhstan’s economy." He also added that "Kazakh people call him Mirza-jan, and so far all remember him with gratitude."

In 1938, Mirzoyan sent a telegram to Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, in which he expressed his disagreement with the decision to move the Koreans deported to Kazakhstan in 1936 from Primorye, in the southern part of the republic, to the north, where they could not engage in rice cultivation. He also expressed his doubts about the working methods of the NKVD (the Soviet secret service later known as the KGB). In the summer of 1938, Mirzoyan was arrested and detained in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. On February 26, 1939, he was executed. He was rehabilitated in 1958.