Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev
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Mirsäyet Xäydärğäli ulı Soltanğäliev (1892 - 1940?), usually known in English as Mirza Sultan-Galiev, was a Tatar Bolshevik who rose to prominence in the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s. He was later executed for being an independent ‘Muslim’ leader as part of the purges of former bolsheviks in the Soviet Union.
Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev was the son of a teacher born in the poor village of Elimbetvo, Ufa Guberniya, Bashkiria. He trained to be a teacher himself. He was drawn to revolutionary ideas during the abortive 1905 revolution. Following this defeat he moved to Baku, where he came to the attention of Nariman Narimanov.
In May 1917 Soltanğäliev participated in the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow and was elected to the All-Russia Muslim Council created by it. In July that year he went to Kazan, where he met Mullanur Waxitov, with whom he helped set up the Muslim Socialist Committee (MSC), with a program close to that of the Bolsheviks. In November 1917 he joined the Russian Communist Party. Following the establishment of Narkomnats in June 1917, Soltanğäliev was asked to become head of the Muslim section. In January 1918 the Central Commissariat of Muslim affairs in Inner Russia and Siberia (Muskom), was set up under the chairmanship of Waxitov, with Soltangaliev as representative of the Russian Communist Party. He was appointed the chair of the Central Muslim Military Collegium when it was established in June 1918. He wrote for Zhizn' Natsional'nostei (Life of the Nationalities).
He was a great reader of the Russian Literature. He translated works by Tolstoy and Pushkin into the Tatar and Bashkir languages.
- “Love for my nation which burdened my heart led me to socialism” he wrote in 1917.
Mirsaid wanted to give Marxism an Islamic face. He argued that Tsarist Russians had oppressed Muslim society apart from a few big landowners and bourgeois. Then, in 1923, he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviations and he was arrested and ejected from the party. Stalin was not sympathetic to his attempt to synthesise Islam, nationalism and communism for a revolution in the East in general and the Muslim in particular. Stalin therefore, executed Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev (probably in 1939 or 1940) for being an independent ‘Muslim’ leader.
