Mikhail Tskhakaya

Mikhail Grigoryevich Tskhakaya (1865, Martvili Municipality – 1950), a.k.a. Barsov, was a Georgian communist. Barsov was a senior leader in the Bolshevik movement in Georgia, having been active in revolutionary politics since 1880. In 1892 he helped found Mesame Dasy (third group), the first Georgian Socialist party. When the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded, he joined it. He saved the young Joseph Stalin from expulsion for Georgian nationalism in 1904. However, he made him write a credo renouncing his views and attend a series of lectures by him on Marxism. Despite this, they remained friends. In July 1906 Tskhakaya was Stalin's witness at his wedding to Ekaterina Dzhugashvili. On September 9 Tskhakaya and Stalin were among just six Bolsheviks at the Social Democratic conference in Tbilisi (the other 36 were Mensheviks). They shared a room at the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London. Neither were allowed to vote owing to Bolshevism's weakness in Georgia. In 1907, after a series of arrests and deportations, he went into exile in Switzerland where he visited Lenin in Geneva. He returned to Russia in 1917, alongside Lenin on the famous sealed train. From that point onwards, he was an influential leader of the Georgian Communist Party. He is buried at the Mtatsminda Pantheon.