Alexander Svanidze

Who was Alexander Svanidze?

Alexander Semyonovich "Alyosha" Svanidze was a Georgian Old Bolshevik and historian. He was a personal friend of Joseph Stalin and a brother of Stalin’s first wife Kato. Nevertheless, Stalin had him arrested during a purge in 1937. He was shot in prison in 1941.

Born of a petty noble family in a small village of Baji in western Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Svanidze was educated at Tiflis and later at Jena where he learned German and English and engaged in historical research of ancient civilizations. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and worked in the Bolshevik underground until being forced to leave independent Georgia in 1919. He worked for the Russian foreign office in the years 1920-1921 and then served as a People's Commissar for Finances of the Georgian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR in the years 1921-1922. In 1924, he was appointed a Soviet trade envoy to Germany and, upon his return to the Soviet Union, became Deputy Chairman of the Soviet State Bank in 1935.