Mir Jafar Baghirov §

Born in Quba in 1896; chaired the Azerbaijani Cheka 1921–27 and the Azerbaijani GPU thereafter, building a personal security apparatus that delivered him the First Secretaryship of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan from December 1933 until his arrest in March 1953. Direct client and confidant of Lavrentiy Beria from their shared Baku Cheka period; presided over the Azerbaijani Yezhovshchina (1937–38), in which roughly 27,000 people were arrested and at least 7,000 executed, including most of the original Müsavat and Hummet cohorts. Implemented Stalin's 1948 deportation order against Armenian-SSR Azerbaijanis from the receiving end and oversaw the demographic policies that lowered the Armenian share of the NKAO's population from roughly 94% in 1923 to under 76% by 1979. Removed and arrested after Beria's fall on 26 June 1953; tried in Baku in April 1956 and shot the following month, the highest-ranking Soviet official to be executed for crimes of the Stalin era.