A native of
Nagorno-Karabakh, Ter-Gabrielyan was born in
Shushi to the family of a tailor. He became a member of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902. From 1904, he was a communist activist in
Baku. In 1918 during the period of the
Baku Commune, he was the minister of oil and the chairman of the Emergency Commission. In 1920 he served as a member of the Revolutionary Committee of Armenia, then in 1921 became the permanent representative of
Armenian SSR (later from 1923 to 1928 – of the
Transcaucasian SFSR) in the
Russian SFSR. He was known to refer to Beria as "an upstart, an adventurer, a forceful brute," and "a dangerous bastard." On 25 June 1937, Ter-Gabrielyan fell victim to the
Great Purge and was arrested in
Moscow. He was kept at
Butyrka prison and "transferred to Armenia on July 3." While under NKVD interrogation, Ter-Gabrielyan "either jumped or was pushed from the third-floor window" of the Armenian NKVD building in
Yerevan on 21 August. He was posthumously
rehabilitated during the
Khrushchev Thaw on 26 April 1956. == See also ==