Alexander Vladimirovich Grigoriev (Russian: Александр Владимирович Григорьев; 28 May 1891 – 25 August 1961), was a Mari Soviet artist, public figure and academician.

Grigoriev Art and History Museum is part of his legacy; his dream was to make it the "Small Tretyakov Gallery".

Therefore, he entered at the Kazan Art School (1910 - 1915), the major place of education and artistic culture of the Volga-Vyatka Territory.

Grigoriev believed his compatriots needed artistic enlightenment, and for this reason he planned to dedicate his life to art.

Grigoriev worked in the Department for Museums and Protection of Art and Antiquity Monuments of the People's Commissariat for Education.

[3] While living in the capital, Grigiriev acquired 50 paintings by famous artists, sculpture and porcelain for the Kozmodemyansk Museum.

[4] In the beginning of 1930s, A. Grigoriev was Deputy Director of the Tretyakov Gallery, art editor of the State Publishing House Gosizdat and member of the USSR Union of Artists since 1932.

[5] For several years Grigoriev lived there, in a house that was dilapidated by the Germans, earning money by writing signs for snack bars and cafes.

After the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, those who survived Stalinism awaited rehabilitation, lifetime or posthumous; "By the decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR dated June 16, 1954, Grigoriev A.V.

After rehabilitation, Grigoriev was openly remembered as the chairman of the AHRR, and was invited to an expanded meeting of the USSR Academy of Arts.

In 1956, Grigoriev was assigned a life-long pension of all-Union significance; in the same year he was elected a delegate to the 1st Congress of Soviet Artists.

Today, the State Prize of the Republic of Mari El in the field of fine arts are named after Alexander Grigoriev.

Alexander Grigoriev met his future wife Evgenia Baklanova, a Muscovite, while working at the Zemstvo Union as a student at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

"[9] According to the recollections of Sofia Krasilnikova, a Kozmodemyansk Komsomol member of the 1920s, the young man "received his first revolutionary baptism of fire in Kazan and experienced the cruelties of the provincial prison ...".

For his participation in revolutionary demonstrations in 1909, Grigoriev was expelled from the teacher’s seminary and sent home under police supervision, and then reinstated.

A a rural man from the hinterland, he took the side of reforms, supporting the ideas of social democracy, Bolshevism and a change of government.

Previously believing in the power of the revolution, Grigoriev then probably did not agree with the words of Nikolai Berdyaev about that time: "The Russian revolution was the end of the Russian intelligentsia ..."[12] After the October Coup, Grigoriev participated in the dispersal of the leadership of the Zemstvo Union headed by Prince Trubetskoy.

In December 1917, Grigoriev became a member of the reformed Main Committee of the Zemstvo Union, in which he worked as a statistician until its liquidation in late 1918.

Since December 1918, Grigoriev was a member of the RCP (b), becoming one of the first Soviet artists to be a communist, having already 20 years of party experience by 1938.

Grigoriev played a major artistic and political role in the development of the Soviet art and raised the level of cultural education in the Mari Territory.

"He was a holy soul-man, as I", lya Repin wrote about Grigoriev, "believed in the bright future of the new country, which he was building together with his like-minded people".

Life is so difficult that when you mentally dwell on such a positive phenomenon as helping worthy old artists, it becomes easier on your soul, and the environment no longer seems bleak.

"[15] In the words of D. Moschevitin, A. Grigoriev's fellow student in KHSH; "Passion-bearers, who in ancient times were canonized alive".