Born in Ufa into a working-class family, in 1915 he was drafted into the army, in 1916 he was an agitator of the committee of the RSDLP in Yekaterinburg.

In 1918–1919, he was the Commissar for Nationalities of the Kazan Council, a member of the Tatar-Bashkir Bureau of the Ufa Provincial Committee, and a teacher of Muslim military-political courses at the Political Department of the Central Muslim Military Collegium.

In November 1919, a delegate to the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East (CONV), was elected chairman of the Central Bureau of the CONV under the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (b).

[2] In 1920, Galiev became chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

The chairman of the special commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which investigated the assassination attempt on Said-Galiev, affirmed that "neither the 1st nor the 2nd group should be in the Tatar Republic".