Mirsaid Khaydargalievich Sultan-Galiev (Tatar: Мирсәет Хәйдәргали улы Солтангалиев, romanized: Mirsäyet Xäydärğäli ulı Soltanğäliev,[1] pronounced [ˌmirsæˈjet xæɪˌdærɣæˈli ulɯ sɔlˌtɑnɣæˈliəf]; Russian: Мирсаид Хайдаргалиевич Султан-Галиев; 13 July 1892 – 28 January 1940), also known as Mirza Sultan-Galiev, was a Tatar Bolshevik revolutionary who rose to prominence in the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s.

Sultan-Galiev, the son of a teacher, was born on July 13, 1892, in the village of Elembet'evo, Ufa Guberniya, Bashkiria, then part of the Russian Empire.

At his father's school, he studied from age 8 to 15, learning Tatar and Arabic, history, geography, and mathematics, while also receiving a basic understanding of the Quran and Sharia.

All this, especially his knowledge of Russian, greatly helped him to gain entrance to the Kazan Teachers College (see Tatar State University of Humanities and Education) in 1907.

In 1912 he also started to publish articles in various newspapers in Russian and Tatar, initially under various pseudonyms, such as "Sukhoi [Dry one]," Syn naroda [Son of the People]," "Uchitel'-tatarin [Teacher-Tatar]," "Karamas-kalinets," and then from 1914 under his own name.

He seems to have absorbed amongst the city's diverse population of Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Russians, Tatars, and Iranians, a deep and growing dissatisfaction with the tsarist autocracy, its resistance to reform, and handling of the war effort.

Baku's political climate in combination with the 1916 anti-conscription uprising of Muslims in Central Asia led him to break with the reform-minded Jadidism of his youth and move towards revolutionary socialism.

In July that year he went to Kazan, where he met Mullanur Waxitov, with whom he helped set up the Muslim Socialist Committee, with a program close to that of the Bolsheviks.

In January 1918 the Central Commissariat of Muslim affairs in Inner Russia and Siberia (Muskom), was set up under the chairmanship of Waxitov, with Sultan-Galiev as representative of the Russian Communist Party.

[8] In the Muskom, Sultan-Galiev also met İsmail Firdevs, a Crimean Tatar revolutionary who became one of his closest ideological followers and public supporters.

They did this while English troops, seizing Jerusalem, appealed to Jews with the words: ‘Gather together quickly in Palestine, we will create for you a European state.’[10] During the Civil War he was active in organising the defence of Kazan against the Whites in August 1918 and liquidating opposition after they had been driven out.

He was also instrumental in ensuring that the Bashkir people, led by Zeki Velidi Togan, joined the Bolshevik side which weakened the military potential of Kolchak's army.

In April 1919 he again was rushed to the Eastern Front to help shore up the morale of the Tatar 21st division at Malmyzh after Kolchak's spring offensive had forced the Red Army to abandon Izhevsk to the Whites.

His view that the proletariat of the imperialist core, together with its bourgeoisie, would continue oppressing the "toilers of the East" after a socialist revolution in the core would have been carried out can be seen in a speech of his during the ninth conference of the Tatar Oblast party committee: If a revolution succeeds in England, the proletariat will continue oppressing the colonies and pursuing the policy of the existing bourgeois government; for it is interested in the exploitation of these colonies.

In order to prevent the oppression of the toiler of the East we must unite the Muslim masses in a communist movement that will be our own and autonomous.The above "quotation" is an excerpt of the speech attributed to Sultan-Galiev.

The reason for this was that if a revolution was to occur in an isolated manner, an imperialist country could easily exploit the resources of its colonies to defeat any revolutionary movement.

Galiev cited the rate of exploitation and how it was retained by preventing the rise of nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiments in colonies by violently cracking down on any such movement.

Sultan-Galiev cited the development of production technology which took place through the exploitation of the industrial workers of the metropolitan countries and similar practices in the colonies.

Galiev gave an example of the production and export of leather or cotton from Tibet or India to the British Empire, which was then used to make a shoe or a shirt and then sent back to the original country.

Firstly, the existing cultural material of the people of the Metropolitan, that being the division of the nation from private properties, collapses in on itself due to these contradictions.

Sultan-Galiev also believed in what he called "Energetic Materialism" as a means of enabling Socialist revolution in colonised and exploited nations in the formation of a "Colonial International".

[14] Sultan-Galiev wanted to give Marxism argued that the Russian Empire had oppressed Muslim society apart from a few big landowners and bourgeois.

He was, despite this attempt at synthesis, thought of by the Bolsheviks as being excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion[15] and, in 1923, he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviations and he was arrested and expelled from the party.

At the beginning of 1937 he was again arrested, and was forced to make a confession; he was convicted of being the "organizer and factual leader of an anti-Soviet nationalistic group," who led an "active struggle against Soviet power" and the party "on the basis of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism, with the goal of tearing away from Soviet Russia Turkic-Tatar regions and establishing in them a bourgeois-democratic Turan state."