Sultanzade: the forgotten revolutionary theoretician of Iran: a biographical sketch

Avetis Mikailian, better known as Sultanzade, was born in 1890 in Maragheh, a small town in northwestern Iran, to an extremely poor peasant family. According to an Armenian source, he attended a small Armenian school in his native town between 1903 and 1906, where the first section of Hnchak (the Armenian left Social-Democratic Party) had been founded in 1896. A former director of that school, Alexander Der-Vartanian, has reported that the young Avetis was sent to Djamaran, an Armenian ecclesiastical college in Ejmeyasin, near the city of Yerevan, although his father, Husayn Sultan, and his mother, Maryam Badji, had already embraced the Muslim faith. The school director relates that the young Avetis had, during the course of his studies, been strongly influenced by the Hnchak Party, a majority of whom later turned to Bolshevism.