Western Azerbaijan Community

Miryusif Mirabbas oglu Mirbabayev, was born in 1889 in Iravan. His father, Mirabbas Mirbabayev, a well-known representative of the Iravan intelligentsia, was a member of the Iravan City Duma.

Miryusif Mirbabayev received his first education at the Iravan Russian-Tatar school and gymnasium. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University in 1916. After the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, M. Mirbabayev worked first as a deputy secretary and then as a secretary in the diplomatic representation of Azerbaijan in Iravan.

As a member of the Iravan Muslim National Council in 1918–1920, Miryusif Mirbabayev appealed to both the foreign ministries of Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as the command of the allied troops in the South Caucasus, to prevent the massacres committed by the Armenians in the Iravan province.

After the establishment of the Soviet power in Armenia, Miryusif Mirbabayev worked in responsible positions in the Military Tribunal of the Armenian Revolutionary Committee, in the People’s Finance Commissariat, head of the teaching department and labor department at the Iravan Pedagogical Technical University. Miryusif Mirbabayev was a researcher at the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia, as well as a he was a member of the National Council of Minorities and the New Turkish Alphabet Committee under the People’s Education Commissariat.

Miryusif Mirbabayev, a polyglot who moved to Baku in 1933, tried himself in the field of linguistics. For some time, he was a scientific worker at the Azerbaijan Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1938–1941, he worked as a scientific secretary at the Institute of Dictionaries of the Academy. After the Dictionaries Institute was merged with the Language Institute, Miryusif Mirbabayev was appointed the head of the Dictionary and Terminology Department of the new institute. In 1944, he defended his dissertation on “The influence of the Azerbaijani language on the Armenian language” and received the scientific title of the candidate in philological sciences. In 1945, he was elected the first director of the Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR.

Miryusif Mirbabayev was one of the scientists who was awarded the “Stalin” prize in 1948 for the four-volume “Russian-Azerbaijani dictionary” prepared under the guidance of Academician Heydar Huseynov (1940–1946). He was one of the main compilers of many other dictionaries.

Miryusif Mirbabayev died in 1951 in Baku.