Heydar Aliyev

Heydar Aliyev was born on May 10, 1923, in the city of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan. Upon completion of the Nakhchivan Pedagogical College in 1939, Heydar Aliyev was enrolled in the Architecture Department at the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute (nowadays the State Oil Academy), however, World War Two hampered those studies.
As of 1941, Heydar Aliyev had been employed as the Chief of Division at the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the Council of People’s Commissars in the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, and in 1944 he was admitted to the state security agencies. With special higher education and training courses in Moscow and Leningrad (nowadays St. Petersburg), Heydar Aliyev had also graduated from the History Department of Azerbaijan State University in 1957. With 25 years of experience in the state security agencies, he was appointed as the Deputy Chairman of the Committee for the State Security at the Cabinet of Ministers of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan in 1964 and promoted to the position of the CSS Chairman in 1967 with the Major General rank conferred in the same year.