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Where Life Boils. The fact of Mikoyan's business acumen is everywhere put down to one reason: "He is an Armenian." Mikoyan himself is intensely proud of the Armenian reputation for shrewd trading, and of his own origin as a son of this small, hardy ethnic community.* He was born in 1895 in an Armenian village barely 60 miles across the Caucasian Mountains from Joseph Stalin's Georgian birthplace. His carpenter father sent him to an Armenian seminary in Tiflis, just across town from the school where Stalin had studied for the Russian Orthodox priesthood 20 years before. "My father insisted," said Mikoyan later, "that there is nothing better in the world than to be a priest and to be in God's service. But when I received my certificate, I had a very clear feeling that I didn't believe in God and that I had in fact received a certificate in materialist uncertainty; the more I studied religious subjects, the less I believed in God." The young seminarian, having already dabbled in liberal and Socialist politics, joined the Bolsheviks and in 1917 plunged into the thick of the revolutionary fight, keen to be "where life boils." Massacre and pillage were the order of the day. "The only time I ever directed a bank," Mikoyan once wryly told a visiting businessman, "was in Tiflis in 1917—when I ordered the vaults of the Imperial Bank blown open." In the Caspian oil center of Baku the 22-year-old revolutionary fought (and was wounded) at the barricades, rescued the famous Georgian Bolshevik Ordzhonikidze from advancing Russian anti-Bolshevik troops. Jailed when the Reds were driven out of Baku, Mikoyan escaped and fled with some 30 other Bolshevik leaders on a freighter bound for the Caspian's Red-held northern shore. But the ship's company voted to head instead for Krasnovodsk on the eastern shore, then seat of a British-backed anti-Bolshevik government.
What happened next is fuzzy "history." The official Soviet version is that on one prisoner was found a paper listing 26 commissars who were to receive the special party favor of food packages while in the Baku jail. These 26 were marched into the desert and shot. Young Mikoyan's name was not on the list, either through luck or by early practice in the art of survival. He was jailed instead, and a few months later was freed. He dashed to Moscow for his first meeting with Lenin and Stalin, then rode triumphantly back into Baku with Ordzhonikidze and Kirov at the head of the Red army.
Caucasian Suite. As the fog of civil war lifted, Mikoyan soon began showing his managerial flair. Party chief first in Nizhni Novgorod (Gorky) and then in Rostov, he won a name for neutralizing knots of resistance rather than shooting all opponents, and built such a record that in 1926 he was brought to Moscow and made Commissar of Internal and External Trade. That same year, at 31, he became an alternate member of the Politburo.