Built the world's largest bomber force, then died the death he had sentenced others to
“He would personally inspect flying officers… it is chiefly owing to him that the Air Force is the powerful weapon it is today.” — defector Alexander Barmine
Latvian Bolshevik who built the Red Army Air Forces into the world's largest bomber fleet. As VVS commander from 1931, Alksnis personally earned his pilot's wings, flew almost daily, and oversaw the sharashka that produced the Polikarpov I-5 fighter. He sat on the Special Judicial Presence that condemned Tukhachevsky and seven other generals to death in June 1937, insisting on the death penalty for every defendant. Arrested in the Latvian Operation that November, tortured into confessing to espionage, and shot at Kommunarka in July 1938.
Career Timeline
- 1916Joined Bolshevik Party at Valmiera teachers' seminary
- 1919–21Commissar, 55th Rifle Division; Military Commissar of Don Region
- 1924–26Graduated Frunze Academy; staff organizational posts in Red Army
- 1926–31Deputy Head of VVS RKKA; earned fighter pilot wings at Kacha school, 1929
- 1931–37Commander of VVS RKKA, member of Revolutionary Military Council; built world's largest bomber force
- 1937.06Most hardline member of tribunal sentencing Tukhachevsky group to death
- 1937.11Arrested in Latvian Operation; shot at Kommunarka, 29 July 1938
- 1956Posthumously rehabilitated
Related historical events
Civil War: Commissar of the 55th Rifle Division
In May 1919 Alksnis joined the Red Army, serving as military commissar of Oryol Province before becoming commissar of the 55th Rifle Division that September, a unit he had helped form. Composed largely of Latvians, the division earned a reputation as one of the harshest in the Civil War. During the suppression of the Ural Cossack uprising in the Orenburg region, Alksnis instituted decimation: one in ten villagers from settlements that had supported the rebels was publicly executed. After the capture of Orenburg, suspected Cossack sympathizers were hanged and their bodies left on display for days as a 'lesson.'
Transferred to the Don region as military commissar, Alksnis hunted down draft evaders, executing some on the spot and forcing the survivors into Red Army service. Even Trotsky judged the brutality excessive: Alksnis was recalled and demoted to assistant commander of the Oryol Military District, then sidelined into the reserves of the People's Commissariat of Defence. He spent the years through 1924 without a substantive post, enrolled pro forma at the Frunze Military Academy. One of the two Orders of the Red Banner he received from this period was, according to Latvian historian Arnis Lanskoy (1991), awarded for his 'services' in Orenburg and the Don basin.