People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1873–1938 ✕ Executed

The Red Army's first commander-in-chief: an Imperial colonel who built the revolutionary armed forces

When Left SR rebels seized central Moscow in July 1918, Vatsetis's Latvian riflemen subdued them with pre-dawn artillery. The Bolshevik government owed its survival that morning to his division.

Known in Latvian as Jukums Vācietis and in Russia as Ioakim Ioakimovich Vatsetis (Иоаким Иоакимович Вацетис). Born to a landless Latvian peasant, he became a tsarist officer and then, after the Revolution, the Soviet Republic's first commander-in-chief of all armed forces, forging the embryonic Red Army. In July 1918 his Latvian Rifle Division suppressed the Left SR armed uprising in Moscow, saving the Bolshevik government at a moment of extreme peril, and he then led the Eastern Front to check the White advance. A non-party military specialist who worked closely with Trotsky and Lenin, he was arrested on suspicion of treason in 1919, removed from command, and spent the rest of his career as a military scholar and professor. Swept up in the Great Terror, he was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1889–1938 ✕ Shot in

The Latvian Bolshevik who built Soviet military intelligence and was consumed by the purges

When the secret residents' conference in Denmark was uncovered in February 1935 and four senior officers of the central apparatus were seized at once, Berzin submitted his resignation.

Born in 1889 into a Latvian farm-labourer family, born Pēteris Ķuzis, and executed in 1938. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905, led guerrilla activity in Latvia, and after serving a katorga sentence for killing a policeman escaped from Siberian exile in 1914. Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Soviet Latvia in 1919 and in Red Army intelligence from 1920, he headed the Fourth (Intelligence) Directorate from 1924 to 1935 and built the Soviet military-intelligence system. Chief military adviser to the Spanish Republic in 1936, he returned as intelligence chief in 1937, was arrested that November and executed on 29 July 1938; rehabilitated in 1956.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1895–1937 ✕ Executed

Latvian-born Civil War hero turned defendant in the Tukhachevsky trial

On the night of 7 August 1920, Eideman's Right-Bank Group crossed the Dnieper to seize the Kakhovka bridgehead, a position sixty kilometres from Perekop that turned the flank and rear of Wrangel's army.

A Latvian-born Soviet commander and writer whose defence of the Kakhovka bridgehead as 13th Army commander helped break Wrangel's offensive from Crimea. He later trained Red Army cadres at the Frunze Military Academy and built the Osoaviakhim civilian defence apparatus, but in 1937 he was shot as a defendant in the Tukhachevsky trial and rehabilitated in 1957.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1897–1938 ✕ Executed

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.