Interior commissar of Soviet Lithuania, a Lithuanian communist leader killed in the Great Terror
He urged that Lithuania remain an independent state, yet imagined that independence as socialist.
A Lithuanian communist leader, he was commissar for internal affairs of Soviet Lithuania and Litbel in 1918 and 1919. In exile he worked in the Comintern and wrote the history of the Lithuanian labour movement; arrested in 1938, he was shot in 1940.
Career timeline
1906Joined the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (Central Committee member from 1907)
1909Arrested and sentenced to four years' katorga, later exiled to the Yenisei province
1917Deputy commissar for Lithuanian affairs in Petrograd, editor of Tiesa
1918–1919Commissar for internal affairs of the first Soviet Lithuanian government
1920Secretary of the Lithuanian CP's Foreign Bureau (Comintern executive representative from 1921)
1926–1935Chairman of the Comintern International Control Commission
Regional party boss of collectivization and the Great Terror who heard Stalin ask why there were so many spies on his watch
In September 1937, after Vareikis reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been identified and shot among Far Eastern railway workers alone, Stalin asked: 'Comrade Vareikis, why is it that there are so many spies in your area of work?'
Born into a Lithuanian working-class family, he worked as a lathe operator in Moscow factories and joined the Bolsheviks in 1913. During the Civil War he commanded the defense of Simbirsk and helped suppress the Left SR uprising. After heading the Central Committee press department, he served as First Secretary of the Central Black Earth, Voronezh, Stalingrad, and Far Eastern Territories in succession. During collectivization he personally directed the suppression of the Ostrogozhsk uprising and presided over troikas that convicted tens of thousands. In 1937, from his Far Eastern post, he oversaw the deportation of 170,000 Koreans to Central Asia and reported to Stalin that 500 spies had been uncovered among railway workers alone, only to be arrested that October and shot in 1938. Rehabilitated in 1956.
Career timeline
1913Joined RSDLP(b)
1918.01–06People's Commissar, Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic; Secretary, Regional Party Committee
1918.06–1920.08Chairman, Simbirsk Provincial Party Committee
1920–1921Chairman, Vitebsk Provincial Executive Committee; People's Commissar of Food
1921–1923Deputy Chairman, Baku Soviet
1923.08–1924.02Responsible Secretary, Kiev Provincial Party Committee
1924.02–10Responsible Secretary, Central Committee of CP(b) of Turkestan
1924–1930Candidate Member, Central Committee, VKP(b)
1924.10–1926.01Head, CC Press Department; Editor, Molodaya Gvardiya
1926.01–1928.04Secretary, Saratov Provincial Party Committee
1928.08–1934.06First Secretary, Central Black Earth Oblast Party Committee
1930–1937Member, Central Committee, VKP(b)
1934.06–1935.03First Secretary, Voronezh Oblast Party Committee
1935.03–1936.12First Secretary, Stalingrad Krai Party Committee
1937.01–10First Secretary, Far Eastern Krai Party Committee
1937.10Arrested
1938.07.29Sentenced to death and shot (Kommunarka)
Lithuanian officer and envoy in Berlin who founded the Lithuanian Activist Front behind the June Uprising of 1941
Mobilised into the Imperial Russian Army in the First World War, he was the first to enlist in the Lithuanian armed forces after independence in 1918, and on 1 January 1919 his men raised the Lithuanian flag over Gediminas’ Tower in Vilnius. He became Chief of the General Staff in 1925 but had to resign after opposing the 1926 coup. He was envoy to Germany in 1927–1930 and 1938–1941. After the Soviet occupation of 1940 he founded in Berlin the Lithuanian Activist Front, which sought to restore independence by working with the Nazis; named prime minister of the provisional government in 1941, he was held under house arrest by the Germans. In 1944 he was arrested for a memorandum demanding a Lithuanian government. After the war he settled in the United States, working at the Library of Congress. His antisemitic writings have made dedications in his honour controversial.
Career timeline
1919Raised the flag over Gediminas’ Tower
1925–1926Chief of the Lithuanian General Staff
1938–1941Envoy to Germany
1940–1941Founded the Activist Front; named provisional prime minister
The Saint-Just of the avant-garde, theorist of production art
«Only by jumping out of art will you understand it» — in the final note to his 1924 book on Nathan Altman, Arvatov distilled into a single sentence his methodological leap from formal analysis to social fact.
A Proletkult theorist and co-founder of LEF, he championed 'production art' — merging art with industry — and laid the foundation for Constructivist aesthetics. A frontline concussion forced him to stop writing by the late 1920s; he took his own life in 1940.
Career timeline
1912Began literary activity in Warsaw
1917SR party member, deputy chair of Tula Gubernia Committee, delegate to the 1st Congress of Soviets and Constituent Assembly
1919Joined RKP(b); served as commissar on the Polish front during the Civil War
1920–1923Proletkult theorist, INKhUK researcher, co-founded LEF and contributed to its journal
1923–1926Published *Art and Class* (1923) and *Art and Production* (1926); formulated the formal-sociological method and elaborated production art theory
1927–1930Published *Sociological Poetics* (1928) and *On Agitation and Production Art* (1930); worsening post-concussion illness curtailed his work
1940Died by suicide in Moscow after a long struggle with mental illness
