Martin Latsis


Martin Ivanovich Latsis was a Soviet politician, Bolshevik revolutionary and state security high officer from Courland.

Life

Latsis was a member of the Bolshevik Party since 1905, an active participant in the Russian Revolutions of 1905–1907 and 1917, a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, a member of the Collegium of the All-Russia Cheka and Chairman of the Cheka in Ukraine, and a member of VTsIK. Between 1932 and 1937, Latsis was a director at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics.
Latsis was the author of the book Dva goda borby na vnutrennom fronte, in which he advocated unrestrained violence against class enemies. He boasted of the harsh repressive policies used by the Cheka.
In 1918, while a deputy chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, he established the principle that sentences were to be determined not by guilt or innocence but by social class. He is quoted as explaining the Red Terror as follows:
On November 29, 1937, during the so-called "Latvian Operation", he himself was arrested, accused by a commission of NKVD and Prosecutor of the USSR belonging to a "counter-revolutionary, nationalist organization" and executed in 1938 by a firing squad.
In 1956, the Military Collegiate of the Supreme Court of USSR politically rehabilitated him.

Literature