Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Latvians were an even more effective ethnic group at both the highest and lowest levels of the Red Army and the Cheka. The Latvian Joachim Vacetis saved Lenin’s government in July 1918 when the junior party in the revolution, the Social Revolutionaries, assassinated the German ambassador and kidnapped . Vacetis’s disciplined Latvian troops shelled the building that held the Social Revolutionary division of the Moscow Cheka and destroyed the Social Revolutionaries, who commanded wide support among the peasantry, as a political force. Repression was no new role for Latvians in Russian tyranny: they had been hired to help Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great achieve absolute power. The Latvians in the Soviet Cheka were not, however, mere mercenaries. Latvia won its independence in 1919 in the turmoil of world and civil wars, but the new middle-class state had no patience with the left-wing agitators infesting Riga’s factories. Militant working-class Latvians became a community of exiles in Russia, numbering perhaps a quarter of a million and living from Petrograd to the Pacific, with their own journals and cultural centers. Some 12,000 Latvian soldiers, from Latgale in eastern Latvia, an area where Russian was understood, fought hard in the First World War, to be abandoned in 1917 by their Russian officers and cut off from their homeland by the Germans. Brutalized by their betrayal, they were natural recruits for the Red Army and the Cheka. In 1919 75 percent of the Cheka’s central management was Latvian. When Russian soldiers refused to carry out executions, Latvians (and a Chinese force of some 500 men) were brought in. Latvians won battles in the Urals against the White Army and Vacetis was commander of the Red Army for a year. From their formation in April 1918 to their dissolution in November 1920 the Latvian riflemen had an influence wholly disproportionate to their numbers.

Two formidable Latvians assisted : Jekabs Peterss and Martinņš Lacis. In Riga, Peterss was an agitator among the dock workers; in 1905 he was interrogated by the Tsar’s police during which his fingernails were ripped out. He immigrated to London with a group of Latvian and Russian Social Democrats to raise money by armed robbery. Peterss won notoriety in the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, when three policemen were killed. Peterss was working with so-called anarchists, including two of his cousins, Peter Piaktov (Peter the Painter) and Fritz Svaars. At the Old Bailey Peterss was acquitted, thanks to a barrister hired by the Social Democrat Party and to the laziness of Scotland Yard who, despite eyewitness evidence, let the policemen’s deaths be blamed on a dead anarchist. While on the run, Peterss challenged the British authorities: “You had best take care of your Van when riding up to the police station. . . . We mean KILL. . . . I am here in Manchester; We will have that bloddy swine of a Churchill before ere long the days are numbered. . . . Yours, Peters.”

Peterss married an Englishwoman, May Freeman, and had a daughter, Maisie, by her. In 1917 he went to Russia to join the Cheka. In Moscow Peterss entrapped the British agent Robert Bruce-Lockhart, who was sounding out possible anti-German collaboration between the Allies and the Bolsheviks. After the assassination of the German ambassador, when in a hysterical fit resigned his post for two months, Peterss took over as head of the Cheka. He subsequently remained its deputy chief, as head of the Petrograd Cheka. Like other Latvians, Peterss insisted that the Cheka should answer to nobody except the head of the government and that it must be free to carry out “searches, arrests, executions.” In Moscow Peterss led raids which killed a hundred anarchists, and in Petrograd he used the prerevolutionary telephone book to round up the middle classes, merchants, civil servants, intelligentsia, and officer corps as hostages for reprisals.

Peterss’s brutality earned him a posting to central Asia, where in the early 1920s he took charge of suppressing the nationalist rebellion by the Uzbek and Turkmen Basmachi. Yet, Robert Bruce-Lockhart testifies: “There was nothing in his character to indicate the inhuman monster he is commonly supposed to be. He told me that he suffered physical pain every time he signed a death sentence.”¹³ Clearly, the pain quickly abated; typical of Peterss was the joint Cheka-party operation with Stalin in Petrograd on June 12–13, 1919, involving 15,000 armed men. Hundreds of suspects, some merely relatives of deserters, were rounded up and shot.