Jēkabs Peterss
Jēkabs Peterss was a Latvian Communist revolutionary and politician who played a part in the establishment of the Soviet Union. Together with Felix Dzerzhinsky, he was one of the founders and chiefs of the Cheka, the secret police of Soviet Russia. He was the Deputy Chairman of the Cheka from 1918 and briefly the acting Chairman of the Cheka from 7 July to 22 August 1918.
Early years
He was born on 3 December 1886 in Brinken volost of Kreis Hasenpoth, Courland Governorate, the son of Latvian farmers. He became a member of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1904. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905 he was arrested in March 1907 for the attempted murder of a factory director in Libau, but was later acquitted by the Riga military court in 1908. Peterss emigrated to England and lived in London, where he was a member of the London Group of the Social Democracy of Latvia and of the British Socialist Party.The Siege of Sidney Street
Peterss was a first cousin of Fritz Svaars, a Latvian anarchist, who was suspected of sabotage, robbery and of the murders of a shopkeeper and a policeman during the 1905 revolution, and was arrested and tortured in Riga, but escaped early in 1906. He moved to London, and was one of a gang who tried to rob a jeweler's shop in Houndsditch, in December 1910. Caught in the act, they killed three unarmed police officers. Svaars and a fellow anarchist were traced to a house in Sidney Street in January 1911, and opened fire on the police, setting off the Siege of Sidney Street which ended with the deaths of both suspects. Peterss was arrested at his home in Turner Street, London, on 22 December. Unlike his cousin, he did not attempt to resist arrest. In May 1911, he and three other Latvian emigres were tried in the Old Bailey. The judge ordered the jury to acquit Peterss on the charge of murder, for lack of evidence. After he had given evidence under cross-examination, he was acquitted of the separate charge of conspiring to commit a burglary.Family
In 1916, he married May Freeman, the daughter of a London banker, by whom he had already fathered a daughter, Maisie Peters-Freeman. After the October Revolution, he invited his wife and daughter to join him there, where they discovered that he had a new family. Maisie never left Russia and died there in 1971.October Revolution
Peterss returned to Russia in May 1917 after the February Revolution. In Riga, Peterss became one of the leaders of the Social Democracy of Latvia working at the front-lines of the Northern Front. During the German advance he moved to Valmiera where he was an editor of the party newspaper Cīņa. Peterss was a peasant representative of the Governorate of Livonia to the Democratic discussion initiated by Kerensky.Moving to Petrograd, he actively participated in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee in Petrograd. At that time he was preparing military units for the October Revolution. Afterward, he was a member of Cheka Collegiate, the Deputy Chairman of the Commission, the deputy head of the Moscow Cheka, and the chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal. He participated in the disclosure of the alleged Lockhart plot as well as leading the liquidation of the Left SR mutiny of 1918. Following Dzerzhinsky's resignation in the aftermath of the Left SR Uprising, assassination of Mirbach, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Peterss briefly served as the acting chief of the Cheka from 7 July 1918 until Dzerzhinsky resumed his duties on 22 August 1918. As one of the Cheka's leaders, Peterss was responsible for the first major Cheka operations involving killings. These were against alleged anarchists in Petrograd and later in May 1918 against anarchists in Petrograd and Moscow. He also was involved in the investigation of the SR attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918, for the indiscriminate Red Terror campaigns and reprisals that followed. He called it a "Hysterical Terror" in the newspaper "Utro Moskvy" of November 4, 1918. During these times appeared a term "room of souls" in numerous prisons such as Butyrka.
In March 1919, he was appointed as the Chief of internal defense in Petrograd, and then the Commandant of the reinforced raion. Following the retreat of the Yudenich forces he was appointed as the Commandant of the reinforced raion in Kiev in August 1919. Upon the sack of Kiev he was a member of the Military Council in Tula. In winter 1919–20 Peters became the deputy chairman of the Special Committee of the STO in providing military preparations on railways.
Post-revolution
In 1920, he represented the Cheka in the Northern Caucasus and served there as the Commissar of the Northern Caucasus Railways. There is a story that when workers in Rostov-on-Don came to him complaining about starvation, Peters told them: "Is this famine, when your Rostov garbage pits are chock-full of various garbage and leftovers? In Moscow, where the garbage pits are completely empty and clean - as if they had been licked clean - there is hunger there!"In 1922, for the direct command of military operations in Bukhara, RKKA commander S.S. Kamenev and Peterss were sent to purge the Bukhara party, military, and militia of Pan-Turkist and Pan-Islamist elements. Responding to Enver Pasha, the Soviet administration under the Turkestan Front, commanded by N. Kakurin and P. Pavlov, organized 2 cavalry brigades, 2 cavalry squadrons, and 1 rifle division, with roughly 7,500–8,000 soldiers and 20 machine guns. Peterss, and one of the first commanders of the Communist Party, along with S. Kamenev, commander of the RSFSR, were sent to Buhara to conduct operations against Enver.
During the Great Purge, as a part of the so-called "Latvian Operation", Peterss was arrested in December 1937, and then executed by the NKVD on April 25, 1938, at the Kommunarka shooting ground. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.