Posted 13 March 2003 - 01:04 PM
I posted some of this to Chorny on another thread:
As early as the year 1919 the All-Russian Che-Ka had come to have 2000 persons on its personal staff, with three-fourths of them natives of Latvia. Indeed, Letts, from the beginning, obtained, and retained, a special position in this regard, and would be engaged by Che-Kas in batches of whole families, and render those Che-Kas faithful service. Thus our modern Letts might be likened to the ancient mercenaries. So much was this the case that the Muscovite Che-Ka came to be known as "the Lettish Colony." A propos of the attraction which the institutions of Moscow had for Latvia's population, the Bulletin of the Left Social Revolutionary Party remarked: "Letts flock to the Extraordinary Commission of Moscow as folk emigrate to America, and for the same reason - to make their fortunes." And the fact that very few Letts knew a single word of Russian was in no way held to disqualify those immigrants from being entrusted with inquisitions and domiciliary searches, or even with the filling in of returns. Whence arose amusing anecdotes not wholly amusing to the victims.
Sergey Petrovich Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, London, 1925, pp. 248-249
A special Latvian unit which had been guarding Lenin at the Smolny Institute arrived on the same train from Petrograd as the Government.... All responsible security positions at the Kremlin were entrusted to riflemen of the Latvian Ninth Regiment; the Latvian Parade Unit and the Second Riga Regiment guarded the staff of the Supreme Soviet for Military Affairs, various commissariats, and foreign embassies.
Nikolai Nefiodov, "The Revolt of July 1918," article in Novoye Russkoye Slovo, New York. September 30, 1973.
Indeed, the Latvian Red Riflemen were in fact the strongest pillar supporting the Bolsheviks. They were the Bolsheviks' Praetorian guard. As the Latvian historian Uldis Germanis, who lives in Stockholm, points out (in Oberst Vacietis und die Lettischen Schuetzen im Weltkrieg und in der Oktoberrevolution, Stockholm, Amqvist & Wiksell, 1974), Lenin could rely on neither the disorganized Russian troops in St. Petersburg, nor the famous sailors at Kronstadt with their growing anarchistic tendencies, nor the militarily weak Red Guard, composed of workers. The Bolshevik headquarters in St. Petersburg, the Smolny Institute building, which contained Lenin's office, were guarded by a special company of Latvian Riflemen (officially called Svodnoya rota Latyshskich Strelkov pri VCIK i Sovnarkome). When the Soviet government moved to Moscow in March of 1918, these faithful bodyguards of the Bolshevik leadership, now known as the United Latvian Riflemen's Battalion, were assigned to guard the Kremlin.
Frank Gordon, Latvians and Jews between Germany and Russia, 1980.
The Latvian Riflemen's regiments of the Red Army, later united as the "Latdivision," participated in all the crucial battles of the Russian civil war, especially in the Ukraine and in storming the fortified zone at Perekop, which blocked the way to the Crimea. The Red Army's victories are unthinkable without the Latvian Riflemen. As the Russian communist poet Demyan Bedny (Pridvorov) wrote at the time, "Any flank is secure if Latvians are there! (Ljubyje flangi obespetcheni, kogda na flangach latyshi.)" It is a proven fact that the Riflemen saved the Bolshevik regime in July 1918, when the Left SR revolt broke out and the lives of Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky were hanging by a thread. As mentioned in the introduction, the protection of important buildings and persons in Moscow, especially in the Kremlin, was entrusted to the Latvian Riflemen. The famous Latvian military leader Jukums Vacietis and his men restored order in Moscow. As J. Porietis records in his book Strelnieku legendaras gaitas (The Riflemen's legendary deeds, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966), units of Latvians smashed anti-Bolshevik rebellions in other cities as well -- the Third Regiment in Kaluga, the Fifth Regiment in Bologoye, the Sixth Regiment in St. Petersburg (Petrograd), the Seventh Regiment in Staraya Russa and St. Petersburg, the Eighth Regiment in Vologda and Yaroslav, and so on. Furthermore, the father of Soviet military aviation was the Latvian Jekabs Alksnis.
Along with Jews and Poles such as Dzerzhinsky and Menzhinsky, Latvians played a role in forming that fearsome instrument of Red terror, the Cheka. George Leggett notes this in his book The Cheka, Lenin's Political Police 1917-1922 (Oxford 1981). He quotes Trotsky as saying at a Politburo meeting on April 18,1918, that Latvians and Jews comprised the largest percentages of the Cheek's employees at the front, in the rear, and in Soviet institutions in the center. Jekabs Peterss, who was a close associate of the founder of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky, and Martins Lacis-Sudrabs, who was the theoretician of the Red terror, were the most monstrous of the Latvian Chekists. The British journalist Reginald 0. G. Urch, who was well-versed in Baltic and Soviet affairs, mentions Lacis-Sudrabs in his book The Rabbit King of Russia (London 1939). Urch cites an article by Lacis-Sudrabs in which he wrote: "The Central Executive Committee has abolished the Cheka, but it has created and placed on duty a new sentinel -- the GPU. The Cheka has done its work.... And you, the new sentinel, be alert"
In the twenties and thirties, Latvians continued to be active in the Soviet Union's political police and intelligence service. The creator of Soviet spy networks in the West was Berzins, who was also the supervisor and mentor of the famous spy Richard Sorge. Another Berzins supervised the slave labor camp system at Kolyma, the Dal'stroy, which was the Soviet predecessor to and equivalent of Auschwitz.
Solzhenitsyn remarks in The Gulag Archipelago: "The Estonians and Lithuanians are close to my own soul.... They never harmed anyone, lived quietly, in good conditions, morally more honestly than we. As it turned out, they were guilty of living next to us and cutting us off from the sea.... As for Latvians, my attitude is somewhat more complicated. There is an element of fate. It was they, after all, who started the whole thing."
Frank Gordon, Latvians and Jews between Germany and Russia, 1980.