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Public archiveOctober Ledger

Leader

Martin Latsis

Jānis Sudrabs (Mārtiņš Lācis) · 1888–1938

LatvianExecuted by the regimeCheka / NKVD

Latsis wrote down what others practiced: do not ask whether the prisoner did anything. Ask what class he belongs to.

Origin and religion

Latvian, born in what is now Latvia, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He took the party name Latsis (or Lacis). Latvians were heavily overrepresented in the early Cheka’s armed detachments relative to their share of the population, in part because Latvian rifle regiments had already broken with the old army and were willing to fire on Russian crowds.

Latvian family (Janis Sudrabs, party name Martin Latsis). Atheist. Author of the Cheka’s class rule.

Responsibilities

  • Member of the Cheka collegium
  • Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka
  • Author of the plainest definition of Red Terror in print

He sat on the Cheka’s board, ran the Ukrainian Cheka during a particularly violent phase, and published in the Cheka’s own organ, Krasnyi Terror (Red Terror).

The record

His article of 1 November 1918 is the sentence historians quote because it is not a rumor. It is an instruction, in the police’s newspaper. He also published execution statistics for 1918–19 that serious historians (Melgunov, Leggett, Pipes) treat as far too low — a few thousand in his tables, against local evidence of a much larger toll. He was shot in Stalin’s purge on 20 March 1938.

What they said

We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials for evidence that the accused acted or spoke against Soviet power. The first thing you must ask him is to what class he belongs, what is his origin, education, and profession. These questions must decide the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.
Decree or orderMartin Latsis, Krasnyi Terror (the Cheka periodical), 1 November 1918. Quoted from the contemporary text by Sergei Melgunov in The Red Terror in Russia and in later documentary histories. Wording varies slightly by translation; the instruction does not.
The Cheka is not an investigating commission, a court, or a tribunal. It is a fighting organ on the internal front of the civil war. It does not judge, it strikes.
Decree or orderMartin Latsis, early Cheka writings, as cited in George Leggett and in standard anthologies of the terror. About 1920.

Others filed as Latvian

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