Leader
Yakov Peters
Jēkabs Peterss · 1886–1938
Portrait photograph. Wikimedia Commons.
Peters was one of the operating chiefs of the Moscow terror in its first year: arrests, fast decisions, shootings.
Origin and religion
Latvian. He had lived in exile in England before 1917 and returned to sit near the top of the Moscow Cheka. Latvian Chekists were conspicuous in 1918–19 memoirs on every side, which later propaganda inflated into “the Cheka was Latvian.” The institution was multiethnic. The overrepresentation was real.
Latvian family. Atheist. Cheka deputy in Moscow.
Responsibilities
- Deputy chairman of the Cheka
- A principal figure in the 1918 “Lockhart plot” arrests
He served as Dzerzhinsky’s deputy and was involved in the case built against the British envoy R. H. Bruce Lockhart in 1918. He later held senior posts in the organs and in party control.
The record
He was arrested in Stalin’s purge and shot in 1938. His career is a pattern: men who built the Cheka were not protected by having built it.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Latvian
- Martin Latsis — Member of the Cheka collegium
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.