Jānis K. Bērziņš

Yan Karlovich Berzin

Jānis Bērziņš also Yan Karlovich Berzin (Russian: Ян Карлович Берзин; real name Pēteris Ķuzis; 25 November [O.S. 13 November 1889] 1889, Zaube parish – 29 July 1938, Moscow), was a Latvian Soviet communist politician.

According to his former subordinate, Walter Krivitsky, Berzin led a guerrilla detachment in his native Latvia at the age of 16, during the 1905 revolution, and was wounded, caught and sentenced to death.[1] His sentence was commuted because of his youth; after two years in prison, he was deported to Siberia, but escaped. Rearrested and sent back into exile in 1911, he escaped in 1914, and was a private in Russian army until he deserted, in 1916

Bērziņš joined the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, rising to the rank of general and chief of the Latvian Red Army. A principle organizer of Lenin's Red Terror, Berzin is credited with devising the system of taking and shooting hostages[2] to recover deserters and to put down peasant rebellions in areas controlled by the Red Army. He was recognized by his superiors for his work in pursuing, arresting, and liquidating Russian sailors after the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921.[3] Promoted to head of the Red Army's Fourth Bureau (military intelligence), the GRU, he served from 1920 to 1935.[4] Among his agents was Richard Sorge.[5]

He was dismissed in 1935, and served for a year in the Far East. In September 1936, he was sent to Madrid, under the nom de guerre Grishin, as chief military adviser to the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In November, he transferred to Valencia. On 8 June 1937, he was recalled to Moscow, and reappointed to his old post as head of military intelligence on 8 June 1937, after his successor, Semyon Uritsky, had come under suspicion, but on 1 August 1937, he too was dismissed, and succeeded by A.M.Nikonov, who was sacked and arrested a few days later.[6] Berzin was arrested on 13 May 1938, and shot on 29 July 1938.[7]

On 14 December 1948, Alexander Barmine, former chargé d'affaires at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that Berzin informed him prior to Barmine's 1937 defection that Owen Lattimore, head of the U.S. Office of War Information in the Pacific during World War II, was a Soviet agent.[8]

Berzin appears in the Venona decrypts under the code name "Starik" (Russian for "Old man").[9]

References

  1. ↑ Krivitsky, W.G. (1940). I Was Stalin's Agent. London: The Right Book Club. p. 115.
  2. ↑ Suvorov, Viktor, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence, New York: Macmillan (1984)
  3. ↑ Suvorov, Viktor, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence, New York: Macmillan (1984)
  4. ↑ Suvorov, Viktor, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence, New York: Macmillan (1984)
  5. ↑ Agent: Sorge, Richard
  6. ↑ Jansen, Marc and Petrov, Nikita (2002). Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press. pp. 66–67. ISBN 978-0-8179-2902-2.
  7. ↑ David J. Nordlander, "Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s," Slavic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 791-812
  8. ↑ FBI Report, "Owen Lattimore, Internal Security - R, Espionage - R," September 8, 1949 (FBI File: Owen Lattimore, Part 1A), p. 2 (PDF p. 7)
  9. ↑ Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), ISBN 0895262754, p. 119
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