Martin Ivanovich Latsis (Russian: Мартын Иванович Лацис; Latvian: Mārtiņš Lācis; born Jānis Sudrabs; Russian: Ян Фридрихович Судрабс, romanized: Yan Fridrikhovich Sudrabs; December 14, 1888 – February 11, 1938) was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet politician, and senior state security officer of the Cheka from Courland (now Latvia).
Latsis was the author of the book Dva goda borby na vnutrennom fronte ("Two Years of Struggle on the Internal Front", Moscow: Gos. izd-vo, 1920), in which he advocated unrestrained violence against class enemies. He boasted of the harsh repressive policies used by the Cheka.[2]
In 1918, while a deputy chief of the Cheka in Ukraine, he called for sentences to be determined not by guilt or innocence but by social class. He is quoted as explaining the Red Terror as follows:
We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.[3]
While praising Latsis' abilities, Lenin criticized his advocacy of indiscriminate class terror as "absurd" and risking "untold harm to communism":
Political distrust means we must not put non-Soviet people in politically responsible posts. It means the Cheka must keep a sharp eye on members of classes, sections or groups that have leanings towards the white guards. (Though, incidentally, one need not go to the same absurd lengths as Comrade Latsis, one of our finest, tried and tested Communists, did in his Kazan magazine, Krasny Terror. He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule, but instead, he put it this way [on page 2 of the first issue of his magazine]: “Don't search [!!?] the records for evidence of whether his revolt against the Soviet was an armed or only a verbal one”) ... Political distrust of the members of a bourgeois apparatus is legitimate and essential. But to refuse to use them in administration and construction would be the height of folly, fraught with untold harm to communism.[4]
On November 29, 1937, during the so-called "Latvian Operation", Latsis was arrested, accused by a commission of NKVD and Prosecutor of the USSR of belonging to a "counter-revolutionary, nationalist organization" and executed in 1938 by shooting in the Butovo firing range.[2]
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