Some remember him with hatred, others with admiration. The son of a Latvian farm laborer could become related to Churchill, become a London banker, and as a result created one of the strongest intelligence services in the world.
Izvestia information: Janis Peters
Peters Yakov Khristoforovich (11/21/12/3/1886 - 4/25/1938), Soviet party and statesman. Born in Latvia into the family of a farm laborer. Worker. In 1904 he joined the Latvian Social Democratic Labor Party (LSDLP).
After the revolution of 1905-1907. - emigrant, lived in London. In the October days of 1917 - a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. After the October Revolution - member of the board and deputy chairman of the Cheka, chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Participated in uncovering the Lockhart-Reilly plot; one of the leaders of the liquidation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary revolt of 1918; led the investigation into the case of Fanny Kaplan, who attempted to assassinate Lenin. In 1920-1922 - representative of the Cheka in Turkestan. Since 1923 - member of the OGPU board. Repressed. Rehabilitated posthumously.
They used to say about him - “a faithful Leninist”, “a fiery revolutionary”. Then - “executioner”, “bloody security officer”. But let's put emotions aside. Any state has weapons - special services. Angels do not work in them, but even harsh accusations, when carefully studied, often turn out to be legends.
Peters was one of the founders of the Cheka, the main intelligence service of Soviet Russia. Neither he nor his comrades had ever prepared for this role. But it quickly became clear that these amateurs and self-taught people from scratch created one of the strongest intelligence and counterintelligence services in the world. Are we interested, for example, in the inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle? Let's take an interest in Peters - he is also the creator of weapons.
Uncle Bob's Confession
One foggy London evening in 1931, nineteen-year-old Cambridge student Harold Adrian Philby (his family name was Kim) once again listened with interest to the recollections of his father’s close friend, whom he simply called “Uncle Bob” (we know him by the name), about life in Russia. Then he said: “I wish I could be there.”
Lockhart, the famous intelligence officer and socialite, smiled:
Yes, in Russia I walked on the edge, my boy. It was exciting, but also tiring. After all, I walked on the earth, and they... climbed towards the “radiant idea”, into the heavens! With such a steep climb, sometimes a second wind of the mind opens. If our intelligence services cooperated, I would send the current analysts from Secret Service to Peters for internship. That's who would be able to knock down their academic arrogance.
“I have always warned that you cannot trust people who arrived from Russia, no matter what surnames they bear, since there is a high probability that these people visited the offices of the Lubyanka... Under the yoke of the charm of their owners, I myself almost stayed in Moscow to begin the life of an ideological fighter against world capitalism." And further: “I never believed the ROWS. The old people there have lost their fighting fervor, and their children are entirely Peters’ agents.”
This was written when “Peters’ agents” had already done their job. EMRO - The Russian All-Military Union, which had branches all over the world, was preparing sabotage against Bolshevik Russia. Already in 1922, sons and relatives of White Guard officers and leaders of the union began to appear in Europe, “escaping” from Russia to their fathers.
Foreign intelligence services immediately paid favorable attention to young people with big names. When the shadow of fascism began to creep over Europe, it was they who formed the basis, the support of the Soviet station, carried out and prepared a number of brilliant operations... and almost everyone died as a result of “turning a bull in a china shop” - this is how Peters bitterly assessed what happened in 1937.
Stalin outwardly always had a great attitude towards Peters, speaking of him as “the last romantic of revolutionary battles.” At the 16th Congress, when everyone was trashing Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, he forgave him for his “energetic silence” regarding the “right-wing danger” and the “persistent” development of the idea of mass control. It seems that he forgave even more - participation in Tukhachevsky’s “conspiracy”. Or didn't you forgive?
The death of Peters is a special story. In the official certificate received by his wife after his rehabilitation (Peters’ second wife Antonina Zakharovna died in 1986), the date of death is 1942. According to other documents, he was shot in 1938. This happened - people were shot earlier than their death certificates reported. However...
The last riddle
At the very beginning of the war, in August 1941, Peters’ daughter May (she came to Russia in 1928, aged fifteen), who was then working at the British embassy, told Antonina Zakharovna Peters that “one comrade who did not identify himself”, through the wife of an embassy employee asked me to convey to her the following phrase: “Your father is alive and continues to work.”
That he was alive - that's what everyone hoped for. But “continues to work”?.. Peters was arrested in front of his son and wife; she remembered well how one of those carrying out the search crushed the Order of the Red Banner with the heel of his boot...
However, there is another testimony of a comrade who also “did not identify himself.” It is not documented, so we will consider this story only a version - although something prevents me from calling it a fairy tale.
Late in the evening of one of the last days of October 1942, an airplane delivered from the front-line zone the body of a murdered senior lieutenant, judging by his uniform, whose head and shoulders were wrapped in a leather jacket. Two military counterintelligence officers specially flew to the front for him. The body was ordered to be taken for an autopsy.
The head of the department who gave the order said: “Don’t be surprised at anything.” Before the autopsy, an identification parade was held, to which only one person attended. A doctor and a third-rank NKVD commissar were also present during the identification. The counterintelligence officers who brought the murdered man to Moscow were in the next room.
One of them left this certificate, in which two names appear - the one who came for the identification, and the one who lay in front of him on the anatomical table. The first one was called Stalin; the second - Peters.
“Fantastic times give birth to fantastic legends, but this creativity is always accurate, selective and fair, since it is accountable to History itself.” John Reed.
Izvestia information: Claire Sheridan
Sculptor, writer, political journalist. Cousin of Winston Churchill. The file on Claire Sheridan was declassified by the British Secret Service last year. It turned out that, according to the British, Claire Sheridan was an agent of Soviet intelligence, to whom she conveyed the contents of conversations with her famous relative.
The dossier says that on instructions from Soviet intelligence, Sheridan worked in Constantinople and Algeria. Sheridan's personal letters intercepted by intelligence agencies revealed that she traveled to Nazi Germany and participated in meetings chaired by Hitler.
She was the mistress of Ismet Bey, who opposed British policy in India. The list of her other lovers includes French generals and major politicians. At the same time, Claire herself claimed that she helped British intelligence collect dossiers on Soviet leaders, in particular on Lev Kamenev.
Churchill was ashamed of his uncontrollable niece and did not free her from secret service surveillance.
Izvestia information: Robert Bruce Lockhart
In 1918, British Ambassador to Soviet Russia. Key figure in the anti-Bolshevik “conspiracy of ambassadors.” The investigation into his case was led by Peters. Expelled from the country. Returning to England, Lockhart became a journalist.
With the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the political intelligence department of the British Foreign Office. Lockhart, traditionally considered in the Soviet Union as the personification of world imperialism, maintained excellent personal relations with Soviet diplomats, objectively did a lot to strengthen Anglo-Soviet relations and always treated Russia with sympathy.
Izvestia information: Kim Philby
Soviet super intelligence officer, head of the famous "Cambridge Five". The position he held before coming under suspicion in 1951 was the representative of British intelligence to the CIA and FBI in Washington (equated to the position of deputy chief of the British Intelligence Service).
His work, according to the CIA leadership, led to the fact that “all Western intelligence efforts in the period from 1944 to 1951 were ineffective. It would be better if we did nothing at all.”
In 1963 he fled to the USSR, died in Moscow in 1988.
Yakov Khristoforovich Peters, (1886-1938), was born in the village of Brinken, Courland province (now Latvia), into the family of a wealthy peasant. Later, Peters, for the sake of “clean personal data,” claimed that his parents “were poor.” He had no education. In 1904 Peters left his family and moved to Libau, where he lived doing odd jobs. Then he joined the Bolshevik Party. However, there is no documentary evidence of this.
In March 1907 was arrested for the attempted murder of the director of the plant where he worked, but at the end of 1908. he was released. In 1909 Peters went to Germany, then to London. I couldn’t find a permanent job because I drank heavily. In 1910 was arrested by British police on suspicion of murdering a policeman and complicity in armed robbery, but in 1911. he was released on bail, and then the evidence of his guilt was declared “insufficient.” After this, Peters settled down, got married successfully, and in 1914. got a job in the import department of one of the trading companies.
After the overthrow of the monarchy, he returned to Russia and immediately became involved in the work of the Social Democratic Party of the Latvian Territory, and soon, having contacted the Bolsheviks, he became a representative of the Bolshevik Central Committee on the Northern Front, where he became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee.
In October 1917 J.H. Peters - member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, delegate to the 2nd Congress of Soviets, was one of those responsible for the combat training of the Red Guard. Since December 1917 - in the Cheka, where he immediately became a member of the Board and treasurer, and soon - secretary of the party organization of the Cheka.
He became one of Dzerzhinsky’s main henchmen in the organization of the Red Terror: he led the defeat of B.V. Savinkov’s “Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom” in Moscow and Kazan, and tried to inflate this matter as much as possible, “enrolling” into this organization all those dissatisfied with the Soviet regime. In both cities, many hundreds of people were shot without trial on his “warrants.”
He participated in the falsification of the “Lockhart case”, in the suppression of the speech of the left Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow: in both cases he practiced mass arrests and “extracted” evidence by beatings. Summer of 1918 for some time he acted as chairman of the Cheka, then led the investigation into the case of F. Kaplan, who was accused of an attempt on Lenin, and was involved in concealing the circumstances of this case.
In January 1919 J. Peters sentenced members of the royal family to death. There was no trial; Peters did not need the sanction of Dzerzhinsky or Lenin. Besides him, the following were involved in this act: M. Latsis, I. Ksenofontov, J. Murnek.
He was co-chairman of the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, where he also handed down death sentences. In June 1919 Peters became the commandant of Petrograd and on June 11, 1919. issued an order for a general search in all residential premises of the city to “seize” all “suspicious persons”, as well as “former” (police officers, gendarmes, officers and non-commissioned officers), and persons who do not have a “residence permit” issued by the Bolsheviks. Both churches and non-residential premises were subject to search. Those detained during this raid were either expelled from the city or executed according to the “warrants” of Peters, who was not even interested in the identity of the detainees or their specific guilt: he only asked about the number.
In July 1919 Peters was transferred to Kyiv: in Petrograd, his “activities” caused such massive discontent among the population that Dzerzhinsky had to remove him from there. During the first day of Peters’ stay in Kyiv, 127 people were executed, then they went around the clock - before the surrender of Kyiv to the Whites, they executed everyone indiscriminately. On the last day before the Reds were evacuated from the city, all prisoners of the Kyiv Cheka were executed.
Peters then carried out the “Red Terror” in Tula.
Winter 1920 was sent “to implement martial law” on the railways: it was believed that sabotage was to blame for their collapse. Peters “figured it out”: many railway workers were executed on charges of sabotage.
In 1920-1922 - Plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka in Turkestan, head of the Tashkent Cheka, led the extermination of religiously minded Basmachi peasants from the detachments of Enver Pasha, the Cossack formations of A.I. Dutov, P.V. Annenkov. Summer 1921 in Tashkent, a trial took place that can be considered a “prototype” of the “doctors’ case”: by order of Peters, all the doctors of the famous clinic of Professor P.P. Sitkovsky were arrested, and the professor himself was arrested “for sabotage”; the trial was a show trial, Peters was the “public prosecutor”, and all the “guilty” were executed.
In 1922 J.H. Peters – head of the Eastern Department of the GPU, which united the “work” of security officers from the Caucasus, Turkestan, Crimea, Tatarstan, Bashkiria, and Uzbekistan; In addition to destroying the “counter-revolution,” he was given the task of working against neighboring countries: Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, primarily by sending militant detachments there. The direct performers were V. Styrne, F. Eichmans, M. Kazas, A. Kork, V. Primakov. Since 1925 Peters is also the chief inspector of the OGPU border troops. For “successes” in punitive activities in 1927. awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
In 1929 was appointed a member of the commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the “cleansing” of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Peters expelled 71 academicians, most of whom were then arrested in the “Academic Case”: to them, “led” by academician S.F. Platonov, Peters attributed the intention to restore the monarchy. The “academic case” received such loud publicity in the country and abroad that Stalin was forced to personally justify himself to journalists, and the execution of the accused, planned by Peters, had to be canceled
Biography
In his autobiography, compiled in 1928 upon joining the All-Union Society of Old Bolsheviks, Peters indicated that he was the son of a farm laborer, from the age of 8 he had to look for food and herd cattle from neighboring farmers, and from the age of 14 he began to work for hire from a neighboring landowner together with farm laborers. However, in 1917, Peters, in a conversation with American journalist Bessie Beatty, said that he was the son of a “gray baron” (as rich peasant landowners were called in the Baltic region) and his father had hired workers.
During the First World War he was a member of the committee of socialist groups headed by Chicherin.
Revolution of 1917
He supervised the liquidation of B. Savinkov’s “Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom” in Moscow and Kazan.
He took part in uncovering the Lockhart conspiracy and led the liquidation of the Left Socialist Revolutionary uprising of 1918. Since the murder of Mirbach on July 6, 1918 was carried out with documents signed by Dzerzhinsky, he was temporarily removed from his post as chairman of the Cheka, and his place was taken by Jacob Peters, who formed a new board of the Cheka exclusively from communists. On August 22 (after Dzerzhinsky's return), Peters was confirmed as his deputy.
He led the investigation into the case of the Socialist-Revolutionary F. Kaplan who attempted to assassinate V.I. Lenin.
On January 9, 1919, J. Peters, participating in a meeting of the Presidium of the Cheka (in addition to him, M. Latsis, Ksenofontov and secretary Murnek were present), issued a resolution: “The verdict of the Cheka against persons of the former imperial pack is to be approved by reporting this to the Central Executive Committee.” According to this decree, Grand Dukes Nikolai Mikhailovich, Georgiy Mikhailovich, Pavel Alexandrovich and Dmitry Konstantinovich were shot in Petrograd.
He worked at the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal, since 1918 one of its three chairmen, who sat alternately.
In March 1919, he was replaced as deputy chairman of the Cheka by Ksenofontov, Ivan Ksenofontovich, in the same month he was sent to Petrograd, where he was appointed head of internal defense, and then commandant of the fortified area.
On June 11, 1919, J. Peters developed and sent out “instructions for conducting an inspection of Petrograd” to the regions. According to this instruction, each district was divided into sections in which a complete inspection of all residential and non-residential premises was carried out; the main purpose of the searches was to find weapons. The following were subject to detention during searches: all persons who had firearms with them without the appropriate permits, with the exception of only the owners of hunting rifles; deserters; unregistered citizens; persons who did not have residence permits at all; all former police officers up to and including police officers and all former gendarmerie officers and non-commissioned officers.
On June 14, an order was given to begin a thorough inspection of all suspicious places and buildings in the districts, churches of all religions, bell towers, attics, basements, sheds, warehouses and squares.
In July 1919, with the retreat of the White troops of the Northern Corps (later the North-Western Army) from Petrograd, the department of the head of the internal defense of Petrograd, headed by Peters, was abolished by the establishment of the RVS of the 7th Army, and in its place the department of the head of the Petrograd fortified district. Peters became commandant of the fortified area and a member of the Defense Committee.
In August 1919, Peters was appointed commandant of the Kyiv fortified area and head of the garrison. At this time, Denikin’s white army and Petliura’s troops were advancing on Kyiv from different sides.
| Unable to change anything militarily, Peters and Latsis began to take it out on the internal enemy<...>One morning the newspapers came out with an endlessly long, two-column, list of those executed. There were, I think, 127 people; The motive for the execution was stated to be a hostile attitude towards the Soviet regime and sympathy for the volunteers. In fact, as it turned out later, the board of the Cheka, reinforced by Peters, decided to carry out a mass execution and selected from the list of prisoners everyone against whom at least something incriminating could be brought up<...>the actual number of those executed was not limited to the list given in the newspapers. On the very last day before the departure of the Bolsheviks, the checks were shot without any accounting or control. |
After the fall of Kyiv, Peters is a member of the Military Council in Tula.
In the winter of 1919-1920 he worked in Moscow as deputy chairman of the Special Committee of the STO for the implementation of martial law on the railways. In January 1920 - plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka in the North Caucasus, commissioner of the North Caucasus Railway.
In Turkestan
In the summer of 1921, by order of Peters, Prof. P.P. Sitkovsky and all the doctors of the Sitkovsky clinic on charges of sabotage. Peters decided to make the trial a show and he himself acted at the trial as a public prosecutor.
In Moscow
In February 1922, Peters was recalled to Moscow and appointed a member of the Collegium and head of the Eastern Department of the GPU, created on June 2, 1922. The new department united the work of security officers in the Caucasus, in the Turkestan, Bashkir, Tatar and Crimean Autonomous Republics, Bukhara and Khiva People's Republics. The new department was charged with developing materials from the foreign part of the INO from the countries of the East; the execution of operational tasks of the eastern department was mandatory for the INO. The branches in the Eastern Department were led by Peters' deputy Vladimir Styrne, Eichmans and Mikhail Kazas. While working in the Eastern Department, Peters in 1925 was also the chief inspector of the OGPU border troops. On the 10th anniversary of the Cheka in December 1927, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
On October 31, 1929, J. X. Peters was relieved of his duties as a member of the Collegium and head of the Eastern Department of the OGPU. His KGB stage of his biography formally ended here, although Peters continued to work in control bodies.
At the end of 1929, Peters led a commission to purge employees of institutions of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Of the 259 academicians and corresponding members, 71 were expelled, mostly scientists in the humanities. Many of them were arrested in the so-called “Academic Case”. The investigation into this case lasted for more than a year. The OGPU accused 70-year-old academician S. F. Platonov and his associates of intending to overthrow Soviet power and form a Provisional Government with the subsequent restoration of the monarchy in Russia.
Essays
- Peters Ya. Memories of work in the Cheka in the first year of the revolution // Proletarian Revolution. - 1924. - No. 10 (33). - P.5 - 32. // Compiled by: V. Goncharov, A. Kokurin Guardsmen of October. The role of the indigenous peoples of the Baltic countries in the establishment and strengthening of the Bolshevik system. - Moscow: Indrik, 2009. - P. 373-381. - 492 s. - 1000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-91674-014-1
Photo gallery
see also
Notes
Links
- Verdict of the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal in the case of E. I. Simonenko (Chairman of the Tribunal Peters)
- Elena Syanova. Under the yoke of their charm (News of Science, 10/13/2003)
- Elena Syanova. “Jacob Peters, whom we do not know” - article in the newspaper “
Peters Yakov Khristoforovich
Assistant to political figure F. E. Dzerzhinsky
They used to say about him - “a faithful Leninist”, “a fiery revolutionary”. Then - “executioner”, “bloody security officer”. Any state has weapons - special services. Angels do not work in them, but even harsh accusations, when carefully studied, often turn out to be legends. Peters was one of the founders of the Cheka, the main intelligence service of Soviet Russia. Neither he nor his comrades had ever prepared for this role. But it quickly became clear that these amateurs and self-taught people from scratch created one of the strongest intelligence and counterintelligence services in the world. Are we interested, for example, in the inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle? Let's take an interest in Peters - he is also the creator of weapons.
Some remember him with hatred, others with admiration. The son of a Latvian farm laborer could become related to Churchill, become a London banker, and as a result created one of the strongest intelligence services in the world.
Peters Yakov Khristoforovich - famous security officer, deputy. Chairman of the Cheka F. E. Dzerzhinsky. Jacob Peters came from a simple peasant family, but his sharp mind, activity, faith in a better future for the country, active life position and the very political situation that developed at the beginning of the 20th century made him a prominent political figure. At the age of 18 in 1904, he joined the Latvian SDLP and worked underground. Active participant in the revolution of 1905–1907. Later Yakov Peters also participates in the October Revolution as a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. Having devoted himself entirely to the fight against counter-revolution, spies, traitors and enemies, Yakov Khristoforovich became a good friend and ally to the main leaders of the Bolshevik Party - Stalin, Dzerzhinsky. His career grew rapidly. At the age of 32, having established himself well, J. Peters becomes an important person in the country, a man of whom the whole country is terribly afraid - in 1918 he becomes deputy chairman of the Cheka, chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the right hand of “Iron Felix” himself. Peters immediately plunged headlong into the political life of the country and not a single high-profile case in the country took place without his participation. He contributed to the discovery of the Lockhart-Reilly conspiracy, in 1918 he became one of the leaders in the liquidation of the left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion, and led the investigation into the high-profile case of Kaplan, a female revolutionary who attempted to assassinate Lenin. From 1920 to 1922 he headed the Cheka in Turkestan. After this, Yakov Peters was transferred to the OGPU, where he became the head of the Eastern Department of the OGPU from 1922. And the last thing in his life was the chairmanship from 1930 to 1934 of the Moscow Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - MKK All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
In 1909, Peters emigrated to Hamburg and from there to London. There he joined the Communist Club and the British Socialist Party. In December 1910, he was arrested by London police on charges of complicity in armed robbery and the murder of three policemen. While Peters was in pre-trial detention (Brixton Prison) in January 1911, his cousin and main suspect, the famous anarchist Fritz Dumniek, was killed. During the police storming of his house on Sydney Street, he offered armed resistance. This event became known as the Siege of Hounsditch. Soldiers of the Scottish Rifle Battalion also took part in the assault; machine guns and artillery pieces were used. The operation was personally led by Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary. After the house was completely burned, Churchill gave the order to begin mass arrests among Latvian Social Democrats and anarchists - it was announced that they were preparing a robbery of a jewelry store, which was prevented. Hundreds of people were arrested, but four were selected for the show trial: Yuri Duborv, Peter Rosen, Mina Gristis and Yakov Peters.
The investigation lasted almost six months. The evidence, right down to the model of this very jewelry store, which was allegedly undermined from house number 100 on Sydney Street, was presented with extraordinary care - 655 pages of the criminal case plus the testimony of the minister himself. But... the court could not prove anything. In May 1911, Peters, along with other Latvian emigrants, appeared in court, by which he was acquitted. Churchill ground his teeth. In addition, he was greatly tormented by the ridicule of his beloved cousin Claire Sheridan, who attended all court hearings. Sir Winston, in her opinion, looked quite pathetic at the trial. She really liked one of the suspects. It was Jacob Peters.
They started dating. Claire Sheridan studied at the London Academy of Art and planned to become a sculptor. She had interesting friends - journalists, artists, aspiring politicians. They went to parties together. At one of these parties, Claire noticed that Yakov suddenly lost interest in yet another political discussion. The reason for this was Claire’s friend - very young, quiet May, the daughter of a London banker. A month later, Jan Peters and May Freeman became husband and wife.
In May 1917 he returned to Russia, leaving behind his wife and four-year-old daughter. During the October Revolution of 1917, Peters was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) (from October 29). He was also a delegate to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets and was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
On December 7 (20), 1917, Yakov Peters was approved by the Council of People's Commissars as a member of the Board of the Military Extraordinary Commission, assistant to the chairman and treasurer of the Cheka. However, at that time Peters was not so confident in his abilities. For the only time in his life he doubted something. After his appointment as a member of the Cheka, he told his close friend Louise Reed that he had absolutely no idea how he could work in the new body - the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, something like the Committee of Public Safety, the punitive body of the French Revolution. He asked himself where to start. There was no experience, no specific plan of action, no money. But he was not alone. Together with him, the organization of the new body was established by Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin appointed chairman of the Cheka (although there were others who wanted to head the new body, but Lenin chose Dzerzhinsky, calling him a “proletarian Jacobin”). There were 23 people in total. However, these were people who were completely dedicated to their cause.
Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission Dzerzhinsky called those days “the dance of life and death.”. Is it necessary to talk again about how much blood was shed then – including innocent blood? But let’s remember once again about the wave of banditry that swept Russia at that time, about the countless nighttime murders and robberies on the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Someone had to end this. The Reds were merciless towards their political opponents, but they themselves did not expect mercy. The “First Call” of the Cheka really believed that it would be able to organize its work in such a way that the “principle of justice and law,” as a reliable foundation, would never be shaken by anyone. None of them was preparing to become the guardian of the state; their entire previous life was devoted to its destruction. But... strangely, here, in the flames of war and rebellion, in a web of conspiracies, in the midst of devastation and collapse, one of the most active and skillful intelligence services of the 20th century was born.
Already in April 1918, Peters, together with Dzerzhinsky in Moscow, led an operation to eliminate armed anarchist detachments, and in the same month he was elected the first secretary of the party organization in the history of the Cheka. At the same time, he led the liquidation of B. Savinkov’s “Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom” in Moscow and Kazan.
On July 6, 1918, during an armed uprising of the left Social Revolutionaries, Peters, together with members of the Cheka board V.V. Fomin and I.N. Polukarov, replaced the guards of the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets in the Bolshoi Theater with more reliable Latvian riflemen. On July 7, after the suppression of the rebellion and Dzerzhinsky’s resignation, Peters was appointed temporary chairman of the Cheka by a resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars. On August 22, after Dzerzhinsky's return, Peters was confirmed as his deputy. In this capacity, he led the investigation into the case of Fanny Kaplan, who shot Lenin, and the operation of the so-called. “conspiracy of ambassadors”, including arrests and investigations. Yakov Peters insisted on the complete uncontrollability of the Cheka, which carries out “searches, arrests, executions, giving a report afterwards to the Council of People’s Commissars and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.” But he was replaced as deputy chairman of the Cheka by I.K. Ksenofontov. Peters began working in the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal and headed the headquarters for the fight against counter-revolution in Moscow.
In May 1919, Peters was sent to Petrograd as the extraordinary commissar of the city and the front line “to cleanse the city of counter-revolutionary gangs” (with a mandate from the Defense Council of the RSFSR) and, at the proposal of the Petrograd Defense Committee, was appointed chief of staff of internal defense (then chief of internal defense) of the city... In fact he became the dictator of Petrograd, launching a campaign of mass bloody terror there. Peters personally led the general arrests and executions within the city; lists were drawn up (based on telephone books) of former dignitaries, military officers, capitalists, nobles, etc. to be arrested. He gave orders to arrest the wives and adult family members of officers who had gone over to the side of the whites.
In August 1919, Peters was appointed commandant of the Kyiv fortified area and head of the garrison, until the Red Army abandoned the city. In October of the same year, Peters was already in Tula, becoming a member of the military council of the fortified area.
Abroad, Yakov Peters was called the most ruthless Bolshevik who killed thousands of people. On this occasion, in 1919, a correspondent for the London Daily Express newspaper asked Mrs. Peters for an interview, telling him that her husband, the chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, “spends all his time signing execution orders during the Moscow Terror.” May answered firmly and with dignity and showed letters from Russia. The article about this meeting was entitled: “The wife of the leader of terror. The Moscow chief of murderers as an ideal husband."
The article appeared on October 7, and two days later the same Daily Express described the consequences of the “white” terror in Moscow, the number of victims in the explosion in the premises of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party, and attempts on the lives of Bolshevik leaders. “Among those killed is the famous red terrorist Jacob Peters.” Another six months later, in the spring of 1920, he was declared dead again - “killed in Rostov by Denikin’s men.” May received a marriage proposal that summer - she was already considered a widow.
May Peters did not dare to travel to her husband in frightening Russia. This was done by another woman - the English artist and sculptor Claire Sheridan. In the fall of 1920, she barely reached Bolshevik Moscow. Later, Churchill’s cousin would write about her visits to house no. and injustice must be destroyed, made revolutionaries out of these people. In achieving such a goal, people with a refined mind endured long years of prison, the hardships of revolutions and wars, the unimaginable stress of everyday work... The ambitious people in Russia all remained on the other side of the barricade.”
Claire was on her way to the man she continued to love. But they were able to see each other only in the spring of 1921 in Tashkent. At this time, Peters was already the extraordinary commissioner in the Turkestan Republic (from July 1920, before that the plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka in the North Caucasus) and a member of the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). He led operations against the anti-Bolshevik gangs of Dutov, Annenkov, Enver Pasha, as well as the destruction of the “accomplices” of the Basmachi. At the same time, he is establishing a systematic capture of English and French spies. And at the same time he selects and forms the first Soviet station for transfer to the Entente countries.
As already mentioned, Peters was personally responsible for numerous executions, executions of hostages, torture, confiscations, etc. Jacob Peters was one of the most odious figures in the Cheka, distinguished by his extreme ruthlessness.
According to newspaper reports of that time, when representatives of Rostov-on-Don workers came to him, as the head of the city, and said that the workers were starving, Peters answered them: “Is this hunger when your Rostov garbage pits are chock-full of various garbage and leftovers? Here in Moscow the garbage pits are completely empty and clean - as if they had been licked clean - that's hunger for you!
In February 1922, Peters was recalled to Moscow and appointed a member of the Collegium and head of the Eastern Department of the GPU. Working in the Eastern Department, Peters in 1925 was the chief inspector of the OGPU border troops. On the 10th anniversary of the Cheka in December 1927, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
On October 31, 1929, J. X. Peters was relieved of his duties as a member of the Collegium and head of the Eastern Department of the OGPU. Since 1930 he was a member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. In 1930–1934 - Chairman of the Moscow Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
Here a completely different story and different work begins, far from the stands, shootouts and party discussions, and Peters, completely unknown to us, appears, who, according to his friend Alksnis (future commander of the USSR Air Force), shortly before Dzerzhinsky’s death gave him the word “never to let go of those invisible threads that protect the country no worse than armies and fortified borders.”
Member of the Party Central Committee, Chairman of the Party Control Commission Jacob Peters did not sign secret directives in the thirties. The developers of covert operations only rarely knew whose ideas they were embodying. Only Stalin and a few other people knew...
Stalin always outwardly treated Peters well, spoke of him as “the last romantic of revolutionary battles.” At the 16th Congress, when everyone was trashing Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, he forgave him for his “energetic silence” regarding the “right-wing danger” and the development of the idea of mass control. It seems that he forgave even more - participation in Tukhachevsky’s “conspiracy.” Or didn't you forgive?
Arrested on November 26, 1937. On April 25, 1938, on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary organization, the Supreme Court of the USSR Armed Forces sentenced him to capital punishment and was executed on the same day.
But there is a special story connected with the death of Jacob Peters. The official certificate received by his wife after his rehabilitation (Peters’s second wife, Antonina Zakharovna, died in 1986) stated the date of death as 1942. According to other documents, he was shot in 1938. This happened - people were shot before their death certificates were reported. However... At the very beginning of the war, in August 1941, Peters’ daughter May (from his first marriage with Maisie Freeman - she came to Russia in 1928, aged fifteen), who was then working at the English embassy, told Antonina Zakharovna Peters that “one comrade, who did not identify himself,” asked through the wife of the embassy employee to convey the following phrase to her: “Your father is alive and continues to work.”
Late in the evening of one of the last days of October 1942, an airplane delivered from the front-line zone the body of a murdered senior lieutenant, judging by his uniform, whose head and shoulders were wrapped in a leather jacket. Two military counterintelligence officers specially flew to the front for him. The body was ordered to be taken for an autopsy. The head of the department who gave the order said: “Don’t be surprised at anything.” Before the autopsy, an identification parade was held, to which only one person attended. A doctor and a third-rank NKVD commissar were also present during the identification. The counterintelligence officers who brought the murdered man to Moscow were in the next room. One of them left this certificate, in which two names appear - the one who came for the identification, and the one who lay in front of him on the anatomical table. The first one was called Stalin; the second - Peters.
After an inspection carried out by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office, Peters was rehabilitated on March 3, 1956 by the Military Commissariat of the USSR Armed Forces as an old revolutionary fighter for the happiness of mankind.
Biography:
Peters Yakov Khristoforovich is one of the heads of state security agencies in Soviet Russia. Real name: Peters Jacob. Born on November 21, 1886 in the Brinken volost of the Gazenpot district of the Courland province (Latvia). Son of a farm laborer. Worker. In 1904 he joined the Social Democracy of the Latvian Region (SDLC). Conducted agitation among the peasants. He was arrested in 1907 and emigrated in 1909. Lived in London. In 1917, he returned to Russia, a member of the Central Committee of the SDLC, its representative in the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), editor of the newspaper “Tsinya”. In October 1917, member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. Since December 1917, member of the board of the Cheka, deputy chairman of the Cheka, chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal. From July 8 to August 22, 1918, he temporarily acted as chairman of the Cheka instead of the suspended F.E. Dzerzhinsky, and then until March 1919 he was deputy chairman of the Cheka. In May 1919, extraordinary commissioner in Petrograd. In 1920-22, plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka in Turkestan, member of the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). Since 1922, head of the Eastern Department of the GPU. Since 1923, member of the OGPU board. In 1930 he was transferred from the OGPU to party work. In 1930–1934 was the chairman of the Moscow Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In 1937 he commanded the Kremlin security. In 1937 he was arrested. On April 25, 1938, he was sentenced to death and executed on the same day in the basements of the Lubyanka. In 1956 he was posthumously rehabilitated.
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