Arvīds Pelše

Arvīds pelše ( Russian Арвид Янович Пельше , Arwid Janowitsch Pelsche , * January 26 ^{. Jul} / 7. February  1899 ^greg. In Zālīte in Iecava , Courland Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 29. May 1983 in Moscow ) was a Soviet Latvian politicians.

Life

Profession, education and advancement

Pelsche was the son of a farming family in the Latvian Bauska district in the Zemgale region . As a worker he worked in machine shops in Riga , Vitebsk as well as in Kharkov and Petrograd until 1917 and then as a dock worker in Arkhangelsk .

From 1915 the Bolshevik Pelsche was a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia, which later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) . In 1916 he met Lenin in Switzerland. The Archangelsk Party sent him to the VI. 1917 party congress in Petrograd. Pelsche was a member of the Petrograd Soviet at the time of the October Revolution . In 1918 he worked briefly for the Cheka , only to be summoned by Lenin to Latvia to organize the revolution there. 1919 accompanied the Red Army . After the communist's defeat in Latvia, he returned to Russia to serve again as a political commissar and political teacher in the Red Army until 1929. Then he was an instructor at the central party school of the NKVD . From 1931 to 1933 his political training was deepened by studying at the Historical Institute in Moscow . From 1933 to 1937 he was a deputy of the commission for the sovkhozes . Pelsche was one of the very few Latvian communists in the Soviet Union who survived the Latvian NKVD operation of 1937/1938. From 1937 to 1940 he taught historical Marxism at a teachers' institute in Moscow.

In the centers of power

His loyalty to the Communist Party (KP) made him rise to the highest offices. Since 1941 he was firmly integrated into the party apparatus of the Latvian Communist Party, from 1941 to 1959 as secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Latvian SSR . From November 1959 to April 1966 he was First Secretary of the Latvian Party and from 1961 a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU . As head of the Pelsche Commission , from 1963 to 1966 he investigated the cause of death of Stalin's confidante Sergei Kirov from 1934.

Pelsche was a representative for a collective style of leadership in the bodies of the party and for a strengthening of the influence of the Central Committee. The Central Committee elected the 67-year-old as one of only a few non- Slavs to the highest political body of the USSR, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), from April 8, 1966 to April 29, 1966 May 1983. From 1966 to 1983 he was also chairman of the control committee at the Central Committee of the CPSU. In the center of power, however, it had no special meaning.

Although he was of Latvian origin, he was held in low esteem by his compatriots for his strict rejection of a more independent Latvia and the fight against "nationalist tendencies", which also included the ban on local holidays and customs .

Pelsche wrote several books on the history of the CPSU and the revolutionary development in Latvia. He was married to the sister of the Poltburo member Mikhail Andreevich Suslov .

Honors

• He was twice awarded the title and medal of the Hero of Socialist Labor .
• He was awarded the Order of Lenin six times .
• He received the Order of the October Revolution and other awards.
• The Riga Polytechnic Institute received his name as an addition after his death.
• His urn was buried at the Kremlin wall in Moscow after a state funeral .

literature

• Thomas Remeikis: A Latvian in the Politbureau. A Political Portrait of Arvids Pelše , in: Lituanus 12: 1 (1966), ISSN  0024-5089 , pp. 81-84
• Michel Tatu: Power and Powerlessness in the Kremlin . Ullstein, Frankfurt 1967
• Arwid J. Pelsche , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 38/1983 of September 12, 1983, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)