Jan Antonowitsch Bersin

Jan Bersin

January Antonovich Berzin ( Russian Ян Антонович Берзинь , Latvian Janis Berzins ; born September 29 ^{. Jul} / 11. October  1881 ^greg. In Ujesd Wenden , Governorate of Livonia , Russian Empire ; † 29. August 1938 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician and diplomat Latvian origin.

Life

Bersin was born into a Latvian farming family in what was then the Russian Empire. He completed the educational seminar and then worked as a teacher. Since 1902 a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP), he was arrested and banished several times and was temporarily in exile. From 1906 to 1907 he was secretary of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP and in 1907 delegate of the Fifth Party Congress.

In 1915 he took part in the Zimmerwald Conference for the Social Democratic Party of Latvia , whose organ Cīņa ( The Struggle ) he temporarily published, and was later active as a journalist in the USA . In 1917 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Latvian Social Democratic Party and was on the VI. Party congress of the RSDLP (b) elected to its central committee in August 1917. He also represented them at the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets during the October Revolution .

From May to November 1918 he headed the political delegation of the Bolsheviks in Switzerland , one of the first representations of Soviet Russia abroad alongside Sweden , until he was expelled from the Swiss Federal Council (together with the Soviet consul general Iwan Salkind ). From January to May 1919 he was a member of the communist government of Latvia as People's Commissar for Education. He then served until June 1920 as secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (EKKI). In 1920 he was involved in bringing about the peace of Dorpat and from February 1921 represented the interests of Soviet Russia in Finland . In the same year he became deputy head of the diplomatic mission in Great Britain . In June 1925 he succeeded Adolf Joffes as the authorized representative of the Soviet Union in Austria . In 1927 he was replaced by Konstantin Jurenew .

He then became the Plenipotentiary of the Foreign Commissariat at the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine . From 1929 to 1932 he was deputy head of the Commission for the Publication of Diplomatic Documents. From 1932 he headed the Central Archive Administration of the USSR and was editor of the magazine "Red Archive". In December 1937 he was during the Great Terror arrested and the following year shot . He was rehabilitated during the thaw .

literature

• Branko M. Lazić, Milorad M. Drachkovitch: Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern , Hoover Press, 1986, pp. 27-28.

Web links

Commons : Jānis Bērziņš-Ziemelis  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biographical information on hrono.ru