Pēteris Slavens

Pēteris Slavens as an officer of the Russian Empire.

Pēteris Slavens (born April 12, ^jul. / 24 April 1874 ^greg. , District Cēsis , Governorate of Livonia ; † 14. November 1919 in Valmiera ) was a native Latvian , who made an officer in the army of the Russian Empire and later career forcibly in the newly established Red Army due to the acute lack of competent military personnel rose to Army Commander. In 1919 he was briefly Commander in Chief of the Soviet Latvian Army in the Russian Civil War and the Latvian War of Independence .

Life

In the Tsarist Army , Slavens attended a junior school from 1893. In 1917 he said goodbye as regimental commander for health reasons and was treated in various hospitals. After the October Revolution , he was forcibly reactivated by the Red Army in the summer of 1918, despite his poor health . First he commanded a division, then from August the 5th Army in the East, which achieved a great military success in the Russian Civil War in September 1918 with the capture of Kazan . He later commanded the Red Army's southern front until January 1919. Because of his illness, Slavens went to the then Bolshevik Riga , where he again had to take up a post in the Soviet Latvian Army. From March he was the commander of this army and was blamed by the Soviet-Latvian party leadership for its devastating defeat in May 1919 (the conquest of Riga by the Baltic State Armed Forces ). Martial law investigations have been initiated against him. Slavens was later demobilized for health reasons , crossed the front line and surrendered to the bourgeois Latvian authorities in November 1919. Committed to a prisoner of war camp, Slavens died shortly afterwards of pneumonia in the hospital .

literature

• Inta Pētersone (ed.): Latvijas Brīvības cīņas 1918 - 1920. Enciklopēdja. Preses nams, Riga 1999, ISBN 9984-00-395-7 . Page 399-400