Julijs Karlis Danisevskis

(party pseudonym, German). Born May 15, 1884; died Jan. 8, 1938. Soviet statesman and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1900. Born in Latvia into a peasant family.

Daniševskis entered the Moscow Commercial Institute in 1910. from which he was expelled in 1912 for revolutionary activity. He was elected to the Central Commitee of the RSDLP at the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP in 1907. He did party work from 1907 to 1914 in the cities of St. Petersburg, Baku, Tbilisi, Warsaw, Riga, Liepāja, and Moscow. He was repeatedly subjected to reprisals. After the February Revolution of 1917, Dashkevich was a member of the Moscow committee of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and a deputy on the Moscow soviet. In May 1917 he went to Latvia and became one of the editors of the Bolshevik newspaper Cina (Struggle).

In 1918 (until June) he engaged in illegal work in Riga. He was a delegate to the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918 and took part in the suppression of the left Socialist Revolutionary revolt in Moscow. In July 1918 he became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council on the Eastern Front, and in September a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. From January to May 1919 he was deputy chairman of the Soviet government and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of Latvia. Later he became chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the RSFSR.

Dashkevich was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik) at the Eighth Party Congress; he was a delegate to the Tenth Congress. After 1921 he was secretary of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) and chairman of the board of the Northern State Timber Trust, the Foreign Trade Bank, and the All-Union Timber Export Company. From 1932 to 1936, Daniŝevskis was deputy people’s commissar for the timber industry of the USSR. He was a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Central Executive Committee of the USSR at a number of sessions. Daniŝevskis’ works include On the Eve of the Socialist Revolution (vols. 1–3, 1918–20) and Struggle for a Soviet Latvia (1929).