Karl Andreevich Peterson

(Kārlis Pētersons). Born Feb. 7 (19), 1877, in Lielvarde Volost (small rural district), now Ogre Raion, Latvian SSR; died Jan. 17, 1926, in Sukhumi. Soviet party and military leader. Member of the Communist Party from 1898. Son of a peasant.

In 1895, Peterson was an unskilled worker in Riga and then worked as a reporter for a democratic newspaper. He organized Social Democratic circles in Riga in 1898 and became a member of the Riga committee of the RSDLP in 1899. From 1900 he was engaged in party work in Libava (Liepāja), Riga, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and was repeatedly arrested and exiled and was incarcerated in a fortress.

Peterson joined a reserve regiment of the Latvian Rifles in the city of Valmiera in 1916. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Joint Soviet of the Latvian Rifle Regiments (Iskolastrel) in 1917, and in the October days he was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, a delegate to the Second Congress of Soviets, and a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He was commissar of the Latvian Rifle Division of 1918 and was involved in suppressing a Left Socialist Revolutionary revolt in Moscow and in liquidating the Lockhart conspiracy.

In 1919, Peterson served as a member of the government of Soviet Latvia, people’s commissar on military affairs, and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Soviet Latvian Army. He was military commissar of Enisei Province in 1920 and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Fifth Army from November 1920 to January 1921. He was a representative of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR in Novorossiisk in 1921. He was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He retired with a special pension in 1923.