Karl Luks

(party pseudonyms—Memora, Vikmera, Viktor Londo, and Volnin). Born Mar. 14 (26), 1888, in what is now Saldus Raion, Latvian SSR; died Aug. 29, 1932, in Kalk-Podvolok, Chukchi National Okrug. An active participant in the Civil War in Siberia and the Far East. Member of the Communist Party from 1925.

Luks joined the revolutionary movement in 1904 and was a member of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Repeatedly arrested, he was sentenced to hard labor in Orel in 1911 and exiled to Siberia in 1916. In the Civil War, Luks served as a member of the Chita revolutionary committee, chief of staff of the combined partisan detachments in the Transbaikal region (1918-20), commander of the East Transbaikal and Amur Partisan fronts, and commander of the troops of Chita District (from October 1920).

He was minister for nationality affairs of the Far Eastern Republic in 1921-22. In 1926, Luks became a commissioner for Glavnauka (Central Scientific Administration) of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR and a member of the Committee of the North of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He was rector of the Leningrad Institute of the Peoples of the North in 1929-30. Luks made three scientific expeditions (in 1927, 1928, and 1930-32) to the northern regions of the Far East for research purposes and in order to conduct work on socialist construction. He died on the last expedition.