Jānis Bērziņš

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Jānis Bērziņš Yan Karlovich Berzin (Russian: Ян Карлович Берзин; real name Pēteris Ķuzis; 25 November [O.S. 13 November 1889] 1889 - 29 July 1938), Latvian and Soviet communist politician.

During World War I, he lived in Sweden under the pseudonym Winter. Bērziņš joined the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, rising to the rank of general, and was head of the Red Army's Fourth Bureau (military intelligence), the GRU, from 1920 to 1935. Among his agents was Richard Sorge.[1] A volunteer in the Spanish Civil War under the nom de guerre Grishin, he was an important commander of the Republican forces.

He supported Joseph Stalin, but was nonetheless executed during the Moscow Trials. On 13 May 1938 he was arrested and on 29 July he was shot in the basement of the Lubianka on orders of Stalin.[2]

On December 14, 1948, Alexander Barmine, former Charge d'Affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that Berzin informed him prior to Barmine's 1937 defection that Owen Lattimore, head of the U.S. Office of War Information in the Pacific during World War II, was a Soviet agent.[3]

Berzin appears in the Venona decrypts under the code name "Starik."[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Agent: Sorge, Richard
  2. ^ David J. Nordlander, "Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s," Slavic Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 791-812
  3. ^ FBI Report, "Owen Lattimore, Internal Security - R, Espionage - R," September 8, 1949 (FBI File: Owen Lattimore, Part 1A), p. 2 (PDF p. 7)
  4. ^ Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), ISBN 0895262754, p. 119

[edit] External links


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