Berzin (Berzins), Jan Karlovich (1889-1938)

Party name “Old Man” (“Starik”).  A Soviet military and political leader, one of the creators of Soviet military intelligence, commonly known as the GRU, and its long-time head.

Berzin was born Pēteris Ķuzis in the small town of Gustavsberg, in Courland Gubernia (an administrative territorial unit in the Russian Empire, now part of Latvia), to a working-class family. In 1905, he joined the RSDRP and took part in the Russian revolution of 1905-1907. In 1907, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for killing a policeman but had his term reduced to two years because he was an adolescent. In 1911, Berzin was arrested for revolutionary activity and exiled to Irkutskaya Gubernia, from which he escaped in 1914. The next year he was drafted but managed to escape again and went to work as a metalworker in the factories of Petrograd, as the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, had been renamed in 1914. He took an active part in the Russian democratic revolution of February 1917, and in the summer of that year was an editor of the Latvian Social Democrat newspaper “Zin’as”.

During the October 1917 Bolshevik armed rebellion, Berzin was a member of the Bolshevik party committee in the Vyborg district of Petrograd and a member of the Petrograd city party committee. In December 1917, he became a member of the staff of the People’s Commissariat (Narcomat) of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR. In that capacity, he was head of the personal guard protecting Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, and the members of the Bolshevik government. (The guard consisted mostly of Latvians and Estonians.)

From March to May 1919, Berzin was Assistant Peoples Commissar (Narcom) for Internal Affairs in the Soviet Latvian Government. ¹ Later, Berzin served in the Red Army as head of the political department of the 11th Petrograd Infantry Division (July-August 1919) and head of the Special Department of the 15th Army (August 1919-November 1920).

In December 1920, Berzin joined the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff of the Red Army, commonly known as the Razvedupr of the RKKA. From December 1920 to December 1921, he headed the human intelligence (Russian “agenturnyi,” that is, working with agents) department; and from December 1921 to March 1924, he was assistant head of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army (RU RKKA).

From March 1924 to April 1935 and from June through August of 1937, Berzin was head of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army. In that capacity, he became the creator of Soviet military intelligence and played a personal role in enlisting cadres of intelligence agents and operatives, as well as planning and supervising the most daring agent penetrations the world over. Among the agents Berzin personally recruited were such widely known names as Richard Sorge, who operated in China and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, and Leonard Trepper, a resident of the anti-Nazi network in occupied Belgium and France in 1940-1942.

In April 1935, Berzin was dismissed from his position as head of military intelligence and sent to the Far East as assistant commander for political affairs of the Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army. From 1936 to June 1937, he was the chief military advisor to the Republican Army of Spain.

Berzin was awarded the Order of Lenin, two orders of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star.

Nonetheless, he was arrested on November 27, 1937 on charges of “Trotskyite anti-Soviet activity.” He was sentenced to death by the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. and executed on July 29, 1938. He was rehabilitated posthumously in July 1956. ²