Career
Between 1932 and 1937, Latsis was a director at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics. Latsis was the author of the book Dva goda borby na vnutrennom fronte ("Two Years of Struggle in the Internal Front", Moscow: Gos izd-vo, 1920), in which he advocated unrestrained violence against class enemies. He boasted of the harsh repressive policies used by the Extraordinary Commission Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation.
In 1918, while a deputy chief of the Extraordinary Commission Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation in Ukraine, he established the principle that sentences were not to be determined by guilt or innocence—but by social class.
He is quoted as explaining the Red Terror as follows: Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession.
These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.
Latsis became a victim of the Soviet regime himself during the 1930s Great Purge, when he was arrested on November 29, 1937 and accused by a commission of People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and Prosecutor of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics belonging to a "counter-revolutionary, nationalist organization".
He was executed in 1938 by firing squad. In 1956, the Military Collegiate of the Supreme Court of Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics politically rehabilitated him. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr.
The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, 660 pp.
