20 Facts About Viktor Alksnis

Viktor Imantovich Alksnis was a Russian politician and Soviet Air Force colonel of Latvian descent.

Viktor Alksnis was the chairman of the Russian Center of Free Technologies, an organization intended to promote Free Software and open standards in Russia.

Viktor Alksnis was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet, a member of the Russian All-People's Union and represented the Rodina party in the Russian State Duma.

From 2013 to 2015, Alksnis was the mayor of the city of Tuchkovo in the Moscow Oblast.

Viktor Alksnis took part in the military tribunal for the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, which sentenced Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other high-ranking Soviet officers to death on Joseph Stalin's order.

However, only eight months later, Yakov Viktor Alksnis was arrested and executed.

Viktor Alksnis's grandmother spent 14 years in labor camps and his father was discriminated for being the son of an "enemy of the people".

In 1973 Viktor Alksnis graduated from the Riga Higher Military Aviation Engineering School named for his grandfather as a qualified military radio engineer.

Viktor Alksnis was a strong opponent of the breakup of the Soviet Union and of the independence of the Baltics.

Viktor Alksnis claimed that the Baltic states are apartheid regimes, that the Russian population in these states suffers repression.

Viktor Alksnis once proposed the ousting of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from power, dissolving the parliament, outlawing all parties, the declaration of martial law and the handing of power to a Military "Committee of National Salvation", which would avoid the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Viktor Alksnis described the internationally non-recognized Transnistrian Republic as the base from which the restoration of the Soviet Union would begin.

In later years Viktor Alksnis claimed to be a principal figure behind the Riga OMON, known for opposing the secession of Latvia from the USSR and actions such as the Soviet OMON assaults on Lithuanian border posts.

Viktor Alksnis was designated persona non grata in Latvia after he left the country in 1992.

Viktor Alksnis was one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front that united nationalist and communist movements that opposed Yeltsin's policies.

In 2007, Viktor Alksnis launched a campaign to promote the use of free software such as the Linux operating system in Russian state institutions to secure software independence.

Viktor Alksnis met with project coordinator Aleksey Bragin to promote the development of the ReactOS operating system.

Viktor Alksnis invited Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation to Moscow.

In 2006, Viktor Alksnis said in an interview that Israel and the United States are enemies of Iran's peaceful nuclear program, and their hostile attitude towards Iran is an attempt to cover up the United States' mistakes in Iraq.

Viktor Alksnis died on 1 January 2025, at the age of 74, after a stroke.