11 Facts About Yakov Alksnis

Jekabs Alksnis was born in a farmer's family in Naukseni Parish, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire, working as a shepherd at age 7.

Yakov Alksnis attended school in Ramnieki and a teachers' seminary in Valmiera, where he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1916.

In 1917 Yakov Alksnis was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army; he completed basic officers' training in Odessa and was assigned to the 15th Siberian Regiment, later the 11th Siberian Regiment.

Yakov Alksnis returned to Valmiera as a Soviet worker, but due to the German occupation, left for Bryansk, where in the summer of 1918 he was elected a member of the Bryansk district committee of the RCP.

Yakov Alksnis was influenced by one of his subordinates who had seen parachutists entertaining the public in the United States, at the time when Soviet pilots regarded parachutes as "almost a clinical instrument".

In June 1931 Yakov Alksnis was promoted to the Commander of Red Air Forces, while Polikarpov and some of his staff were released on amnesty terms.

In 1935, the Red Air Forces under Yakov Alksnis possessed the world's largest bomber force; aircraft production reached 8,000 in 1936.

In June 1937 Yakov Alksnis sat on the board of the show trial of the members of the supposed Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization.

Yakov Alksnis later "remembered" that he had been a spy since 1922 and that he had been a member since 1936 of a counter-revolutionary "Latvian Nationalist Organization in the Red Army".

Yakov Alksnis was shot on 29 July 1938 at the Kommunarka shooting ground.

Viktor Alksnis, grandson of Yakov Alksnis, was a far left-wing Russian politician remembered for his pro-Union activities of the late 1980s and early 1990s.