Karl Gailis

Gailis, Karl Andreevich 

Born Apr. 19 (May 1), 1888, in Vecgubene Volost (small rural district), now Gulbene Raion, Latvian SSR; died Jan. 4, 1960, in Moscow. Participant in the revolutionary movement and Soviet statesman. Member of the CPSU from 1906.

Gailis did party work in St. Petersburg. He contributed to the Priboi publishing house, the newspaper Pravda, and the journal Voprosy strakhovaniia. He was a representative of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of the Latvian Krai, which was affiliated with the Bolshevik faction of the Fourth State Duma. He was subjected to repressive measures. In 1916, Gailis became a member of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of the Latvian Krai. After the revolution of February 1917 he became a member of the Vol’mar (Valmiera) soviet and later, the Petrograd soviet. He was a delegate to the First Congress of the Soviets, at which he was elected to the Central Executive Committee. Gailis was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) and an organizer and member of the revolutionary committee of the Twelfth Army. A delegate to the Second Congress of the Soviets, he participated in the armed uprising of October 1917 in Petrograd. He worked on the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and was on the staff of the Petrograd military district. He was one of the leaders of Soviet power in Latvia—a member of the Executive Committee of the Latvian Soviet and of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1919, Gailis became a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat on Nationalities of the RSFSR. Later, he was a member of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR and the Supreme Court of the USSR. From 1933 to 1939 he was a member of the transportation division of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and from 1939 to 1952 senior consultant of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR. From 1952 he was a personal pensioner. Gailis was awarded the Order of Lenin.