Ozols, Janis

Ozols, Jānis 

(party pseudonym, Ziedonis). Born Feb. 10 (22), 1885, in Irlava Volost (small rural district), now Tukums Raion, Latvian SSR; died Dec. 22, 1919, in Valmiera, in what is now the Latvian SSR. Participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

The son of a farmhand, Ozols became a worker in Riga in 1904. In 1905 he served on the Ilguciema committee of the Latvian Social Democratic Labor Party and was a member of a revolutionary fighting group. A member of the Riga Committee of the Social Democracy of the Latvian Territory (SDLT) in 1907, he was arrested and sentenced to four years of hard labor and to exile in Siberia. Ozols escaped from exile in 1912, emigrated to Great Britain, and joined the Bureau of Foreign Groups of the SDLT. In 1917 he was a member of the presidium of the Riga soviet and the Riga committee of the SDLT.

After German troops occupied Riga in August 1917, Ozols became one of the organizers of the party underground. In 1919 he was chairman of the executive committee of the soviet in Libava (present-day Liepāja) and a member of the revolutionary military committee in Kurzeme. Ozols was a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Latvian Communist Party in March 1919, at which he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. He subsequently engaged in underground activity in bourgeois Latvia. Arrested on December 14 together with delegates to a Komsomol conference, he was shot after brutal tortures.

REFERENCE

Kalnin, L. “Ia. Ozol-Ziedonis.” In Vechnaia slava. Moscow, 1967.