David Beika

Born Aug. 18 (30), 1885, in the volost (small rural district) of Zaleniek, Dobele District, former Courland Province; died Feb. 7, 1946. Soviet Party and economic figure. Member of the Communist Party after 1903. Born into the family of a farm laborer. Passed the examination for a teacher’s license and worked as a teacher.

In 1905–06, Beika led the armed struggle against the punitive detachments in Dobele District. He emigrated in 1907. In 1917 he was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the Social Democratic Party of the Latvian Krai and to the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik). In August 1917 he became chairman of the Central Trade Union Bureau in Riga. He served as a delegate to the First All-Latvian Congress of Soviets (January 1919), a member of the Presidium of the Latvian Central Executive Committee, and a commissar of industry. The Sixth Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Latvia elected him a member of the Latvian Communist Party (CPL) Central Committee. From January 1920 he was a member, and from March 1920, deputy chairman of the Foreign Bureau of the CPL Central Committee. He was a delegate to the second and third Comintern congresses. From October 1920 he was a member of the CPL Secretariat under the Comintern. From June 1923 he was secretary of the Smolensk, and from 1926 of the Arkhangel’sk, RCP(B) Provincial Committee. From 1926 to 1930 he was chairman of the Council of the All-Russian Union of Artisans’ Cooperatives. From 1932 he was a member of the collegium board and authorized representative of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR in the RSFSR Council of People’s Commissars. He participated from 1936 to 1938 in the Civil War in Spain and was a delegate to the Thirteenth through the Sixteenth Congresses of the CPSU (Bolshevik). He is the author of an autobiography, Memoirs of a Forest Brother (1937, in Russian; 1956, in Latvian), and of several articles.