Eduard Petrovich Berzin (1894-1938) was a Latvian Riflemen officer who played the key role in the Cheka’s 1918 provocation known as the Lockhart plot. In August 1918, as commander of a Latvian artillery battalion guarding the Kremlin, he was introduced to British envoy Robert Bruce Lockhart and agent Sidney Reilly as a disaffected officer willing to turn Latvian troops against the Bolsheviks. Acting on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s instructions, he took British money and reported everything to the Cheka, which used the affair to arrest Lockhart and break up Allied networks.

Berzin later worked in the OGPU’s economic administration and in 1931 became the first director of Dalstroy, the NKVD trust that used Gulag labor to mine gold in the Kolyma region. He was arrested in December 1937 and shot in 1938. He should not be confused with Yan Berzin, head of Soviet military intelligence.

Sources

• Schneer, Jonathan. The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia. Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Lockhart, R. H. Bruce. Memoirs of a British Agent. Putnam, 1932.
• Nordlander, David J. “Origins of a Gulag Capital: Magadan and Stalinist Control in the Early 1930s.” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (1998).

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.