Leitman (Leitmann) Basya Veniaminovna (1908, Riga) — participant in the revolutionary movement in bourgeois Latvia (associates: M. Romanovsky, N. Noskov), victim of political repression in the USSR.

Basya Leitman began her working life in Riga as a shop assistant and factory worker. In 1926–1929 she was a member of MOPR, helped political prisoners, and organized the youth at her factory, for which she was dismissed.

In August 1929, after receiving an invitation from her sister and permission from the USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, she moved to Kharkiv (Ukraine).

In 1932 she was sent to the Moscow Institute of Soviet Construction under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; after graduation she worked as an instructor of the regional executive committee and deputy secretary of the Komsomol Regional Committee in Birobidzhan (Jewish Autonomous Region). She became a member of the CPSU in 1932. In 1936 she was elected to the bureau of the regional Komsomol committee.

On 3 December 1937 she was arrested by the NKVD. On 8 December 1938 she was charged under Article 58-10 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (anti-Soviet propaganda using the religious or national prejudices of the masses) and sentenced to 5 years in a labor camp. In practice she remained imprisoned until 1946.

From 1947 she worked as a statistician in the Department of Public Education in Daugavpils.

In 1956 she was fully rehabilitated by the Presidium of the Regional Court of the Jewish Autonomous Region due to lack of corpus delicti. In 1957 she was reinstated in the CPSU. She became a personal pensioner first of local, and later of republican significance.

Additional sources:

The 4th edition of the CD Victims of Political Terror in the USSR

Book of Memory of Khabarovsk Krai