Born into a working-class family in a village called Aseka-Vareiki, in Kovno (Kaunas) province, Lithuania,[1] he moved to Moscow and worked as a turner-toolmaker at factories.

In the summer of 1913, Vareikis and two other Bolsheviks founded a sports club in Podolsk with the aim of involving workers in revolutionary activities.

[3] At the beginning of the First World War, Vareikis published defeatist and revolutionary leaflets among workers as well as leading and participating in many anti-government strikes.

[8] In August 1934, he was drafted into helping prepare the First Congress of Soviet Writers, but a speech he delivered enraged the Congress chairman, the writer, Maxim Gorky, who thought it was "harmful (and) illiterate in general"[9] Stalin's deputy, Lazar Kaganovich informed him that Gorky had written an article for Pravda attacking Vareikis so harshly that staff at the newspaper did not want to publish it.

On arrival in the territorial capital, Khabarovsk, he accused the chairman of Dalkraikom, Grigori Kutov, of having allowed "Trotskyite-Japanese agents" to sabotage the regional economy.

This prompted Stalin to ask: "Comrade Vareikis, why is it that there are so many spies in your area of work?”[2] On 16 September, he told a meeting of the bureau of Dalkraikom that "due to the loss of class vigilance of a number of leading workers, the enemies of the people, Japanese-German agents, Trotskyists, spies and saboteurs, carried out counter-revolutionary agitation and subversive wrecking work at construction sites and enterprises" in the far eastern port of Sovetskaya Gavan.

Under the direction of Vareikis, and the head of the Far Eastern NKVD, Genrikh Lyushkov, more than 170,000 Koreans were deported to Central Asia in a few weeks.

[15] It is rumoured that what the group that Vareikis led actually hoped to achieve at the Congress was to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary, and appoint Kirov in his place.

[18] Vareikis was removed from the post of first secretary of the Far Eastern Regional Committee on 3 October 1937, and recalled to Moscow, where he was arrested as he got off the train, and accused of being part of the counterrevolutionary 'Rightist-Trotskyist' organization in the Central Black Oblast.

[3] Under interrogation, he made to 'confess' that he had been a spy for the Tsarist police from 1915, an allegation that Stalin repeated to the head of Comintern, Georgi Dimitrov on 7 November.

On 29 July 1938 Iosif Vareikis was sentenced to death by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union and was shot on the same day in the Kommunarka NKVD shooting ground.