Imprisoned during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in 1937, he died from the injuries sustained during a beating by Aleksandr Langfang while in NKVD custody.

He studied to become a schoolteacher, beginning in Dorpat (now Tartu), and then in St. Petersburg, where he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's Bolshevik faction.

[4] On November 5, 1917 (by the current Gregorian calendar – October 23 by the Julian calendar still in use in Russia at the time), Bolshevik leader Jaan Anvelt led his leftist revolutionaries to the revolution in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and took political power.

In 1925, Anvelt arrived in the USSR, in 1926–29 working as a political commissar of the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy.

[6] His grandson Andres Anvelt became the Estonian Interior Minister for the Social Democratic Party in 2016.