Jēkabs Alksnis was born in a farmer's family in Naukšēni Parish, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire (present-day Latvia), working as a shepherd at age 7.

He returned to Valmiera as a Soviet worker, but due to the German occupation, left for Bryansk, where in the summer of 1918 he was elected a member of the Bryansk district committee of the RCP(b) Alksnis was drafted again, this time to the Red Army, in 1919, and in 1919–1921 held administrative and political assignments in the Southern Russian theatre of war.

He was influenced by one of his subordinates who had seen parachutists entertaining the public in the United States, at the time when Soviet pilots regarded parachutes as "almost a clinical instrument".

In June 1931 Alksnis was promoted to the Commander of Red Air Forces, while Polikarpov and some of his staff were released on amnesty terms.

[5] In June 1937 Alksnis sat on the board of the show trial of the members of the supposed Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization.

During the destalinization of the late 1950s, Alksnis was posthumously rehabilitated; the Air Forces college in Riga was named in his honour.