He was born on 3 December 1886 in Brinken volost of Kreis Hasenpoth, Courland Governorate (now Nīkrāce parish, Skrunda Municipality), the son of Latvian farmers.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1905 he was arrested in March 1907 for the attempted murder of a factory director in Libau[1][circular reference], but was later acquitted by the Riga military court in 1908.

Peterss was a first cousin of Fritz Svaars, a Latvian anarchist, who was suspected of sabotage, robbery and of the murders of a shopkeeper and a policeman during the 1905 revolution, and was arrested and tortured in Riga, but escaped early in 1906.

In Riga, Peterss became one of the leaders of the Social Democracy of Latvia working at the front-lines of the Northern Front.

He also was involved in the investigation of the SR attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918 (Fanni Kaplan case), for the indiscriminate Red Terror campaigns and reprisals that followed.

In winter 1919–20 Peters became the deputy chairman of the Special Committee of the STO in providing military preparations on railways.

He returned to Moscow in 1922 and worked as a high-ranking official in the OGPU, Rabkrin, and as the chief of the Eastern department of the GPU (created on June 2, 1922).

[5] During the Great Purge, as a part of the so-called "Latvian Operation", Peterss was arrested and executed by the NKVD on April 25, 1938, at the Kommunarka shooting ground.

In 1919, an American diplomat testified to Congress that Peterss was, with another Cheka leader Aleksandr Eiduk, considered the "most blood-thirsty monster in Russia".

As a Chekist, he undoubtedly had many people killed, yet the portrayal of him as 'the most blood-thirsty monster' contrasts with the opinion of the British diplomat, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who spent a month under arrest in Moscow in 1918 and was interrogated by Peterss.

There was a strong streak of sentimentality in his nature, but he was a fanatic as far as the clash between Bolshevism and capitalism was concerned, and he pursued his Bolshevik aims with a sense of duty which was relentless.