In 1901, after the death of his older brother, a sailor, the year before he left Mangelskaya nautical school and entered the Baltic Teachers' Seminary [lv; ru] in Kuldiga.

During the 1905 Revolution, he was a leader of militant formations of peasants in Livland Governorate and organized strikes in Riga and the surrounding district.

From 6–10 November, he was one of the leaders of the First All-Black Sea Fleet Congress in Sevastopol, which adopted the Bolshevik resolution he wrote on power and sending detachments of sailors and ships to fight Alexey Kaledin.

[1] On 18 December he was elected to lead the Presidium of Soviet of soldiers and workers deputies; he also headed the city's Bolshevik committee and was a chief editor of the newspaper "Tavricheskaya Pravda" (Taurida's Truth).

Gaven was a delegate to the Second All-Black Sea Fleet Congress on 16–19 February 1918 and the author of its resolution to support the Council of People's Commissars.

He led the unsuccessful defense of Crimea from the Ukrainian People's Republic troops and German invaders, and organized the evacuation to Novorossiysk.

As of November 16, 1920 he became deputy chair, serving under Bela Kun, of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee and a participant in the "red terror" that followed the evacuation of the White Army from Crimea.

Starting in 1924 he lived and worked in Moscow, as a member of the presidium and head of the agricultural section of Gosplan, the USSR State Planning Committee.

Due to illness (secondary tuberculosis of the ankle joints and thrombophlembitis), he gradually withdrew from active work and retired in 1933.

In 1932 he was allegedly a member of the Bloc of Soviet Oppositions, the political alliance created by left and right opponents of Joseph Stalin within the USSR and Leon Trotsky by the end of 1932.

[2] The confessions of defendants in the First Moscow Trial in August 1936 depicted Gaven as one of the oppositionists who communicated with Leon Trotsky.

Gaven was not, however, named as a defendant or called as a witness; instead he was arrested on 4 April 1936 on charges of “counterrevolutionary” activities.

[1] He was too ill to appear at his trial on 3 October, at which the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization.

His elder brother Ekab (Jēkabs) was a sailor who, after graduating from the Mangelsk Naval School, became a navigator and captain.

In 1911 she began work as a teacher at Elena Stasova's Tiflis school, and participated in her underground group, joining the RSDLP in 1910.

In 1921 she became Secretary of the bureau of the Armenian section of the Crimean regional committee of the RCP(b) and a member of the editorial board of the newspaper “Bell of the Commune”.

Beginning in 1923, she led the International Red Aid in Crimea and the “Friends of Children” society, and participated in the resettlement of Armenians repatriated from Turkey.