Latvian Operation of the NKVD

More than 500 Latvian peasant colonies originating from the 19th century following the abolition of serfdom existed near St. Petersburg, Novgorod and in Siberia. As the Eastern Front was approaching Courland in the First World War, extensive forced evacuations were carried out, so that the number of Latvians living in Russia doubled to nearly 500,000. Many of the Latvian Riflemen were early supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917. With the end of the First World War and the Russian Civil War, many of the refugees were able to return to independent Latvia. The Latvian–Soviet Peace Treaty provided explicitly for the repatriation of former Latvian riflemen and refugees.

According to the 1926 Soviet census, about 150,000 Latvians had remained in the Soviet Union. They cultivated an active cultural life with the schools, newspapers and theatres. Since the 1905 Revolution, there was a strong Latvian faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Persons of Latvian descent temporarily held high positions in the State apparatus of Soviet Russia. Of the 70 Cheka commissars in 1918, 38 were of Latvian descent.

However, with the increasing Russification of Russia's state organs, members of non-Russian minorities were largely ousted from management positions. Under the leadership of Josef Stalin, Latvia was regarded as a so-called "enemy nation" and Latvians were generally regarded as "counter-revolutionary" and "suspicious elements". This perception is believed to have stemmed from the resistance of Latvian peasant colonists to forced collectivization at the end of the 1920s.

Through targeted deportations to the Gulag, such colonies were eliminated by 1933. A rigorous purge of the party and state apparatus of non-Russians began at that time. The Latvian Communist Party in the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1936, with its members being persecuted and executed as "nationalists" and "enemies of the people". One aspect of Stalin's Great Purge was state-directed xenophobia. In July 1937, the Latvian cultural and educational society "Prometejs" was closed and its employees were arrested. In December 1937, the Latvian theatre "Skatuve" in Moscow was also closed and its actors and other employees were executed and buried in an unmarked mass grave. The Red Latvian Riflemen were removed from history books and school textbooks and their veteran associations were dissolved.

On 23 November 1937, Nikolai Yezhov ordered the NKVD services to pool all the information gathered about Latvians in cultural and political life, the military and other institutions, so as to be able to arrest them "just as during the Polish operation".

On 30 November, in keeping with Order No. 49990 "On carrying out an operation of repressing Latvians" («О проведении операции по репрессированию латышей»), Latvians throughout the Soviet Union were arrested. The legal process was streamlined by standardized accusations and confessions, which resulted in sentences that the accused was remanded to labor camps or to be shot. With fabricated confessions obtained through torture, the NKVD constructed the existence of a Latvian espionage ring, which allegedly included all Latvian officials from the Politburo down to the school directors. The last Latvian Chekists were executed by their former colleagues.

Large groups of victims were shot at the shooting ranges of Butovo and Kommunarka near Moscow, in Levashovo near Leningrad or in Kurapaty near Minsk. However, the torture and murder in the framework of this operation took place throughout the Soviet Union.

Given a large number of detainees, the courts were unable to convict them quickly enough, despite the so-called album procedure. The date of completion of the operation was thus extended until August 1938. In October 1938, special Troika were then set up to deal with the backlog of unprocessed cases.

The Latvian operation ended when Yezhov's successor, Lavrenty Beria issued NKVD Order No. 00762 on November 26, 1938, marking the end of the Great Purge. The liquidation of the Latvian party officials caused certain difficulties for the Soviet authorities when they sought to establish a party and administrative apparatus after the occupation of Latvia in 1940.

A memorial stone to all the Latvian victims of the Great Purge buried at Levashovo Memorial Cemetery

The convictions of 22,369 Latvians are known, 16,573 or 74% of whom were shot. Various estimates are based on 73,000 Latvian casualties. The exact number of the victims are unknown because many other people who were executed during the operation were not ethnically Latvian or Latvian nationals: These included spouses of persons sent to the Gulag because of their marriage with a member of the "enemy nation" as well as the children from such unions, who were sent to orphanages were not included in the statistics.

The operation resulted in the vast majority of remaining Latvians abandoning their culture, and the descendants of the Latvians in Russia barely speak Latvian today. The victims of the operation were rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw; however, the exact information about specific deaths and dates could only be obtained after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perpetrators of the operation, often known by name, have never been tried.

• Estonian Operation of the NKVD
• Finnish Operation of the NKVD
• German operation of the NKVD
• Greek Operation of the NKVD
• Polish operation of the NKVD

• Pārsla Eglīte u.a.: "Latviešu akcija" PSRS 1937–1938. Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, 2007, ISBN 978-9984-9931-5-7.
• Björn M. Felder: Lettland im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Zwischen sowjetischen und deutschen Besatzern 1940–1946. Schöningh, 2009, ISBN 978-3-506-76544-4.
• Aivars Beika: Latvieši Padomju Savienībā. Komunistiskā genocīda upuri 1929–1939. In: Latvijas Okupācijas muzeja gadagrāmata; 1: 1999. Riga 2000.
• Anna Kaminsky: Erinnerungsorte an den Massenterror 1937/38: Russische Föderation. Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED Diktatur, 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-022887-2.

• „Der Große Terror“: 1937-1938 . Kurz-Chronik (The Great Terror: 1937–1938. A Brief Chronology.)
• 2011 Latvian documentary "Train Station Latvians 1937" (Part 1, 2, 3 and 4) directed by Dzintra Geka.