The ensuing months would become known in Latvia as Baigais gads, the Year of Horror. Mass arrests, disappearances, and deportations culminated on the night of June 14, 1941, when 11,598 Latvians, 1,789 Jews, 761 Russians, 42 Germans and 238 others were deported. Prior to the German invasion, in less than a year, at least 27,586 persons were arrested; most were deported, and c. 945 persons were shot.

While under German occupation, Latvia was administered as part of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Latvian paramilitary units and police participated in the Holocaust. 80,000 to 100,000 Latvian citizens were killed during the Nazi occupation, including about 70,000 Latvian Jews; about 20,000 Jews brought from Central and Eastern Europe were also murdered in Latvia. Latvian soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict, including in the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, most of them conscripted by the occupying authorities.

The Soviets reoccupied the country in 1944-45 and further mass deportations followed as the country was forcibly collectivized and Sovietized; 42,975 persons were deported in 1949. In sheer numbers, however, 41,084 ethnic Latvians, 772 Russians, 4 Germans, and 1,114 others were deported in 1949. By the census of 1959, ethnic Latvians made up only 62% of the population. The percentage of ethnic Russians had meanwhile risen to 26.6% (there were 556,400 ethnic Russians in the Latvian SSR 1959; in 1943 there had been 207,003 ethnic Russians, about eight out of ten of them living in the eastern region of Latgallia).

The 1949 deportations ostensibly targeted "kulaks and nationalist families." One was a member of a "nationalist family" if a relative had resisted the occupation, for example. Kulaks � "the rural bourgeoisie" � were defined using prewar statistics, despite the fact that many people had lost their land or livestock in the intervening decade. Some supposed kulaks possessed no land at all. Complaints from the Gulag were met with a standard NKVD response: "you (your mother or your father) possessed a kulak farm in 1939."

In hundreds of cases, children were deported alone, without their families. When they reached sixteen years of age, they were assigned the status of deportees.

The status of those not defined as kulaks was shifted retroactively with no charges being brought -- in the summer of 1949, special sessions simply declared their permanent resettlement and the confiscation of their property, without trial.

From 1955, people were allowed to return to Latvia, but incrementally � Jānis Riekstiņ�, Senior Researcher at Latvia's National Archives, compares the process to chopping off the tail of a dog, piece by piece. About 12% of the deportees had perished. Those who returned were required to sign documents agreeing not to return to their place of residence.

Concurrently, an influx of laborers, administrators, military personnel and their dependents from Russia and other Soviet republics reduced the ethnic Latvian population to 62% by 1959; by the time independence was regained, Latvians were in danger of becoming a minority in their own country. During the Khrushchev Thaw, attempts by national communists led by Eduards Berklavs to gain a degree of autonomy for the republic and protect the rapidly deteriorating position of the Latvian language were suppressed.

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� Text: Pēteris Cedriņ�, 2009

� The Latvian Institute
This fact sheet can be freely printed from homepage of the Latvian Institute, distributed and cited, on condition that the Latvian Institute is acknowledged as the source. The Latvian Institute promotes knowledge about Latvia abroad. It produces publications, in several languages, on many aspects of Latvia.