[2] Vācietis started his military career in Imperial Russia in 1891, and reached the rank of second lieutenant after graduating from infantry cadet school in 1895.

[1] He played a critical role in July 1918 in suppressing a revolt by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who opposed the decision to end the war with Germany.

[3] From July to September 1918, Vācietis commanded the Eastern Front, which he created out of scattered units fighting for the Bolsheviks in Siberia against the White Army and the Czechoslovak Legion.

[1] On 2 September 1918 Vācietis was appointed the first commander-in-chief of the Red Army (RKKA), and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council - but became embroiled in a dispute with Sergey Kamenev, his successor as commander of the Eastern Front, which was intertwined with power struggles within the Bolshevik party leadership, in which Leon Trotsky, the Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, backed Vācietis, and Joseph Stalin backed Kamenev.

On 8 July 1919, Vācietis was arrested under the accusation of membership in a counter-revolutionary reactionary White Guardist organization, but was soon released when the charge was proved false.

On 29 November 1937, during the height of Stalin's Great Purge, Vācietis was arrested by the NKVD as a member of the alleged "Latvian Fascist Organization within the RKKA", and was executed on 28 July 1938.