[1] He was one of the most prominent Latvian politicians of pre-World War II Latvia during the Interwar period of independence from November 1918 to June 1940 and served as the country's first prime minister.

Born in a prosperous farming family, Ulmanis studied agriculture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and at Leipzig University.

He was politically active during the 1905 Revolution, was briefly imprisoned in Pskov, and subsequently fled Latvia to avoid incarceration by the Russian authorities.

During this period of exile, he studied at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the United States as Karl August Ulmann, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture.

This safety was short-lived as World War I broke out one year later and Courland Governorate was partially occupied by Germany in 1915.

In the last stages of World War I, he founded the Latvian Farmers' Union, one of the two most prominent political parties in Latvia at that time.

Many elected officials and politicians (almost exclusively Social Democrats, as well as figures from the extreme right and left) were detained, as were any military officers who resisted the coup d'etat.

In all, 369 Social Democrats, 95 members of Pērkonkrusts, pro-Nazi activists from the Baltic German community, and a handful of politicians from other parties were interned in a prison camp established in the Karosta district of Liepāja.

After several Social Democrats, such as Bruno Kalniņš, had been cleared of weapons charges by the courts, most of those imprisoned began to be released over time.

[6] Although the incumbent State President Alberts Kviesis did not support the coup, he remained in office and collaborated with Ulmanis.

All political life was proscribed, while culture and economy were eventually organized into a type of corporate statism made popular during those years by Mussolini.

His party had never won more than 17 percent of the vote in any election and had seen its support steadily decline in the years since the 1922 constitutional convention.

In practice only the religious party Agudat Israel's newspaper Haint was not forbidden, while popular publications Dos Folk, Frimorgn, Riger Tog, and Naier Fraitik were closed.

[10] During Ulmanis' rule, education was strongly emphasized and literacy rates in Latvia reached high levels.

[citation needed] At a time when most of the world's economy was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression, Latvia could point to increases in both gross national product (GNP) and in exports of Latvian goods overseas.

[15] The movie was based on a widely popular novel written by Vilis Lācis who in 1940 became the Prime Minister of the Soviet-occupied Latvian SSR.

On 23 August 1939 Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's USSR signed a non-aggression agreement, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which contained a secret addendum (revealed only in 1945), dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.

He resigned as prime minister three days after the coup, and appointed a left-wing government headed by Augusts Kirhenšteins—which, in truth, had been chosen by the Soviet embassy.

Soviet-controlled elections for a "People's Saeima" were held on 14–15 July, in which voters were presented with a single list from a Communist-dominated alliance.

A year later, as German armies were closing in on Stavropol, he and other inmates were evacuated to prison in Krasnovodsk, Turkmen SSR (present-day Türkmenbaşy in Turkmenistan).

Some traditions created by Ulmanis, such as the so-called Friendly invitation [lv], a charitable donations to one's former school, continued to be upheld.

On the one hand, it is possible to credit Ulmanis for the rise of ethnic Latvians' economic prosperity during the 1930s, and stress that under his rule there was not the same level of militarism or mass political oppression that characterized other dictatorships of the day.