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.

[3] However, with the increasing Russification of Russia's state organs, members of non-Russian minorities were largely ousted from management positions.

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".

In December 1937, the Latvian theatre "Skatuve [lv; ru]" in Moscow was also closed and almost all of its actors and other employees were executed and buried in an unmarked mass grave in the Butovo firing range.

The Red Latvian Riflemen were removed from history books and school textbooks and their veteran associations were dissolved.

[4] 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, to be able to arrest them "just as during the Polish operation".

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.

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.