During the Great Purge, as a part of the so-called "Latvian Operation", Gaylit was arrested by the NKVD on August 15, 1937, and executed the following year.
Working as a farm laborer in his youth, he became a land surveyor after attending the Wolmar City School.
In 1928 he became assistant to the commander of the North Caucasus Military District, and from 1930 deputy chief of the Main Directorate of the Red Army Headquarters.
On August 1, 1938, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR for espionage and participation in a counter-revolutionary organization.
1896), a journalist, was arrested at the end of August 1937 and sentenced in December 1938 to five years in the camps as a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland.