Kārlis Augusts Vilhelms Ulmanis (4 September 1877 – 20 September 1942) was a Latvian politician.
Biography[]
Born in a prosperous farming family, Ulmanis studied agriculture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and at Leipzig University. He then worked in Latvia as a writer, lecturer, and manager in agricultural positions. 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.
Kārlis Ulmanis (left) in 1919.
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. Ulmanis was one of the principal founders of the People's Council, which proclaimed Latvia's independence on November 18, 1918, with Ulmanis as the Prime Minister of the first Provisional government of Latvia. After the Latvian War of Independence of 1919 - 1920, a constitutional convention established Latvia as a parliamentary democracy in 1920. Ulmanis served as Prime Minister in several subsequent Latvian government administrations from 1918 to 1934.
On the night from May 15–16, 1934, Ulmanis, with the support of Minister of War Jānis Balodis, proclaimed a state of war and dissolved all political parties and the Saeima (parliament). The bloodless coup was carried out by army and units of the national guard Aizsargi loyal to Ulmanis. The Ulmanis regime was unique among other European dictatorships of the interwar period. Ulmanis did not create a ruling party, rubber-stamp parliament or a new ideology. It was a personal, paternalistic dictatorship in which Ulmanis–who called himself "the leader of the people"–claimed to do what he thought was best for Latvians. Ulmanis was a Latvian nationalist, who espoused the slogan "Latvia for Latvians" which meant that Latvia was to be a Latvian nation state, not a multinational state with traditional Baltic German elites and Jewish entrepreneurial class.
On August 23, 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. Latvia was thereby assigned to the Soviet sphere. Following a Soviet ultimatum in October 1939, Ulmanis signed the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty and allowed the formation of Soviet military bases in Latvia. On June 17, 1940, Latvia was completely occupied by the Soviet Union. For the next month, Ulmanis cooperated with the Soviets. 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.
Also on July 21, Ulmanis was forced to resign and asked the Soviet government for a pension and permission to emigrate to Switzerland. Instead, he was arrested and sent to Stavropol in Russia, where he worked in his original profession as an agronom for a year. After the start of the German-Soviet war, he was imprisoned in July 1941. A year later, as German armies were closing in on Stavropol, he and other inmates were evacuated to prison in Krasnovodsk in present-day Turkmenistan. On the way there, he contracted dysentery and soon died on 20 September 1942.