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Gottland is a municipality of Latvia.

World War II
According to the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact Gottland along with the rest of Latvia was supposed to be occupied by USSR. On 30 September, 1939 the government of Latvia received a demand from Vyacheslav Molotov, the minister foreign affairs of USSR, to sign the mutual assistance treaty. Initially the demand was ignored. But after a personal letter to the last president of Latvia the mutual assistance treaty was signed on 17 October, 1939. The treaty intended to locate a number of soviet army bases in the territory of Latvia. The government of Latvia, however, managed to reach a compromise, according to which no bases were intended to be built in Gottland, and the amount of soviet troops stationed was reduced from 50,000 to mere 15,000.

On June 15, 1940 Jūlijs Auškāps, the minister of education of Latvia visited Gottland to attend the completion of the University of Visby on June 16, although he had been asked to not attend the event. During the ceremony the government of Latvia had been forced to sign it's own resignal by the USSR. After he learned of this later that day, employing the powers granted to him by the government, he declared a state of emergency in the country, internationally announced that it is being occupied and sent requests for assistance to various embassies (though none answered), thus unintentionally worsening the situation in Latvia.

On June 19, 1940 he formed a new government in which he was the prime minister and started to mobilize an army on the small island of 50 000 inhabitants. After this the government of Gottland went relatively passive to not induce an agression directed toward Gottland.

It has been revealed that the Red Army planned to invade Gottland in spring of 1945, however, the government of Gottland internationally announced false information that it has signed a unification pact with Sweden, thus deterring the Red Army from attacking. Thus no active warfare occured in the island throughout the war.

Post-war period
From 1940 to 1946 approximately 200 000 refugees from Latvia arrived to Gottland. Half of them travelled further abroad but the other half stayed in Gottland. At one point there were nearly 220 000 people residing in the island, more than 4 times exceeding its pre-war population. Enormous shanty towns had formed surrounding major towns. Due to poverty, lack of electricity and various other factors, the island was in all ways experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe.

With the aid of Marshall Plan the country received $116 million which was mainly used to house the refugees and build factories. During this period most of modern Visby was constructed. Simultaneously the country experienced an economic reform towards free market policies to accelerate the recovery.

Demographics
The population of Gottland in 1989 was 237,483 out of which 150,000 lived in Visby.