Memory On Trial: Relitigating the Finnish Occupation of Soviet Karelia

On August 1, 2024, journalist Valery Potashov set out from his home in Petrozavodsk, the capital of Russia’s Republic of Karelia, to attend the final day of a court case launched to legally establish that the Finnish Army had committed “genocide of the Soviet people” during its occupation of Soviet Karelia during World War II. Once outside, he was detained by members of the FSB. They took Potashov back to his apartment for a search that, they claimed, was to investigate whether he was involved with an “undesirable organization.” This visit by the security services prevented him from attending the trial. “I had the feeling that they were just trying to keep me in my apartment,” Potashov said.

Back on July 19, 2024, the first day of that trial, the Karelian branch of the FSB had threatened that a charge of treason would be brought against any journalist producing “anti-Russian content” in connection with coverage of the trial.

“They never received the punishment they deserved”

In the summer of 2024, Karelia’s chief prosecutor, Dmitry Kharchenkov, petitioned his republic’s supreme court to recognize that genocide of the Soviet people had taken place during the Finnish occupation (1941-1945) of what was then the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. This and analogous cases were being instigated by Igor Krasnov, Russia’s prosecutor general, who expressed the goal of “restoring historical justice.” The crime of genocide against the civilian population of the Soviet Union in what Russia refers to as “the Great Patriotic War” was first alleged in 2019. That case was launched in Novgorod Oblast. In 2020, a Novgorod court found that German fascist invaders had committed genocide of Soviet citizens in the village of Zhestyanaya Gorka. The verdict cited the UN General Assembly’s 1946 resolution affirming genocide as a crime under international law and the Charter of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal. Dozens of such genocide verdicts have been handed down by courts across Russia, as well as in occupied Crimea and the Lugansk and Donetsk “People’s Republics” (Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, currently occupied by Russia).

These efforts grew out of the Russian Search Movement (Поисковое движение России), which seeks to “preserve historical memory of the victims of war crimes by Nazis and their accomplices during the Great Patriotic War.” The movement’s No Expiration Date project, launched by Yelena Tsunayeva, a member of Putin’s United Russia Party, hunts for evidence of wartime atrocities in mass grave sites and archival documents.

“Because of the Soviet Union’s and Britain’s geopolitical interests at the time, Finnish war criminals never received the punishment they deserved,” said Denis Popov. “Only the Finnish leadership was tried – the president and certain ministers. But none of them spent more than three or four years in prison.” Popov is a historian at Petrozavodsk State University, the author of several works on the 1940s Finnish occupation of Karelia, and he testified at the trial. “During Soviet times, we had warm relations with Finland,” Popov said, “and there was economic, political, and cultural cooperation. The Finnish occupation of Karelia was not talked about.”

Occupation and Reconstruction

One of the main principles guiding the Finnish occupying army during World War II was the idea of “Greater Finland.” Zheny Parfyonov, a history graduate student at Petrozavodsk State University who serves on the staff of the National Museum of the Republic of Karelia, specializes in the region’s military history and the 1940s resistance movement. He explained that the “Greater Finland” movement arose in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, inspired by a number of factors, including the policy of forced russification imposed by Alexander III and Nicholas II in Finland, which was then an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire. Many pro-independence activists fled to Germany.

In 1918, after a civil war in Finland that ultimately led to the country’s independence, anticommunism evolved into anti-Russian sentiments, and the idea of incorporating parts of Russia with Finno-Ugric populations into Finland grew in popularity. The Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union (1939-1940) poured oil on the fire.^[1] Finland lost a significant portion of its territory, which brought the country’s interests into alignment with those of Nazi Germany. After the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union, Finland found itself in a de facto, if not formal, alliance with Germany.

The Karelians’ ethnic affinity with Finns had made them a target of arrests and executions before the war. During Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-1938, ethnic repression (“national operations”) swept through Karelia. In 1937, the Veps people, a Finno-Ugric speaking population of limited dispersion, were caught up in the Soviet leadership’s fight against national identity, leading to the closing of Veps schools, the halting of instruction in the Veps language, and repressive measures against the ethnic intelligentsia.

When Finnish troops invaded Karelia in 1941, they too divided its population into “the nationals” (ethnic Veps and Karelians) and “non-nationals” (Russians). The Veps and Karelians were seen as belonging to Greater Finland. According to University of Houston historian Alexey Golubev, not much changed in the “national” villages: “Under the Finns, they continued to live under the same spartan – but not dying of hunger – conditions as they had before” (conditions brought about by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture).

The Finns placed the “non-nationals” in labor and concentration camps, planning to later ship them to German-occupied territory. Prisoners were fed extremely poorly, subjected to physical punishment, and forced to work, usually in logging. They were paid meager wages.

Former Finnish concentration camp prisoners were interviewed for an oral history project about Karelia. They recalled crowded conditions that sometimes forced people to sleep on the floor. Prisoners would occasionally try to squeeze through the barbed wire to hunt for bread in town, but anyone caught doing so would be beaten.

The population of these camps changed over time. In May 1942, there were as many as 24,000 inmates being held, but by early 1944, that number had dropped to approximately 15,000, according to researchers. Back then, the population of Karelia was 83,000. It is impossible to say how many people perished from hunger and unsanitary conditions in the six concentration camps of occupied Petrozavodsk (Karelia’s capital): estimates range from 7,000 to 14,000. Some members of the “non-national” population lived freely, but only because the Finns hadn’t gotten around to sending them to a camp yet, said Golubev.

Since 1986, High School No. 13 in Petrozavodsk has housed a school museum, Children of the War, devoted to the occupation of Karelia and featuring floor-to-ceiling documentary photographs of children newly liberated from a Finnish concentration camp taken by war correspondent Galina Sanko. The walls are decorated with barbed wire and wartime propaganda posters, one of which proclaims: “We will mercilessly crush and destroy the enemy!”

“The Republic of Karelia has had and still has a multiethnic population. […] If we start dividing it up into this, that, and the other, that’s not right,” a high school staff member explains to museum visitors, apparently in an effort to excuse the fact that the exhibit only talks about the life of the Russian population during the war, without a word about the Veps and the Karelians.

According to her, the museum made no changes to exhibits after the genocide verdict was issued, but they do mention it during tours.

Genocide as a political weapon

According to Karelian journalist Valery Potashov, who covered the trials last summer, the trials are the “logical next step” after the Sandarmokh excavations, which were undertaken in 2019 by the Russian Military-Historical Society together with the regional office of the Russian Search Movement. Sandarmokh is a forest tract in Karelia and one of the largest and best-known sites of mass shootings and graves of victims of Stalinist repression. The site was first discovered by Yuri Dmitriev, who worked tirelessly starting in the 1990s to research the fates of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. (Dmitriev is currently serving a 15-year sentence on trumped-up charges.) The Russian Search Movement group was not interested in victims of Stalinist repression: they were looking for the graves of Finnish concentration camp prisoners and fallen Red Army soldiers. Even though that’s not what they found, they marked the site with a granite memorial mentioning the Finnish occupation.

Karelia’s Supreme Court convened six times during the summer of 2024 to consider whether the actions of the Finnish Army could be considered genocide of the Soviet people. Expert testimony was primarily provided by historians from Petrozavodsk and Moscow. No witnesses were called to represent the Finnish side. The proceedings were described by Potashov as “accusatory” and entirely “political.”

Testimony was also offered by “interested parties” (the term used during proceedings): people who had been interned in the camps as children, and Artur Parfyonchikov, head of the Republic of Karelia.

“It’s difficult to conduct a trial 80 years after the fact,” said historian Zheny Parfyonov. “The only actual witnesses that can be called are elderly people who found themselves in Finnish concentration camps as children. They have their own understanding of that period: they don’t have the full picture of what happened; from the inside, they only saw individual aspects.”

Parfyonov testified at the trial as a witness, providing information about the raids and underground work conducted by the anti-Finnish resistance in occupied parts of Karelia.

On August 1, 2024, the Karelian Supreme Court ruled that the Finnish Army’s actions in Karelia during the Second World War constituted war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Both this verdict and the one in the Zhestyanaya Gorka case cited the 1946 UN resolution and the Nuremburg Charter.

The 1948 UN “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In the Karelian prosecutor’s declaration, the brutality of the Finnish regime is described as creating “conditions incompatible with life,” a slight rephrasing of one of the convention’s clauses.

In recent years, accusations of genocide have been made with increasing frequency on the international level, such as regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza and Russia’s in Ukraine.

“The concept of genocide is shifting from legal usage into political usage, so we can understand the historical context in which the Supreme Court of Karelia reached its decision,” said historian Golubev. “If the actions of Russia in Ukraine are being publicly recognized within the European political sphere as genocide, we’re no longer dealing with genocide as a legal term. ‘Genocide’ is being transformed into a political weapon. If you call your girlfriend an idiot, she’ll throw that word right back at you – that’s the approximate level of discussion.”

Parfyonov said he sees the Karelian Supreme Court decision as largely “a symbolic act of historical justice” that is needed by historians, politicians, and those interned in concentration camps as children. It would be difficult to make financial claims against Finland after signing the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty: the treaty spelled out the reparations the Soviet Union was due from Finland. They were paid in full in 1952.

“A dress to bury Verushka in”

“You’re talking about the recognition of genocide, but I don’t know anything about that. What happened?” Marina Smirnova asks. She is the daughter of 87-year-old Vera Khamelyova, a former child prisoner in a Karelian concentration camp. This was the first she had heard about the court case. She says it hasn’t changed anything in their lives.

She and her mother, Vera Nikolayevna, have been living together in Petrozavodsk for the past three years. Vera Nikolayevna is hard of hearing, so sometimes Marina answers for her: as a child, she often heard stories about the concentration camp from her grandmother. For them, the war became a “shared memory.” But Vera Nikolayevna wants to speak for herself.

When the war broke out, Vera’s family had been living in Sennaya Guba, a village on an island in Lake Onega. Then, after the Finnish invasion, in the winter of 1941, four-year-old Vera, her pregnant mother, grandmother, and sister were taken away in a truck across frozen Lake Onega to Petrozavodsk and confined to Concentration Camp No. 4. That winter, as Vera Nikolayevna recalls it, was brutal. Her maternal grandmother was well off and had been able to bring some gold with her, which she kept in a little bag on her neck. She was able to trade the gold for food, and that saved their lives.

But there still wasn’t enough to eat, and little Vera came down with dropsy. “My stomach swelled up, and I was lying on a mattress on the floor. Grandma thought I’d die and washed a dress to bury Verushka in,” the old woman recalls. But the little girl recovered thanks to a feldsher who worked in the camp infirmary.

After the war, Vera Khamelyova’s family moved to Velikaya Guba, a village on the banks of Lake Onega and, at age seven, she went to school. But she didn’t stay there for long:

The teacher was showing us a picture and asking what we saw there. It was a picture of some chicks. But how was I to know that? I never saw any in the camp, but there were chickens running in the yard. So I answered ‘Kurichi’ (my grandmother pronounced tsasch).^[2] The other kids were rolling on the floor laughing and I got upset. My mother said I wouldn’t be going back to school.

Vera returned to school the following year and later received a higher education and went on to teach English and German at a technical school in the Karelian town of Kondopoga. Her former colleagues still send her cards every Victory Day, May 9. A card celebrating the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany sits on her desk next to a tiny bear figurine that Vera Nikolayevna brought back from a Soviet-era trip she took to the German Democratic Republic. The desk is also piled with magazines her daughter brought her from the school library: Vera Nikolayevna likes to read memoirs about the Finnish occupation and essays on history. She jokes that her nose is sore from wearing her reading glasses too much.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the German Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation Foundation sent reparations payments to Vera Nikolayevna, as a former concentration camp prisoner. The German government established the foundation in 1993 to make payments and provide charitable assistance to victims of Nazism. In 2011, the Russian government shut the foundation down, stating that the task of compensation had been fulfilled. German authorities assert that this closure deprived thousands of former prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners of the ability to receive compensation. Then, in December 2024, a Karelian legislative committee voted down the idea of paying the “children of war” still living in the republic “even a thousand rubles each” in conjunction with 2025’s 80th anniversary Victory Day celebrations.

Vera Nikolayevna’s daughter Marina says they aren’t looking for help: for them it is enough that her mother receives benefits due to her physical disabilities and gets her medicines for free.

“The camp people are coming”

Lenina Pavlovna Makeyeva, an 89-year-old childhood camp prisoner from Petrozavodsk, has no remaining family, so she needs help buying food and household chores. Cancer has left her unable to lift anything heavy.

“I get a half loaf of bread – 250 grams. One or two potatoes,” the pensioner said, describing her trips to the store. “I somehow managed to get a pack of sugar into my cart and, after leaving the store, and I looked to see who’s walking with free hands. I asked someone to get the cart across the street, and they did. Then I look for my next ‘client.’”

Makeyeva said she believes the genocide court case was just to “check a box,” but she hopes that it will help draw attention to a problem she’s been dealing with for more than a year now: she wants former camp inmates to be given free social services. Makeyeva is not currently eligible: her pension of R50,000 a month (approximately $600) is above the subsistence rate.

Last summer, Makeyeva testified in court to support the prosecutor’s petition to have the actions of the Finnish Army designated as genocide of the Soviet people. She was five when she arrived at Concentration Camp No. 5. Her two sisters and her grandmother died of hunger there, and her mother became severely ill. After liberation, life was hard. When former inmates walked down the street, they’d hear taunts of “The camp people are coming!” Because she had spent her childhood in the camp, Makeyeva was not admitted into the Komsomol (the Young Communist League), and she had to go through college as a correspondent student.

Later, after Makeyeva entered the work force – first as a train-station cashier, then working for the tax service – she had to submit paperwork to the KGB every year attesting that she had not committed “illegal actions against the people.”

Now, Makeyeva heads the Karelian Union of Former Child Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps. When the organization was founded in 1989, primarily to provide mutual aid and education, 1,490 people joined. Now, according to Makeyeva, the union is down to 86 members. Her work for the union keeps her going, she said. In the time we spent with her, she put on a fashion show of different outfits arrayed with sets of medals: for being a war veteran, a camp inmate, and awards from the Ministry of Finance.

“I’m a persistent person by nature,” Makeyeva proudly proclaimed. She’s used to standing up for her rights. In 2005, the Russian government set pension supplements for former concentration camp inmates: 1000 for those who were minors at the time and 500 for those imprisoned as adults. But Makeyeva’s mother was not granted this supplement: she was told by the Pension Fund that Finnish concentration camps didn’t count. Lenina Pavlovna and her mother spent two years fighting for these payments. Finally, a court order approved them.

In October 2024, Makeyeva petitioned the Petrozavodsk prosecutor for free social services. In response, the prosecutor sued Makeyeva for R30,000 for the “moral harm” caused by her numerous attempts to petition for help. The case went to trial on January 29, 2025. The judge rejected the suit.

“An agitator for Finnish life”

During the Second World War, ethnic Karelians and Veps living in Finn-occupied territories were much less likely to wind up in concentration camps than were ethnic Russians. Yekaterina Ponomaryova (at her request, we are not using her real name), a 57-year-old resident of one of the “nationalities” villages, learned her family history from archival documents and relatives’ stories.    

The village where she lives has historically been primarily ethnic Karelian. Because of the Finns’ sense of ethnic affinity with this group, during the occupation, collective farmland and horses were handed over to local residents for private use. The children attended school and worked in the fields.

During the occupation, Ponomaryova recalled, the Finns allowed villagers to restore an Orthodox chapel that had been partially destroyed. “If they hadn’t done that, during Soviet times, nobody would have given permission to restore the chapel, and it wouldn’t be standing today,” she told us. People were allowed to visit the chapel. A Finnish priest whom Ponomaryova described as “an agitator for Finnish life,” conducted services there. Once, he even held a service following the Orthodox canon. After the war, the chapel was closed.

Ponomaryova’s aunt was taken away to work in Finland. Her family didn’t know where she was: the aunt didn’t write home because she was afraid that if she was sent home from Finland she would then be exiled to Siberia. She wrote to her family only twenty years later to report that she had married a Finnish officer and had children.

There was no mass resettlement of Karelians after the war, but they did endure discriminatory treatment. Ponomaryova recalled her parents’ tales from that time: “Karelians were not considered human. My father never admitted that he spoke Karelian – not in the army, not at work.”

“I had a relative who, in the ’70s, went to school only able to speak Karelian. The children weren’t allowed to speak it at all, even during recess – they were afraid of getting smacked and told: ‘Speak Russian,’” said Yekaterina Ponomaryova. She said that longstanding nationalities policies left a psychological imprint on Karelians. “We were afraid to say we were Karelians.”

Historian Golubev proposed an explanation for the silence surrounding the life of the “nationalities” population during the Finnish occupation: “Collaborationism has a bad name in all societies that have experienced it. […] Nations that liberate territory after a lengthy occupation don’t have any interest in objectively studying the history of what took place there.”

After the war, the Soviet Union began cooperating with Finland. The two countries worked together to construct a major mineral processing plant on the border. The Karelian city of Kostomuksha grew up around it.

Journalist Potashov said he sees the development of friendly relations with the Finns after the war as one of Russia’s and Karelia’s greatest achievements. The main problem with the genocide cases is the damage it does to that relationship:

“A few years ago, I spent time with [Finnish] veterans of the Winter War,” he said, “and they told me that they had met with our veterans, drunk with them, and together recalled those times. Unfortunately, we’ve again returned to seeing the Finns as enemies.”