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.

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).