Fate of Ethnic Finns in USSR Detailed in New Book and Electronic Data Base

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 8 – The Finnish National Archives has released its final report on The Fate of Finns in the Soviet Union 1917-1964 (in Finnish) in the form of both a book by Alexi Manio and an interactive data base with information on some 38,000 Finns (mariuver.eu/2026/06/08/sudby-finnov-v-sovetskom-sojuze/).

            (The full text of the itself book is available in full in Finnish online at drive.google.com/file/d/19_FRE2rQs9HgBG7JE0HoAe9p3OtfOyBq/; the electronic data base also in Finnish can be found at  kohtalonaneuvostoliitto.kansallisarkisto.fi/index.php.)

            These new publications are especially valuable for the light they shed on the number of ethnic Finns who fell victim to Stalinist repression and to the very different ways these repressions hit the various waves of Finnish migration into the Russian Empire and then the USSR.

            These waves of migration included  “the "old" Finns, who lived in St. Petersburg before the revolution, the "red refugees" who left Finland after the Civil War of 1918 and the American Finns who came to Karelia from the USA and Canada fo find work during the depression of the 1930s,” Mari El reports in its review of the book and data set.