Like Atlantis and Kitezh, North Ingria Republic Doesn’t Exist Now, ‘Kommersant’ Says, But It Did

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 13 – This week, Ingermanlanders and their supporters marked the centenary of the declaration of independence of the North Ingria Republic in July 1919 (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-new-aspirant-to-be-fourth-baltic.html). That was to be expected, but something that was not occurred today.

            In Moscow’s influential Kommersant newspaper, Aleksey Alekseyev, that paper’s political observer, published a 2300-word article providing a sympathetic portrait of the North Ingria Republic and suggested that much of the support it garnered was the result of ham-handed repression by the Bolsheviks at the time (kommersant.ru/doc/4031239).

            But perhaps more intriguing that the paper’s willingness to attract broad attention to an event 100 years ago few had ever heard of, Alekseyev’s article is striking because of what it says about Soviet policy after the Bolsheviks suppressed the North Ingria Republic and its final words about that political project.

            “Soviet power viewed the Ingermanlanders as an unreliable element. In the 1930s and 1940s, this people experienced five waves of repression. They were dispatched to the Kola Peninsula in Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. They were deported as ‘kulaks,’ ‘anti-Soviet elements,’ ‘residents of border districts,’ ‘socially dangerous, ‘earlier resettled by German occupiers in Finland,’ and ‘illegally returned to Leningrad oblast.’”

            “In 1937-1938,” Alekseyev says, “all Finnish institutions were closed, all aspects of national autonomy were suppressed, instruction, radio broadcasting and print media in Finnish were all prohibited. According to statistics offered by Leonid Gildi in his book, The Fate of ‘a Socially Dangerous’ People (in Russian, Moscow, 2003), almost half of the Ingermanlanders died from Stalinist repressions – 65,000 people.” Other scholars give somewhat lower numbers.

            “The territory adjoining the Finnish border was completely cleansed of the local population before the Soviet-Finnish war. And the history of the Republic of North Ingria for many decades was not acceptable for recollection either in the USSR or in Finland. But all the same it was, both the republic and its history.”