The Ripper
02-09-2011, 01:13 PM
By Pekka Hakala
The ninth President of the Republic of Finland, Mauno Koivisto, 87, sits at his desk in his home in Katajanokka in Helsinki and is visibly stunned.
“So the return migration of the Ingrians was their idea?” Koivisto wonders. “No, no. The Soviet Union agreed to it. They never wanted to expel the Ingrians from the country.”
So apparently Koivisto was not aware of the claim that the Soviet Security Service, the KGB, had been behind the effort to allow the Ingrians’ to move to Finland. It has actually attracted surprisingly little attention, even though it is not a complete fantasy.
The so-called return migration of Ingrians from the Soviet Union began with Koivisto’s television interview in April 1990. The President said on a current affairs programme, after a meeting with foreign affairs journalists, that the Ingrians should be treated as returning migrants.
“The Ingrians are Finns”, Koivisto said. “Their ancestors were moved there once at the behest of Sweden, and they have undergone much while they have been there.”
The civil service immediately took action after Koivisto’s statement. The expression “at the behest of Sweden” was interpreted to mean that the Finnish roots of those approved as returning migrants could be traced back to the 17th century. That is when migration began from Finland to Ingria – the area around St. Petersburg and the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland.
At first the returning migrants were chosen simply by looking at their internal passport for the Soviet Union – Soviet citizens were actually required to have one of those. If the passport identified the holder’s nationality as “Finnish”, that person was eligible to settle in Finland as a returning migrant. The matter was not written into the law until later.
Parliament decided in January this year to end the arrangement, and return migration of Ingrians is coming to an end next summer.
So far, the Finnish Immigration Service estimates that about 30,000 Ingrian returning migrants and family members have come to Finland. Most of the arrivals speak Russian as their mother tongue.
Koivisto’s speech made him a hero of the Ingrians. However, his reputation was tarnished somewhat by the observation made by Dr. Kimmo Rentola in his history of the Security Police, which appeared in 2009.
“Immigration by the Ingrians first came up in a discussion between [former Security Police chief Seppo] Tiitinen and Feliks Karasev, the KGB station chief in Helsinki on June 2nd, 1988”, Rentola writes.
Immigration Service researcher Antero Leitzinger expressed the matter in a fresh history of the service even more bluntly. “Koivisto gave his approval to an idea that he would not have put forward of his own initiative”, Leitzinger writes.
Leitzinger had interviews many people working at the Immigration Service, but on the KGB’s Ingrian initiative, Rentola was his only source.
“All of those whom I have interviewed remember that the initiative came from Koivisto, which is of course natural, because Koivisto gave orders to the Ministry”, Leitzinger says.
In his book Rentola makes reference to Tiitinen’s notes, which have been in his use. They indicate that Tiitinen spoke of his discussions with Karasev to Koivisto in July 1988 – almost two years before his famous TV speech.
“The book leans on one single source, and undoubtedly, a broader base would be needed”, Rentola admits now. However, he is not willing to throw his observation into the rubbish bin yet.
“The KGB has never been one to make initiatives. It is only a messenger. It was often used as a channel for sensitive feelers. The idea seems to have come from a high-ranking Soviet government or economic entity.”
“I cannot recall anything like that”, says Seppo Tiitinen (who currently works as Secretary General of the Finnish Parliament) when asked about his meeting with Feliks Karasev nearly 23 years ago. “It could be that it was the first contact in that direction, but the matter itself started from a discussion with Koivisto.”
“The President once asked me unexpectedly in connection with a meeting how many ingrains there are, and what I would think if we would take them all.”
So all those involved agree that the initiative was Koivisto’s not the KGB’s or Karasev’s. But who is this Karasev?
The phone rings twice in St. Petersburg, and an older gentleman answers it in the local manner.
“Hello?”
Feliks Karasev puts an h-sound in front of the word, suggesting that he noticed that the call was coming from Finland.
Karasev, or more properly Karasov, originally Sutyrin, is an 81-year-old veteran general of the Soviet external intelligence service. He is believed to have trained young men such as the present Prime minister Vladimir Putin and the first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov. He spent many years in Finland, most recently as the chief of the intelligence station here.
So whose idea was this return migration?
“Oh dear”, Karasev responds in Finnish. “It was such a long time ago. I can’t remember anything like that. I don’t remember talking to anyone about it, and speculation is not part of my work.
However, speculation fits quite well within the brief of researchers.
“Precedents on directed emigration from the Soviet Union exist concerning different minority nationalities at different times”, Leitzinger observes. At the same time with the Ingrians, there was the departure of Soviet Jews to Israel, and the return of Germans to their recently-united home country. The repatriation of the Germans was a very similar, extended operation, where an indication on a Soviet internal passport that the person was ethnically German was enough.
Or, as René Nyberg, the former Ambassador to Moscow and Berlin puts it: “It was enough for your grandfather to have had a German shepherd as a pet.”
“If the purpose had been a general and centrally coordinated transfer of population, the first step probably would have been KGB infiltration through national organisations”, Leitzinger suspects.
It is hard to say anything about infiltration, but the recently established Ingrian association of Estonia was actively taking the initiative already in the autumn of 1989. Rudolf Pakki, the chairman of the association, wrote to the foreign ministries of Finland and the Soviet Union, and to President Koivisto about the plight of the Ingrians, because Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to Finland.
Talk was about easier access to visas, recalls the association’s current leader, Toivo Kabanen, who started at his post in 1990.
“We never dreamed at that time that it would be possible to move to Finland.”
However, Kabanen feels that the Soviet Union and its intelligence service may well have had a good reason to want to be rid of the Ingrians. Plans were made in 1988 to set up special Ingrian villages in the Karelian Isthmus.
“I have heard from there that there was thinking in the KGB that the next step would have been that the villages should have been returned to Finland.”
A somewhat similar situation was happening on Estonia’s border with Russia. Kabanen was day-dreaming with Arnold Rüütel, the leader of the Estonian Soviet Republic, who was later elected President of Estonia, about the annexation of Estonian Ingrian areas east of the River Narva to Estonia.
Darkness is descending on the slushy Katajanokka neighbourhood in Helsinki, and the elderly former President Koivisto recalls events of more than two decades ago. At that time, before the severe recession of the 1990s, there was much talk about a labour shortage in Finland. However, Koivisto says that this was not what guided his decisions on the Ingrians.
“I have positive feelings for the Ingrians”, Koivisto says. “The story of the Ingrians touched very sensitive spots in Finland.”
Western and Central Ingria came under German occupation in the autumn of 1941, and more than 63,000 Ingrians were evacuated to Finland. Of them 55,000 were returned to the Soviet Union in the autum of 1944, and were put at the mercy of Stalin.
So in 1990 Koivisto finally managed to pay back a debt that was owed to the Ingrians. The President’s previous very cautious attitude appears to have changed in the previous winter, pretty soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“At that time I made an enquiry of sorts, let’s say an unofficial one, toward the Soviet Union, and there was no sharply negative response, at least. Of course it was a time of weakness for the Soviet Union. I could well imagine that local officials would have been dissatisfied that good people are leaving the country.”
What does the operation look like in retrospect. Was it successful?
“At least it was not a serious failure. Nobody, certainly not any sensible people, would have predicted at that time that Germany would be united, and that the Soviet Union would fall apart. Sometimes things happen in the world, which are unforeseeable.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.2.2011
HS - International Edition (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Koivisto+vehemently+denies+that+Ingrian+migration+ to+Finland+was+KGB+initiative/1135263653011)
The ninth President of the Republic of Finland, Mauno Koivisto, 87, sits at his desk in his home in Katajanokka in Helsinki and is visibly stunned.
“So the return migration of the Ingrians was their idea?” Koivisto wonders. “No, no. The Soviet Union agreed to it. They never wanted to expel the Ingrians from the country.”
So apparently Koivisto was not aware of the claim that the Soviet Security Service, the KGB, had been behind the effort to allow the Ingrians’ to move to Finland. It has actually attracted surprisingly little attention, even though it is not a complete fantasy.
The so-called return migration of Ingrians from the Soviet Union began with Koivisto’s television interview in April 1990. The President said on a current affairs programme, after a meeting with foreign affairs journalists, that the Ingrians should be treated as returning migrants.
“The Ingrians are Finns”, Koivisto said. “Their ancestors were moved there once at the behest of Sweden, and they have undergone much while they have been there.”
The civil service immediately took action after Koivisto’s statement. The expression “at the behest of Sweden” was interpreted to mean that the Finnish roots of those approved as returning migrants could be traced back to the 17th century. That is when migration began from Finland to Ingria – the area around St. Petersburg and the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland.
At first the returning migrants were chosen simply by looking at their internal passport for the Soviet Union – Soviet citizens were actually required to have one of those. If the passport identified the holder’s nationality as “Finnish”, that person was eligible to settle in Finland as a returning migrant. The matter was not written into the law until later.
Parliament decided in January this year to end the arrangement, and return migration of Ingrians is coming to an end next summer.
So far, the Finnish Immigration Service estimates that about 30,000 Ingrian returning migrants and family members have come to Finland. Most of the arrivals speak Russian as their mother tongue.
Koivisto’s speech made him a hero of the Ingrians. However, his reputation was tarnished somewhat by the observation made by Dr. Kimmo Rentola in his history of the Security Police, which appeared in 2009.
“Immigration by the Ingrians first came up in a discussion between [former Security Police chief Seppo] Tiitinen and Feliks Karasev, the KGB station chief in Helsinki on June 2nd, 1988”, Rentola writes.
Immigration Service researcher Antero Leitzinger expressed the matter in a fresh history of the service even more bluntly. “Koivisto gave his approval to an idea that he would not have put forward of his own initiative”, Leitzinger writes.
Leitzinger had interviews many people working at the Immigration Service, but on the KGB’s Ingrian initiative, Rentola was his only source.
“All of those whom I have interviewed remember that the initiative came from Koivisto, which is of course natural, because Koivisto gave orders to the Ministry”, Leitzinger says.
In his book Rentola makes reference to Tiitinen’s notes, which have been in his use. They indicate that Tiitinen spoke of his discussions with Karasev to Koivisto in July 1988 – almost two years before his famous TV speech.
“The book leans on one single source, and undoubtedly, a broader base would be needed”, Rentola admits now. However, he is not willing to throw his observation into the rubbish bin yet.
“The KGB has never been one to make initiatives. It is only a messenger. It was often used as a channel for sensitive feelers. The idea seems to have come from a high-ranking Soviet government or economic entity.”
“I cannot recall anything like that”, says Seppo Tiitinen (who currently works as Secretary General of the Finnish Parliament) when asked about his meeting with Feliks Karasev nearly 23 years ago. “It could be that it was the first contact in that direction, but the matter itself started from a discussion with Koivisto.”
“The President once asked me unexpectedly in connection with a meeting how many ingrains there are, and what I would think if we would take them all.”
So all those involved agree that the initiative was Koivisto’s not the KGB’s or Karasev’s. But who is this Karasev?
The phone rings twice in St. Petersburg, and an older gentleman answers it in the local manner.
“Hello?”
Feliks Karasev puts an h-sound in front of the word, suggesting that he noticed that the call was coming from Finland.
Karasev, or more properly Karasov, originally Sutyrin, is an 81-year-old veteran general of the Soviet external intelligence service. He is believed to have trained young men such as the present Prime minister Vladimir Putin and the first deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov. He spent many years in Finland, most recently as the chief of the intelligence station here.
So whose idea was this return migration?
“Oh dear”, Karasev responds in Finnish. “It was such a long time ago. I can’t remember anything like that. I don’t remember talking to anyone about it, and speculation is not part of my work.
However, speculation fits quite well within the brief of researchers.
“Precedents on directed emigration from the Soviet Union exist concerning different minority nationalities at different times”, Leitzinger observes. At the same time with the Ingrians, there was the departure of Soviet Jews to Israel, and the return of Germans to their recently-united home country. The repatriation of the Germans was a very similar, extended operation, where an indication on a Soviet internal passport that the person was ethnically German was enough.
Or, as René Nyberg, the former Ambassador to Moscow and Berlin puts it: “It was enough for your grandfather to have had a German shepherd as a pet.”
“If the purpose had been a general and centrally coordinated transfer of population, the first step probably would have been KGB infiltration through national organisations”, Leitzinger suspects.
It is hard to say anything about infiltration, but the recently established Ingrian association of Estonia was actively taking the initiative already in the autumn of 1989. Rudolf Pakki, the chairman of the association, wrote to the foreign ministries of Finland and the Soviet Union, and to President Koivisto about the plight of the Ingrians, because Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to Finland.
Talk was about easier access to visas, recalls the association’s current leader, Toivo Kabanen, who started at his post in 1990.
“We never dreamed at that time that it would be possible to move to Finland.”
However, Kabanen feels that the Soviet Union and its intelligence service may well have had a good reason to want to be rid of the Ingrians. Plans were made in 1988 to set up special Ingrian villages in the Karelian Isthmus.
“I have heard from there that there was thinking in the KGB that the next step would have been that the villages should have been returned to Finland.”
A somewhat similar situation was happening on Estonia’s border with Russia. Kabanen was day-dreaming with Arnold Rüütel, the leader of the Estonian Soviet Republic, who was later elected President of Estonia, about the annexation of Estonian Ingrian areas east of the River Narva to Estonia.
Darkness is descending on the slushy Katajanokka neighbourhood in Helsinki, and the elderly former President Koivisto recalls events of more than two decades ago. At that time, before the severe recession of the 1990s, there was much talk about a labour shortage in Finland. However, Koivisto says that this was not what guided his decisions on the Ingrians.
“I have positive feelings for the Ingrians”, Koivisto says. “The story of the Ingrians touched very sensitive spots in Finland.”
Western and Central Ingria came under German occupation in the autumn of 1941, and more than 63,000 Ingrians were evacuated to Finland. Of them 55,000 were returned to the Soviet Union in the autum of 1944, and were put at the mercy of Stalin.
So in 1990 Koivisto finally managed to pay back a debt that was owed to the Ingrians. The President’s previous very cautious attitude appears to have changed in the previous winter, pretty soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“At that time I made an enquiry of sorts, let’s say an unofficial one, toward the Soviet Union, and there was no sharply negative response, at least. Of course it was a time of weakness for the Soviet Union. I could well imagine that local officials would have been dissatisfied that good people are leaving the country.”
What does the operation look like in retrospect. Was it successful?
“At least it was not a serious failure. Nobody, certainly not any sensible people, would have predicted at that time that Germany would be united, and that the Soviet Union would fall apart. Sometimes things happen in the world, which are unforeseeable.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.2.2011
HS - International Edition (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Koivisto+vehemently+denies+that+Ingrian+migration+ to+Finland+was+KGB+initiative/1135263653011)