MOSCOW, September 8. /TASS/. During the Second World War, Helsinki intended to make Karelia a part of Finland, but only with an ethnically "correct" population, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said in his column "The New Finnish Doctrine: Stupidity, Lies, Ingratitude," which is published by TASS.
"The hard facts testify: the invaders, who formed the Military Administration of Eastern Karelia headed by Colonel Vaino Kotilainen (starting from 1943 by Olli Paloheimo), pursued an overtly racist policy. They did everything they could in attempts to make Karelia part of Finland without the "Slavic component". They segregated the peoples into "correct" - Finno-Ugric - and "incorrect" - mainly, meaning ethnic Russians," he noted.
The former, Medvedev continued, were supposed to be left as citizens of the future "Greater Suomi", forcibly "Finlandizing" them - that is, erasing their historical and cultural identity, severing any ties with the all-Russian civilizational space. The second, the "non-national population," was planned to be forcibly relocated to other regions.
"At the same time, within the framework of the ethnocide policy pursued by the Finnish aggressors, Russians were to wear a red armband, similar to the yellow Star of David introduced by the Nazis as an identification mark for European Jews. The life of the "non-natives" under the Finnish yoke differed little from the conditions of the population in the territories of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republics occupied by the Germans. They were significantly disfranchised: received scarce food rations and stayed vulnerable to robberies by the Finnish military and extrajudicial persecution."
