Soviet partisans in Finland

Finnish civilians killed in Seitajärvi on 7 July 1944

Forty-eight Soviet partisans attacked the village of Seitajärvi in the municipality of Savukoski at 3:00 a.m. on 7 July 1944. The village was protected by nine soldiers of the Finnish Army. Barking dogs awakened the villagers, but the Finnish soldiers, taken by surprise, were quickly overrun by the partisans. The latter lured the civilians to come out of hiding by promising that they would not be hurt, speaking to them in Finnish. Then the partisans took the civilians with them and set most of the buildings in the village on fire. The Finnish anti-partisan unit Sau arrived on the scene nine hours after the attack and found dead bodies with the help of search dogs in a nearby forest. The women and children who were taken as prisoners by the partisans had been killed by shooting and stabbing them with knives and bayonets. Some of the women had also been raped.[13][14]

Fourteen civilians and two Finnish soldiers had been killed altogether. One eight-year-old girl who had been stabbed played dead and survived. The anti-partisan unit Sau kept tracking the partisans and found the trail of the troops. They fought until the morning and killed 33 partisans in total, but the main bulk of the partisans had managed to escape over the Kemijoki river. According to the official Soviet report which falsified information, the partisans destroyed a "Finnish garrison" and killed 94 men.[13]

In the aftermath of the attack, a doctor from neutral Sweden was requested to perform autopsies on the victims. The administrative board of the Norrbotten County sent a doctor named Richard Lindgren to perform the task. Two Swedish newspapers, the Norrbottens-Kuriren and Norrländska Socialdemokraten, followed him to report on the attacks. The autopsies found that the civilians had been either shot in the head or neck. A five-year-old girl called Valma had been stabbed to the head with a knife and seven-month-old Ritva had died from blunt force trauma to the head. The rapes could not be unambiguously proven in the autopsies, as the bodies had already been washed and had also decomposed since it had been nine days since the attack happened. Based on physical marks on the bodies and the position of the bodies on the scene, it was concluded that rapes had happened and this was reported by the Norrländska Socialdemokraten.[15]

Memorial to the victims in Lokka

Twenty-one civilians were killed in the village of Lokka, Sodankylä, on 14 July 1944. The partisan group Stalinets attacked the village from three directions at 7:45 p.m. after one partisan had been caught nearby and fired at with a rifle by a Finnish civilian. The school building where the civilians were hiding was then set on fire by the partisans. The partisans shot at people who tried to help them escape the burning structure through a window. Hilja Kumpula and five of her children perished in the fire, the youngest of whom was a one-month-old baby. The detachment managed to escape unharmed before units of the Finnish Army could reach them. Gennady Kupriyanov, who was leading the partisan activity, claimed in his report that the village was a "heavily fortified garrison". In reality, the NKVD had accurate intelligence on the village and the partisans had been monitoring it for days, knowing it had no combatants.[16]

Olavi Alakulppi, a captain in the Finnish Army who witnessed the aftermath of the Seitajärvi raid, tried to influence a United Nations commission to investigate the Soviet partisan attacks in Finland as a war crime. He served in the United States Army after the war and during his stay in the United States he submitted evidence and a formal testimony about the partisans, including photos of the victims and reports from Swedish newspapers about the attacks. In 1960, the Soviet envoy to the United Nations strongly denied that they had committed crimes against civilian population and even questioned whether Alakulppi had actually served in the Finnish Army. The Finnish UN permanent representative Ralph Enckell refused to take a stance on the issue and the case was not pursued further.[19]

In October 1998, Christian Democratic MP Päivi Räsänen submitted a parliamentary question asking the government how they would investigate the partisan war crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice. The question was answered by the Minister for Foreign Affairs Tarja Halonen who stated that the investigation would require co-operation from Russia.[20]

After the parliamentary inquiry, the office of the Prosecutor General of Finland decided to review the issue, as murder does not expire under the Finnish law. They concluded that the partisan attacks should be investigated as murders, but that the case should not be pursued by the Prosecutor General, and instead referred the investigation to the National Bureau of Investigation. Finland and Russia only had a treaty on general cooperation on legal matters, not a treaty on extradition, so in case of charges extraditions would have had to happen based on Russian court orders.[21]

In 2003, Russia informed Finnish authorities that the alleged crimes had expired under the 1926 Soviet criminal code, which ruled that murder expires in ten years, and that they would not provide further information from the archives. The National Bureau of Investigation dropped the case after this.[18][22]

The Finnish Parliament approved legislation which granted a sum of 1,500 euro for the victims of the partisan attacks in September 2003. The compensation was granted to people whose illness had been caused by a partisan attack, including emotional distress, or if they had lost one or both parents. It was estimated that there were 600–700 Finns eligible for the compensation. Previously only physical injuries were compensated.[23][24]