In the aftermath of the Bolshevik seizure of power, millions of inhabitants of the former Russian Empire fled the newly formed Soviet state. Owing to its geographical proximity to Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Finland became one of the main transit routes for the refugees: tens of thousands of Soviet émigrés crossed the border river running through the Karelian Isthmus to escape the country. While many continued their journey toward the metropolitan centers and émigré hubs in Central Europe, tens of thousands settled in Finland, mostly in the cities of Vyborg and Helsinki.
The majority of the refugees refused to accept the legitimacy of the Soviet rule. Political activism emerged under a variety of émigré movements, which were united by uncompromising anti-Bolshevism: the Soviet regime was to be overthrown through political propaganda, armed struggle, and, in some cases, outright terrorism. By the late 1920s, however, it became increasingly evident that the émigré combat organizations – such as the underground terrorist cells of the ROVS under General Aleksandr Kutepov – were incapable of destabilizing the Soviet power in Moscow.
Within the Soviet leadership and its expanding security apparatus, the presumed conspiracies of “White émigrés” were both feared with paranoia and exploited with cynicism. Real and fabricated “plots” and “acts of sabotage” attributed to émigrés provided convenient justification for extensive campaigns of discipline and repression inside the Soviet Union, culminating in Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror and the purges of 1937–1938. Soviet intelligence also closely monitored the active operations of émigré combat groups in the Finnish territory, and official propaganda denounced Finland as a “nest of terrorists.”
During the 1920s, the leadership of the anti-Bolshevik cause was largely in the hands of White Russian émigré organizations, but in the following decade, nationalistic organizations of ethnic minorities came more to the fore. Internal tensions in the Soviet Union intensified as the structural problems of the country became more apparent. Soviet Ukraine experienced the devastating famine known as the Holodomor, while elsewhere – particularly in the Caucasus – armed groups demanding national self-determination began to gather strength.
This wave of separatism swept through the émigré communities of Europe. Organizations representing the Soviet Union’s minority nationalities – Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, and others – sought to contribute to the domestic struggles for national liberation.
The Soviet secret police, the OGPU–NKVD, reacted with even greater vigilance. Determined to contain and manipulate these militant networks, it employed highly inventive – at times almost avant-garde – methods of espionage, infiltration, and provocation. The Soviet intelligence succeeded particularly well in planting agents within Ukrainian nationalist organizations operating across Europe.
The most famous of these was Pavel Sudoplatov, born in Melitopol in 1907. Trained by the Soviet security services, Sudoplatov was tasked with carrying out a clandestine mission: to pose as a passionate Ukrainian nationalist and infiltrate the ranks of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). He started his task in Helsinki, where he built his false identity as a Ukrainian Nationalist among Ukrainian OUN activists staying there.
Sudoplatov proved extraordinarily successful in playing his double role. Between 1935 and 1938, he became a close confidant of Yevhen Konovalets, the OUN’s leader, who moved between several Central European cities. While carrying out underground missions for Ukrainian activists in Central Europe and the Soviet Ukraine, he received his real instructions from Moscow. In the spring of 1936, as he attempted to return to the Soviet Union via Finland, Sudoplatov was detained at the Finnish-Soviet border by Finnish border guards. Suspected of being a Soviet intelligence operative traveling under a false identity, he was taken under investigation by the Finnish security police until its main Ukrainian informant, OUN’s principal representative in Finland, Konrad Poluvedka, intervened personally. Poluvedka guaranteed Sudoplatov’s reliability, leading to the latter’s release and safe passage from Helsinki to Tallinn.
A couple of years later, the Finnish security police discovered that Poluvedka was, in fact, one out of three or four “Ukrainian nationalists” clandestinely inserted into Finland’s émigré networks by the OGPU–NKVD in the 1930s. His real identity remains unknown even today.
Sudoplatov’s later career would make him one of the most notorious intelligence operatives of the Soviet era. On 23 May 1938, in Rotterdam, he presented Konovalets with a traditionally decorated Ukrainian chocolate box containing a hidden bomb. The assassination of Konovalets was not the last of Sudoplatov’s violent undertakings: in August 1940, he directed the operation that resulted in the death of Lev Trotsky in exile in Mexico.
Aleksi Mainio
Associate Professor
University of Helsinki
Finland
aleksi.mainio@helsinki.fi
