MOSCOW, June 27. /TASS/. During World War II, Finland established a regime, as harsh as that of Nazi Germany, First Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Rashid Nurgaliyev said in his article, adding that Finnish documents from 1940-1941 indicate that Finland planned a genocide against the Soviet people.
"Thousands of eyewitnesses of those tragedies, including residents of the occupied territories, former concentration camp inmates, fighters that liberated the Karelia land, confirm that the Finnish authorities imposed a regime in Karelia, as harsh as the one that was imposed by the Nazi Germany in the occupied part of the USSR. Official Finnish papers from 1940-1941 confirm that an unprecedented act of genocide was planned against the Russian people," Nurgaliyev said.
He pointed out that, on July 8, 1941, one day before the beginning of the Finnish offensive north of Lake Ladoga, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim issued the order number 132, its fourth clause reading: "capture the Russian population and send it to concentration camps."
"The Finns tried to separate the Soviet people into 'their own' and 'the alien' from the very beginning. To that extent, they used the method, utilized by Nazi Germany. Their anthropologists travelled to settlements and determined which residents were Finns and who were representatives of a different, 'inferior' nation, as they believed. They measured skull size, eye and hair color. Karelians, Vepsians, Ingrian Finns, Soviet Finns, ethnically close to the Finns, were supposed to stay on their territory in order to become citizens of the ‘racially pure’ Finno-Ugric state," Nurgaliyev added.