The Soviet partisans in Finland were an irregular military force which attacked Finnish military and civilian targets during the Continuation War, a sub-theater of World War II active between 1941 and 1944. They were based in East Karelia in the Soviet territory and conducted long-range penetration reconnaissance and raids inside Finnish borders, often attacking weak targets such as remote border villages or ambushing vehicles. Around 170 Finnish civilians were killed and 50 wounded in the raids.
Partisan activity and raids
Around 2,400 Soviet partisans at most operated on the Karelian Front. They targeted enemy soldiers and officers, bridges, garrisons and railways. Unlike Soviet partisans elsewhere, they lacked continuously operating headquarters behind the enemy lines and often stayed there for just 15–20 days at a time. Their goals inside Finnish borders were to destroy military communications, disrupt economic activity of the Finnish population, and cause panic and uncertainty.
The partisans in Finland were controlled by organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the NKVD. The three most important people co-ordinating the partisan activity were the NKVD major general Sergey Vershinin, the First Secretary of the Karelian Communist Party Gennady Kupriyanov, and the First Secretary of the Karelo-Finnish Komsomol Yuri Andropov, who later became the leader of the Soviet Union. Andropov's responsibility was to train the Karelian partisans. The headquarters were located in Belomorsk on the shore of the White Sea.
The three most prominent partisan groups were named Poljarnik, Bolshevik and Stalinets. Ten percent of the partisans in the groups were women. Besides the Soviet partisans, airborne reconnaissance troops and spies () of the Soviet military also operated inside the Finnish borders.
The Finnish Army organized a special unit called Sau for anti-partisan activities. A partisan brigade was destroyed in Northern Karelia by the Finnish Army in mid-1942. Finnish preparations in the north of the country for partisan activity have later been criticized as lacking. The German military stationed in Lapland wanted to control the Finnish civilian population more strictly, conduct evacuations and issue German identification cards because they believed some civilians were giving information to the partisans, but the Finnish authorities rejected these plans. The Finnish Air Force also had too few resources to help with anti-partisan duties.
The partisans often presented highly falsified accounts of the raids inside the Finnish territory. Civilian villages were called military garrisons in the official reports. The raids on villages turned more brutal in mid-1944, when they were co-ordinated with the Soviet Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive and incursions inside Finnish territory involved partisan detachments as large as 200 fighters during this time. In total, between 170 and 182 Finnish civilians died in the attacks, 50 were wounded and 20 went missing.
Seitajärvi massacre
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.
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.