On March 28, 2020 at 11:00, at the Broken Ring Memorial on the Western shore of Lake Ladoga, clergymen of The Church of Ingria will hold a prayer service commemorating Ingrian Finns who were deported to Siberia during World War II.
On March 20, 1942, the Military Council of the Leningrad Front passed a decree, “On the Mandatory Evacuation of the Finnish and German Population from Suburban Areas of the Leningrad Oblast and from Leningrad.” According to the information in Viktor Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR (“Special Settlers in the USSR”), 44,737 Finns were deported from Leningrad and the oblast. Of them, 17,837 were settled in the Krasnoyarsk Krai, 8,267 in the Irkutsk Oblast, 3,694 in Yakutia, 3,602 in the Omsk Oblast, and the rest in the oblasts of Vologda and Kirov. “Special settlers” was the official term in the Soviet bureaucracy for deportees.
After the end of the Great Patriotic War, the special settlement system was abolished, however the government forbade the Finns to return to the territory of the Leningrad Oblast. By a decree of the USSR Council of Ministers of February 11, 1949, the Finns were only allowed entry to Karelia which neighbors the Leningrad Oblast. Several tens of thousands of former “special settlers” moved to live in Karelia.