The book «Karjalan palautus» (Return of Karelia) is entirely devoted to the plan for returning the lands lost after the end of the Soviet-Finnish war. The authorship of the historical rehabilitation plan belongs to the Pro Karelia movement – an organization that insists on the return of Finnish territories that went to the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War. In addition, Pro Karelia demands that Russia return to Finland the war reparations "paid to the Soviets approximately fifty years ago".
The author of the book, Finnish researcher and historian Veikko Saksi, says that in today's currency the war reparations paid to the Soviet Union after the war can be estimated at 4 billion euros, which should be used for the restoration of Karelia. "According to Pro Karelia's plans, the returned war reparations and other monetary compensation would be placed in a special "Karelian fund". This capital would be used to restore the returned areas and renovate the areas of the new national border, which will correspond to the border established under the peace treaty in Tartu in 1920".
At the same time, movement activists defend their ideas based on the results of their own research. According to Pro Karelia's estimates, approximately 250 thousand Russians would remain in the returned territories. The book notes that the Karelian cities of Vyborg and Sortavala have fallen into terrible disrepair, and the surrounding countryside is in even worse shape. Of Karelia's 1,300 villages, a thousand have been left without inhabitants. If the territories were returned, approximately 300 thousand Finns could move there.
Movement activists believe that the restoration of "lost" Karelia, which consists of the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia to the east and north of Lake Ladoga, will take approximately ten years. At the same time, when publishing the book, the authors proceeded not from a desire to actually return Karelia, but only from an attempt to attract public attention to the problem. The movement is confident that it is necessary to free the Finnish people from prejudices on the Karelian question, and it is worth approaching Russia only in about ten years.
The Finns lost Karelia gradually; part of the current republic passed to the Soviet Union as a result of the "Winter War" of 1939-40. Then the Karelian Isthmus, today part of the Leningrad Oblast, and the cities of Sortavala and Vyborg came into the possession of the USSR.
This was a strategically important victory for the USSR, which, before the start of World War II, on the eve of a German landing in Scandinavia, managed to protect the railway line to Murmansk. After Finland supported Hitler, the war continued and lasted from 1941 to 1944. After Germany's defeat, Karelia completely passed to the Soviet Union, and since then talk about returning Karelia has periodically taken place in Finland.
As Gazeta.Ru reports, for four years now organizations advocating the restoration of Finland within its pre-1939 borders have been collecting signatures for a petition demanding the return of Karelia. By 2004, the petition had been signed by one hundred thousand Finns; the organizers of the campaign plan to eventually collect half a million signatures and then hand the document over to the official authorities.
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