65 Years Ago on the Leningrad Front

On 3 April 1942 the Leningrad Front Military Soviet issued a resolution ordering the removal of all Russian-Finns in the Soviet armed forces from the front and their transfer to NKVD labor battalions and columns. These forced labor detachments became formally incorporated into the labor army with GKO (State Defense Committee) Resolution 2409 of 14 October 1942. This resolution subjected all male Soviet citizens aged 17 to 50 of Finnish, Hungarian, Romanian or Italian nationality to conscription into the labor army on the same basis as the Russian-Germans inducted under the authority of GKO resolutions no. 1123 and 1281. The Russian-Finns and others inducted into the labor army endured the same brutal conditions and high death rates from malnutrition, disease, exposure and over work that Stalin had earlier inflicted upon the Russian-Germans.

Source:

Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European Press, 2004), p. 139 and pp. 347-348.