During the collapse of the USSR, the Russian leadership considered the option of transferring Karelia to Finland for money, writes yle.fi.
Russia was seriously considering the option of selling Karelia to the Finnish state in 1991. The then Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov told about this to Helsingin Sanomat.
According to him, in July 1991, the commission, which included Fedorov, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev and adviser to the then head of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, Gennady Burbulis, compiled a list of regions in which extremist movements advocating for autonomy could emerge and grow stronger, and whose fate will have to be decided at the international level. The list also included the so-called "Lost Karelia" - that is, those lands that were transferred to the USSR under the Moscow Treaty of 1940. The Russian authorities, according to Fedorov, feared the growth of "Karelian nationalism." Other regions included the Kuril Islands, Pytalovsky District on the border with Latvia, Kaliningrad Region, Crimea and the border with China along the Amur River.
In the same year, the Russian leadership, according to Fedorov, discovered that the Soviet treasury was practically empty. Then they decided to determine the amount for which it would be possible to sell Karelia to Finland: $ 15 billion. It was also planned to sell the Kuriles and Pytalovo. Fedorov told about this back in 2007 in a column published in the newspaper Argumenty Nedeli.
In the same year, he gave the Helsingin Sanomat an interview in which he suggested that Foreign Minister Paavo Väyrynen and President Mauno Koivisto were aware of these plans. Now it turned out that the Finnish leadership was not aware of the sale option, since it was discussed behind closed doors. President Koivisto died the year before last, and Väyrynen confirmed to HS that he knew nothing.
Fedorov's 2007 column was a kind of response to the material of the newspaper "Kainuun Sanomat", which said that in 1991-1992. In the military garrison of Santakhamin, on the orders of Koivisto, calculations were made of how much money Russia would have to pay for the return of Karelia and how much to spend on infrastructure restoration. According to the newspaper, Finland was ready to pay 64 billion Finnish marks to Russia, and was preparing to spend 350 billion marks on repairs. In terms of modern money, the amount was much less than the calculations of the Russian side. Koivisto, who was retired at that time, denied the information published in Kainuun Sanoman.
According to Andrey Fedorov, the issue of Karelia was raised in one form or another until 1994. Then it was decided that the issue of returning the Karelian lands was closed and that Russia would independently develop the region and build cross-border cooperation.
Andrey Fedorov is the son of Vladimir Fedorov, who from 1967 to 1973 was in charge of working with the Communist Party of Finland at the Soviet embassy in Helsinki. The family lived from 1969 to 1996 in the Töölö district, and Andrei went to a Finnish-Russian school.
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