During the 1930’s terror in Soviet, Stalin ordered forced resettlement and persecution of the population inside his ever-expanding state. A tiny Norwegian colony on the Kola peninsula became dragged into this terror through random and chaotic orders from communist leaders, saving some lives and taking others.
“Mother had just milked our cow. My little brother was still asleep, while my father dressed me. My mom started making my bed, when she turned towards my father and exclaimed “two policemen are on their way up to our house!” my father responded with “So what? It could be anything…” (Gudrun Mironova, survivor and daughter of Gudrun Fredriksen)
“Mother was the only woman. 17 people! When I clinged to her dress they tried to pull my mom away. I screamed “Bloody murderers!” after them. Father came over and loosened my grip carefully. He held me in his arms and said “My daughter. Let’s go and have a look at your brother”
Above is from the interview of Gudrun Mironova, daughter and survivor of the persecution towards the Norwegian settlement. She was born in 1934 to a Norwegian-Sami couple where her Norwegian mother and grandfather was arrested and killed, then buried in mass-graves. Her Russian-Sami father was eventually drafted into the WW2 and died as a solider a few years later.
Most moved west but some also to the east
Northern Norway, Finland and Russia had a well organized relationship for centuries, which goes under the name “the Pomor trade”. It was so important that they created a pidgin language to be able to understand one another, and the trade was blooming in the Barents Sea. The Russian Tsar encouraged settlement on the empty Murmansk coast giving privileges to those who did, and in 1870 around 3–200 Norwegians traveled east to settle on a peninsula they named “Fiskerhalvøya” or “Fisherman Peninsula”, slightly east of Murmansk. The peninsula had already been settled by Norwegians, Finns and the Russian Pomors in small villages named Zubovka, Tsypnavolok and Vaida-Guba. After 1870 most of the settlers were Norwegians, especially in Tsypnavolok which they named “Setne Valokka”. In the early 1900’s it was around 500 people living on the peninsula of Finnish, Russian and Norwegian descent.
With the Russian revolution of 1917, political changes started to affect the Norwegians living in the peninsula. Many left as a result, but most stayed. Petsamo became Finnish in 1920 resulting in an increasing amount of Finnish workers, and the contact with Norway began to close permanently as the sea trade was controlled and stopped by USSR officials. Moving between ports as independent fishermen or simply visiting family in Norway became very difficult. In 1930 the Norwegians were forced into the work collective “Polar Star” and got local militias to watch them, which led to loud protests. Stalin were conviced that all “foreigners” up north could possibly be spies, although most of all he despised the Finns for their control of the Petsamo region. The political persecutions started with arrests and killing of leaders of local organizations and industries as well in fishing villages and even Russian Sami settlements. The leading figures were often tortured to confess that they were spies, and then executed under this pretense. Stalin wanted to get rid of all foreginers in the whole of Russia and only leave the “true Russian race”, which meant that a big amount of different population groups all over the previous Russian Empire — now Soviet Union, suffered deaths and persecution in the 1930’s — 1940’s. The arrests of Norwegians (and Finns) started in 1936, and most of died in GULAG’s (work/prison camps) or got shot and buried in mass graves. NKVD (predecessor to KGB) had calculated out 4000 people in Kola that had to get killed, which also included Norwegians. If the estimated number of Norwegians in the Kola Peninsula were about 150 people, then every fourth person became a victim of persecutions.
The Great Terror period were way less systematic and more chaotic in it’s execution than what one might think, which led to random results in who survived and who got arrested. For the Norwegians and Finns, the villages were gradually emptied as the elders and parents were either arrsted or sent to fight in the Second World War. Gudrun and her brother Sasha were lucky to get sent to relatives in a small Kola village named Kanevka, and grew up in safety there. All of the remaining Norwegians that were left in the “Fisherman peninsula” were forcefully moved out in 1940 by Soviet officials, and sent down south to Karelen and Arkhangelsk. Norwegian orphans from Tsypnavolok ended up in orphanages in small forest villages here, but many died from malnutrition or disease during the war.
The Norwegians that survived the resettlements or the Second World War were not allowed to return to Kola and their native Tsypnavolok after the war. All of them stayed in Karelen and around Arkhangelsk for the rest of their lives, not being allowed to reclaim their Norwegian identity. Ironically enough, they were not further surveillanced by Russian authorities in Karelen, as Russian officials used old population registries from the 1920’s in Karelen to keep an eye out on people with Finnish heritage — and at that time no Norwegians were registered in Karelen. When WW2 ended the number of surviving Norwegians must have been less than 100, and they were all forced to forget their connections to what happened in the Kola Peninsula. They hid their identity, remarried and did not speak Norwegian again. Gudrun’s uncle Ludvig were persecuted since the 1930’s by changing his name and address every third month as one Soviet police officer adviced him to do, and lived all across the Kola coast to avoid the slow bureaucratic system.
The Kola Norwegians became forgotten by the Norwegians after the Second World War, but in the 1980’s there were still rumours in Finnmark that they were still alive inside the Soviet Union. Norwegian journalists travelled in there in 1990 and met indeed Norwegians of the Jørstad family who still spoke fluently Norwegian — some kind of old Finnmark dialect. Through travels and interviews in Karelen they were able to locate many more who had survived and their descendants. They were also offered to move back to Norway after the Soviet Union fell, and some did that.
Sources in Norwegian:
Den glemte utryddelsen av nordmenn i Sovjetunionen: https://www.forskning.no/historie-krig-og-fred-russland/den-glemte-utryddelsen-av-nordmenn-i-sovjetunionen/1588526
Kolanordmenn https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolanordmenn
Stalin myrdet nesten alle finnene på Murmanskkysten https://www.nrk.no/kvensk/_-stalin-myrdet-nesten-alle-finnene-pa-murmankysten-1.15028427
Kolanordmennene SNL https://snl.no/Kolanordmennene
