From the history of Karelian underground: the fate of Andrei Erte

This article about Andrei Petrovich Erte, a member of the underground Petrozavodsk City Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic, is based on archival documents from the Archives of the Directorate of the Federal Security Service of Russia for the Republic of Karelia, many of which were declassified only in 2025 and introduced into scholarly circulation by the author for the first time. The main focus is on the infiltration of a group of underground fighters behind front lines, the arrest of Andrei Erte and his comrades by Finnish soldiers, the trial of the underground fighters, and their serving of sentences in Finnish prisons in occupied Karelia and in Finland during 1943 and 1944. The article examines the reasons why, after returning to his homeland in the fall of 1944, Andrei Erte was convicted by a Soviet court and served his sentence in the GULAG correctional labor camps of the NKVD of the USSR. Based on a thorough analysis of archival documents, the author substantiates the thesis that Yury Vladimirovich Andropov, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Young Communist League of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic during the Great Patriotic War, played a decisive role in the rehabilitation of this underground activist in 1960 and the acquittal of treason charges against him. The article makes a significant contribution to the Russian historiography of domestic intelligence services during the Great Patriotic War.