A Russian diplomat told how under Yeltsin they wanted to sell Karelia to the Finns
There was indeed a discussion of the possibility of Russia selling Karelia to neighboring Finland during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, although it was never brought into the public sphere due to the “painfulness” of this issue and its “sensitivity.”
This was stated to RBC by Andrei Fedorov, who held the post of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia in 1990–1991, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Of course, there was no “commission” around this issue, as reported by the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. Formally, it was only a small working group that met in the White House and discussed a whole block of territorial problems. I remember that Sergei Shakhrai, Mikhail Fedotov and others also took part in it,” said Fedorov, who now heads the Center for Political Research and Consulting.
The former deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry noted that in the early 1990s, in conditions of a difficult economic situation, when “the most fantastic proposals for finding money for the country were in the air,” discussion of such issues was “common.”
“There were definitely one or two working notes inside the presidential administration that were addressed to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. They concerned the situation that was developing in border or disputed territories,” Fedorov explained.
According to him, the situation with Karelia was complicated by the fact that in this region, which in 1940–1956 had the status of a union republic (in 1956, the Karelo-Finnish SSR was transformed into the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and became part of the RSFSR), “some things which began in the late 1980s, predictably transformed into nationalist tensions.”
According to the diplomat, “if the Yeltsin administration had been decisive, the probability of selling Karelia would have been 80%.” “If the deal were successful, today the Russian Federation would no longer have several thousand square kilometers,” Fedorov emphasized.
Fedorov expressed confidence that if the Yeltsin administration had nevertheless offered the Finnish authorities to buy Karelia, they “would have found the funds for this.” “We were talking about the sale of Karelia for $10 billion or more. Another thing is that Finnish politicians at that time, it seems, simply did not understand how this could be implemented in practice,” said the former deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
On July 21, Helsingin Sanomat, with reference to Fedorov, reported that the Russian leadership under Boris Yeltsin discussed the sale of Karelia and even calculated the amount that could be received for it from Finland - $15 billion. The next day, former Secretary of State of the Russian Federation Gennady Burbulis and ex-minister Foreign Affairs Minister Andrei Kozyrev told the media that nothing of the kind happened.
In response to a request from journalists to comment on their words, Fedorov said that, apparently, both Burbulis and Kozyrev “apparently simply forgot about it,” since “for them these were secondary, if not secondary, issues.” Fedorov himself, according to him, is historically connected with Finland, and “his father oversaw Finnish issues from the CPSU Central Committee for 35 years.”
He also added that Karelia today remains a depressed region of the Russian Federation and it simply needs to be developed. “Perhaps one of the solutions to this is to involve the Finnish side under some kind of guarantees,” the former diplomat concluded.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.