“From Finnish Captivity to a Soviet Labour Camp”

The J-Doc digital archive contains the investigation file of Red Army soldier Gersh Purer. His story illustrates what could happen to a Soviet serviceman returning from enemy captivity.

Gersh Moshkovich Purer, a salesman working for a trading enterprise in Vinnytsia, was drafted into the Red Army in 1939 and soon found himself fighting in the Winter War, which began with the Soviet invasion of Finland. The war was going badly for the Red Army. On 23 January 1940, Purer was captured after his unit was surrounded by Finnish forces in the Petrozavodsk area. In the spring of 1940, he returned to the USSR as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange. But instead of going home, he was sent to an NKVD camp in Yuzha, Ivanovo Oblast.

Purer gave NKVD investigators a detailed account of the circumstances of his capture, Soviet servicemen who had collaborated with the Finnish camp administration, and his interrogations by Finnish counterintelligence officers. Interestingly, one of the Finnish interrogators wanted to know how Jews lived in the USSR. Purer replied: “We all live well” (folio 7).

Nevertheless, the NKVD accused Purer of having surrendered “without offering resistance” and of having been subjected to “anti-Soviet indoctrination” while in captivity. For these “crimes,” he was sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp.

It was not until 1969 that Gersh Purer was fully rehabilitated on the grounds that his actions did not constitute a crime.

You can learn more about the circumstances of his capture, the investigation, and his conviction by exploring the case materials in the J-Doc digital archive.