Corpses.

The fate of the early immigrants to the USSR is well documented, thanks to the obsession of the Finnish Lutheran Church on bookkeeping. Some 15,000 American and Canadian Finns moved to the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s to escape the turmoil of the Great Depression. Many of them had managed to eke out some property and machinery, which they took with them.

Initially everything went fine – they founded kolkhozes and many were employed in mining and forestry. But soon troubles began to arise.

The old lesson of Russia which Genghis Khan and Timur Lenk taught them is that when you are inferior in military power against your enemy, treat every foreigner as a spy and whenever possible, simply kill them. This lesson was applied to those Americans who moved to the USSR. They simply were apprehended as spies, tortured into confession and either shot or deported to the Gulags. They today inhabit the nameless graves around the Russian taiga.

Some 90% of the ethnic Finns who lived in Russia before 1918 and their descendants were exterminated in Stalin’s persecutions. This is a higher percentage than that of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Almost 100% of the American Finns in the USSR were exterminated, with only individuals escaping the Great Meat Mincer.

The situation was no better with other immigrants in the USSR: they were exterminated. Only a handful were ever able to return to the USA.