Toivo Vähä

Toivo Juhonpoika Vähä (То́йво Ю́хонпойка Вя́хя, also known as Ivan Mikhailovich Petrov, Russian: Иван Михайлович Петров, 12 April 1901 – 18 June 1984) was a Finnish born Soviet colonel of the KGB. He fled to Soviet Russia after the 1918 Finnish Civil War and made a long career in the Red Army and the Soviet Border Troops. Vähä was one of the few Finnish exile revolutionaries who survived the Great Purge. He is best known for the 1925 capture of the British super-spy Sidney Reilly during the Operation Trust.

Early life
Toivo Vähä was born to the family of the industrial worker Juho Vähä and Maria Lindström. He started working at the age of 14, having several jobs in Helsinki. In 1916, Vähä moved to the industrial community of Dubrovka, near the Russian capital Saint Petersburg. At the time, Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. Vähä had five brothers, who all followed him to Russia after the 1917 February revolution. Their father had emigrated Russia few years earlier.

As the Finnish Civil War broke out in January 1918, Vähä joined the Saint Petersburg Finnish Red Guard, a paramilitary unit composed of the Finnish emigrant workers of Saint Petersburg. The battalion was sent to Finland, where Vähä fought in the Battle of Kämärä, and later served as a courier in the Battle of Vilppula. As the Red front fell in the Northern Tavastia region, the Saint Petersburg Reds retreated to Eastern Finland. After the decisive loss of the Battle of Vyborg in late April, they managed to flee to Soviet Russia.

Like hundreds of other Finnish exile Red Guard fighters, Vähä joined the Red Army and fought with the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. In the summer of 1919, Vähä served in Siberia when he was sent back to Petrograd to join the military academy. In 1920–1923, Vähä took a three-year course in the international Petrograd Red Officer School, where he was joined by four of his brothers. During the time in the academy, Vähä took part on the arrests of the suspects of the Kuusinen Club Incident in September 1920, the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, and the suppression of the East Karelian uprising in the winter of 1922. After the Battle of Kimasozero in January 1922, Vähä killed three captured Finnish White Guard soldiers by an order of his platoon leader Toivo Antikainen. Antikainen was later captured in Finland, where he received a life in prison for the murders.

After his graduation in March 1923, Vähä was recruited by the NKVD. He served as a border station commander by the Finnish border in the Karelian Isthmus. Since 1924, Vähä worked for the GPU in Leningrad, until he was moved to a border station in Sestroretsk in June 1925.

Operation Trust
In 1924, the Soviet secret police Cheka recruited Vähä to the Operation Trust. It was launched in 1921 to set up a fake resistance organization, in order to identify anti-Bolsheviks. Vähä played a role of a Soviet traitor who helped the counter revolutionaries, Russian emigrants and western agents to sneak from Finland to the Soviet Union. He was recruited by the Finnish Army Intelligence, who mistook Vähä for an ordinary Soviet border guard. In reality, he was working under the command of the Polish revolutionary Stanislaw Messing, the head of the Leningrad Cheka. The Finnish intelligence trusted Vähä, and even recommended him to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

In September 1925, Cheka managed to lure the British agent Sidney Reilly to cross the border. Vähä smuggled him across the Sestra River and took Reilly to the Pargolovo railway station, where he was arrested. The Finns had successfully tested the route just a few days earlier, when Vähä escorted the courier of the White general Alexander Kutepov to the Soviet side. Reilly was taken to Moscow for interrogation and shot in November 1925.

To complete the operation, Cheka staged Vähä's death in order to mislead the British. He was held at the Hotel Evropeiskaya in Leningrad, and then secretly shipped to Moscow. Cheka put out a rumour, that Vähä was shot as a traitor. In Moscow, he was given a new identity as Ivan Petrov. In 1925–1928, Vähä studied in the Border Academy, but was sent to the Far East, as an old acquaintance recognized him. Vähä then served by the Chinese border in the Argun River, and fought in the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict.

The Great Purge and the World War II
Between 1934 and 1937, Vähä served in the Black Sea and the Belorussian border guards. He had kept his real identity as a secret, but as Stalin launched the campaign against ″nationalists″, Vähä's Finnish accent attracted attention. Unfortunately, he had also close relations to the Army Commander Ieronim Uborevich who was executed during the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization. Vähä was arrested in February 1938, then declared an ″enemy of the people″ and given the death penalty. For some reason, he was not executed immediately, but kept in a death row for more than a year.

In November 1939, Vähä was given a chance to join the army of the Finnish Democratic Republic, a puppet government created during the 1939–1940 Winter War. After the war, he was named as the commander of the Red Army Infantry Regiment 126, which was composed of Karelians, Ingrians and Finns. Instead of Ivan Petrov, Vähä was now using his real name again. As the Nazi Germany launched the campaign against Soviet Union, he was replaced by another Finnish-born officer Valter Valli. Vähä became the commander of the Infantry Regiment 143, and soon the commander of the Infantry Regiment 936 at the 3rd Belorussian Front. In September 1941, Vähä was wounded near the town of Staraya Russa. After his recovery, he was sent to Ural, where he served as the head of the Zlatoust Infantry Academy until January 1946.

Last years
Vähä served his last years as a KGB colonel in Kaliningrad. After his resignment in 1964, Vähä lived in Zhytomyr Oblast in Ukraine and managed various state enterprises. He retired in 1967, and moved to Petrozavodsk, Karelian Republic. Vähä started writing his autobiography which was released in 1970 and translated to Finnish in 1974. He also wrote three other memoirs, including one on the Operation Trust, and several short stories that were published in the Finnish-language Karelian literature magazine Punalippu.

The Operation Trust was brought to the public in 1964. The newspaper stories also mentioned Vähä's name, calling him a Soviet hero. Vähä's family now finally learned about his former life. As Vähä went underground in 1925, he also left his wife and daughter. Vähä was later married again and had another daughter, who was named Lilya, just like his first child.

During his last years, Vähä was known as a keen critic of Stalinism. He also paid attention to the mistakes of the Soviet Communist Party, which he had joined in 1920.

Toivo Vähä died in Petrozavodsk in 1984 at the age of 83. The bust on his grave was erected by the KGB. Vähä is still a highly valued person in Russia. In 2001, his last hometown Petrozavodsk arranged a large festival to celebrate Vähä's 100th anniversary. In 1990, the Soviet author Oleg Tikhonov published a documentary novel of Vähä's life.