The herding association of
Petsamo lost all of its reindeer and pastures through cession of territories to the Soviet Union.
They also thought that the Soviets, with the help of the British and Canadians, would try to capture vitally important nickel mines at
Petsamo. This estimate of the situation was expressed in Hitler's Instruction Nr.
And after that the Finns had to pay a very high price: 84,000 soldiers were killed, tens of thousands of civilians perished, and we lost 12 percent of our territory from Karelia, from
Petsamo in the north.
signed a peace treaty at Paris in February 1947 limiting the size of Finland's defense forces and providing for the cession to the Soviet Union of the
Petsamo area on the Arctic coast, the Karelian Isthmus in southeastern Finland, and other territory along the former eastern border.
After the treaty in 1920 Finland received from Russia the
Petsamo, or Pechenga, area in NE Lapland, and the naturalists were keen to put it on their maps: the Geo-Ecological Finland got a new province, Lapponia petsamoensis, which had just been cut out from the former Lapponia inarensis along a very unnatural but politically adequate line.
Sjogren also visited Lapland between August 1825 and February 1826, going through Sodankyla, Inari (= Enari), Utsjoki,
Petsamo, and Kola, and then spent three more weeks in Mezen' (Gouvernement Archangelsk) in March and April 1826.
Finland's painful decision to fight the Soviets rather than the Nazis from 1940 left it, five years later, with a $300m bill for 'war reparations', the annexation of its northern, mineral-rich
Petsamo region and the loss of its only ice-free Arctic port.
The Soviets' keen interest in the low-grade
Petsamo deposits in neighboring Finland shows the inadequacy of the USSR's nickel supplies.