1961–
A historian who recalculated the Winter War casualty record
Where the Winter War's official loss figures had drifted broadly for fifty years, he recounted the dead one by one from a name-level database, arriving at some 138,000 Red Army dead and a loss ratio more than five times that of the Finns.
Yuri Kilin is a Petrozavodsk historian whose research examines Karelia and the Soviet Union’s foreign and military policy. He led a 2006–2009 project that critically reconciled official records of Red Army losses in the Winter War and reopened the question of how the dead should be counted. His 2012 figure of 138,533 Soviet dead became the latest major revision in the debate over the war’s human cost.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1961Born in Karelia
- 1983Graduated from the History Faculty of Petrozavodsk State University
- 1983–1986History teacher in a secondary school
- 1986–1989Postgraduate researcher at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of History of the USSR
- 1989–1992Researcher at the Karelian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
- 1992–현재Professor at Petrozavodsk State University
- 2000Received a Doctor of Historical Sciences degree
- 2006–2009Led a project revising Red Army loss records from the Winter War
Related historical events
Revising the Winter War casualty register
Yuri Kilin and Veronika Kilina developed an electronic register through Petrozavodsk State University’s Centre for Research and Education on the Second World War in Northern Europe. The project set out to reconcile Red Army records of those killed or missing in the Soviet-Finnish War and help relatives locate burial or disappearance sites. Launched in 2006, it resulted in a website opened to the public on 25 November 2009. The database built on the existing Books of Memory but incorporated additional records and removed duplicate entries caused in part by variant spellings of names and place-names. In 2012, Kilin reported reducing 168,024 source entries to 138,533 after eliminating duplicates; the database also newly included records for more than 100 Soviet prisoners of war who died in Finnish custody. He cautioned that this was a database count subject to continued revision, not a final total. His 2014 article accordingly gave a revised count of 138,509 entries as of 29 December. The category covered not only those killed in action but also those who died of wounds and the missing, so it should not be equated with a count of battlefield deaths alone.