Leino's prisoners (, ) was a group of 19 people deported from Finland under Minister of the Interior Yrjö Leino to the Soviet Union in April 1945.
After the signing of the Moscow Armistice on 19 September 1944, which brought an end to the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union, an Allied Control Commission (ACC) headed by Andrei Zhdanov arrived in Helsinki to observe Finland's compliance with the armistice. The subsequent repatriations of POWs between the both nations allowed Soviet intelligence to collect voluminous information on white émigré activities in Finland, as well as on other anti-Soviet intelligence and propaganda activities there.
After analysis of the collected information, the SMERSH department of the ACC requested the Finnish State Police (ValPo) to extradite and hand over 22 individuals accused of involvement in anti-Soviet activities. The activities included recruitment of Soviet POWs to the Russian National People's Army and the Russian Liberation Army, two collaborationist military units led by Russian émigrés, during the Winter War and the Continuation War, as well as contacts with Finnish and Japanese intelligence.
The Soviet request was approved by Interior Minister Leino. The listed individuals were arrested on the night of 20âÂÂ21 April 1945, immediately flown in a special airplane from Helsinki-Malmi Airport to Moscow, and brought to the headquarters of the NKVD in the Lubyanka Building. Of the extradited individuals, ten were Finnish citizens (two ethnic Finns and eight White émigrés) and nine were stateless Nansen passport holders.
After months of interrogation, all of the extradited were sentenced to harsh punishments; most of them were placed in Gulag labor camps, while at least one of them were executed. Five of them died while imprisoned or in camps, two of them took Soviet citizenship and chose to remain in the Soviet Union after serving their sentences, while the remaining individuals returned to Finland after receiving amnesties between 1954 and 1956. Those who returned were paid compensation by the Finnish government after their return. Leino was forced to resign as Minister for misconduct of his duties in 1948, after the extraditions became publicly known.
The original list handed over by Zhdanov included 22 names, of which three are not listed below: Nikolai Bastamov, Georgi Alekseev, and Alexander Kalashnikov. Bastamov was receiving medical treatment in Sweden at the time, and was thus not arrested; Alekseev, a French citizen, also managed to escape to Sweden and evaded arrest. Kalashnikov, whose real name was Nikolai Belyanski, was a Soviet POW who had chosen to remain in Finland following the Moscow Armistice. He was thus meant to have been repatriated to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1944, making his case differ from the others listed. He was handed over together with the other prisoners.