page_title: Toivo Vähä
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Toivo Vähä / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Soviet border guards in Transbaikalia. Left in the back is Toivo Vähä (1901-1984).
context_page_description: Toivo Juhonpoika Vähä 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 his role in the 1925 capture of the British super-spy Sidney Reilly during the Operation Trust.
context_section_description: Toivo Vähä was born to the family of Juho Vähä, an industrial worker, 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 to 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 Finnish emigrant workers in 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 collapsed 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, many fled 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, and was then sent back to Petrograd to join the military academy. In 1920–1923, Vähä took a three-year course at the international Petrograd Red Officer School, where he was joined by four of his brothers. During his time in the academy, Vähä took part in 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 on the orders of his platoon leader Toivo Antikainen. Antikainen was later captured in Finland, where he received a life sentence for the murders.
  After his graduation in March 1923, Vähä was recruited by the NKVD. He served as a border station commander at the Finnish border in the Karelian Isthmus. From 1924 Vähä worked for the GPU in Leningrad, until he was moved to a border station in Sestroretsk in June 1925.
caption: Soviet border troops in Transbaikalia. Toivo Vähä in the middle.
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