Purge (novel)

Purge

English-language cover
Author	Sofi Oksanen
Original title	Puhdistus
Translator	Lola Rogers
Country	Finland
Language	Finnish
Genre	Historical novel, Crime novel
Publisher	WSOY
Publication date	2008
Media type	Print (Hardback; Paperback)
Pages	380 pp
ISBN

Purge (Finnish: Puhdistus) is a novel by Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, which has been translated into thirty-eight languages. Oksanen's third Finnish-language novel, Purge was published in 2008 and is based upon her original play of the same name, staged at the Finnish National Theatre in 2007. As of 2010, Purge is the only one of Oksanen's novels which has been translated into English.

Purge is a story of two women forced to confront their own dark pasts, of collusion and resistance, of rape and sexual slavery set against the backdrop of the Soviet occupation of Estonia.

The novel was originally conceived as a play. The play was written in 2007 and produced at the National Theatre of Finland. In writing the novel, Oksanen chose for the plot to diverge from its original ending and focus on different themes.

After existing as an independent country for twenty-one years, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Estonia in June 1940 during World War II. In 1941–1944, Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany. From February to November 1944, the German forces were expelled by the Red Army. The Soviet rule was re-established by force, and sovietisation followed, mostly carried out in 1944–1950. The forced collectivisation of agriculture began in 1947, and was completed after the mass deportation in March 1949. The Soviet authorities confiscated the private farms and made the peasants to join the collective farms. An armed resistance movement of forest brothers was active until the mass deportations. A total of 30,000 participated or supported the movement; 2,000 were killed. The Soviet authorities fighting the forest brothers suffered also hundreds of deaths. Some innocent civilians were killed on both sides. In addition, a number of underground nationalist schoolchildren groups were active. Most of their members were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The punitive actions decreased rapidly after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953; from 1956–58, a large part of the deportees and political prisoners were allowed to return. Political arrests and numerous other kind of crimes against humanity were committed all through the occupation period until the late 1980s. After all, the attempt to integrate the Estonian society into the Soviet system failed. Although the armed resistance was defeated, the population remained anti-Soviet. This helped Estonians to organise a new resistance movement in the late 1980s, regain their independence in 1991, and then rapidly develop a modern society.