Finland was part of the Russian Empire for over a hundred years, and Russian influence has left a significant mark on the history of this country. Even nearly 104 years after gaining independence, one can find many testimonies of the Russian past here. In Helsinki, the capital of Finland, there is an Orthodox cemetery known as the "Large" or "Ilyinsky". It was founded in 1815 and became the resting place for many Orthodox Christians who lived in what was then Helsingfors. In 1852, the Ilyinsky chapel was built at the cemetery, which gave it the popular name "Ilyinsky Cemetery", while the expansion of the territory led to the emergence of the second name, "Large Cemetery".

One of the first to be buried in the Orthodox cemetery of Helsingfors was Rear Admiral Nikolai Andreyevich Bodisko, who passed away on November 1, 1815. He was the first Russian admiral to find peace on Finnish soil, but not the last. In March 1917, two famous naval commanders became victims of Bolshevik propaganda in the Baltic Fleet. Vice Admiral Nepenin, the last commander of the Imperial Baltic Fleet, was killed by bayonets and rifle butts, while Rear Admiral Arkady Konstantinovich Nebolsin died from his wounds. Both were buried in this cemetery. In 1928, Admiral Oskar Viktorovich Stark, the commandant of Port Arthur, was buried nearby, next to the grave of his son, a Russian officer.

After the October Revolution, a wave of Russian refugees flooded into Finland, and the failures of the White movement only intensified this. It is hard to imagine now, but thousands of Russian officers, statesmen, and public figures, as well as poets and writers, found their rest in this Finnish cemetery. Here lie the lady-in-waiting of the empress Anna Vyrubova and the famous poet of the White movement Ivan Savin, who bravely fought in the Civil War, survived captivity, and miraculously escaped, but soon died from blood poisoning after an appendectomy.