Monastery within the Soviet-Finnish war. Evacuation
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The monastery was bombed repeatedly from the first days of the war. The most destructive were the bombings of February 2 and 4, when Valaam was attacked by three raids of seventy planes. The monastery could have been razed to the ground. However, the damage was not as serious as it could have been. Finnish officers talked about that with amazement, concluding that either Soviet pilots had felt pity for such a beauty, or St. Sergius and St. German had protected their cloister.
In June 1940, in the country estate of Papinniemi in Eastern Finland, bought by the brethren, the life of the New Valaam monastery started.