The Kirkenes Ethics. Igor Diakonoff

Igor Diakonoff, an outstanding Assyriologist, historian and linguist, spent several years of his childhood in Norway. When the Red Army liberated the Northern Norway in 1944, he was sent by the Soviet command to Kirkenes and became a key actor in the relations between the local population and the Soviet armed forces. A promising scholar, finding himself among the ruins in a country of his childhood, he became determined to formulate general ethical principles which would be fit for any social system, religion or race. He finished this work, which resulted in a short treatise named “The Kirkenes Ethics“, only by the end of his life, and his war-time human experience in Kirkenes remained a major theme for him until his last days.