"this is a certain system of political terror". To explain why the rest of the world has not noticed this, he claims that "Children who get into these camps have special prohibitions for communications, they cannot tell us what is happening there." He states: "I think that the juvenile justice system, the system of a mass removal of children, is genocide of children". He has not provided numbers for how many children are supposed to have been killed in this alleged "genocide", and has not revealed any sources for his information. In September 2014, he alleged that the Finnish authorities had unjustifiably taken custody of a daughter of a Russian mother, and that the mother would seek help from the Russian Children's Ombudsman Pavel Astahov, who has a background in KGB. Journalist Jussi Konttinen of the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat characterised Johan Bäckman as a promising researcher in Russian studies in the early 2000s, who has since "marginalized" himself in Finland. Bäckman's first public appearance was in the late 1980s when he played bassoon in the EBU Young Soloists Competition on national television. He also played bassoon in the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Opinion of the history of Finland Bäckman is highly critical of the modern Finnish historiography of World War II and challenges the traditional Western account that Finland waged a separate Continuation War against the aggression of the USSR. According to Bäckman, the Finns participated in the Siege of Leningrad actively and asked Hitler to destroy the city. He speculates that Finland also planned an ethnic cleansing in Karelia in order to create a Finno-Ugric superpower (Greater Finland), possibly stretching as far as the Urals, or even to the river Yenisei, which he claimed is proven by vast amounts of documents and in several Finnish history books by Helge Seppälä, Osmo Hyytiä and Nikolai Baryshnikov. Bäckman accuses Finland of being the aggressor in World War II: that it allied with Hitler in attacking the USSR in 1941 (Continuation War)—omitting the original source conflict (Winter War); plotted territorial expansion and planned to conduct ethnic cleansing; and that, along with the Estonians and Germans, believed in its Aryan origins (a Nordic master race). He contends Finns are both anti-Semitic and Russophobic, Russophobia being a "racist political ideology"—both per "several academic works by Finnish authors." In March 2002, during a military historical festival in Suojärvi in the Republic of Karelia which was