Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans

Although the tragic tale of the approximately 6,500 Finnish North Americans who succumbed to “Karelian Fever” in the early 1930s is relatively well known—thanks to the work of Alexey Golubev, Irina Takala, Auvo Kostiainen, Varpu Lindström, Markku Kangaspuro, Reino Kero, Nick Baron, and many other scholars and memoir writers—Samira Saramo has made a particularly valuable contribution to the field. Rooted in “life writing studies,” her work makes extensive use of the handful of extant letters and memoirs penned by North American Finns who emigrated to Soviet Karelia, primarily between 1931 and 1935. Using these sources, Saramo has produced a history of everyday life—a microhistory—of the transnational community of Canadian and American Finns who moved to Soviet Karelia in hopes of building a new workers’ paradise among the forests, fields, fisheries, and developing towns and cities of the region.Drawing on the work of scholars of the North American Finnish left, the author begins by providing readers with an excellent analysis of the development and internal dynamics of the Finnish North American left-wing community. In so doing, Saramo goes well beyond the usual narrative of the factors that induced so many to abandon North America and take the risk of moving to Soviet Karelia (some as early as the 1920s). What emerges are a series of push and pull factors that offer a complex—and eminently human—account of the social, economic, political/ideological, personal, and familial motivations of those who moved to the Soviet Union.What readers will find most interesting is Saramo's delineation of the living and working conditions of the North American Finns in Karelia. Keenly aware that these folks constituted a privileged—if proletarian—elite in Karelia when they first arrived, Saramo is at pains to illustrate that even if conditions were difficult for the North Americans in the Karelian hinterland, they were far better than those available to the “others” who inhabited the region—the local Finns, Karelians, Ingarians, Veps, and Russians. They received better wages, better housing, and better food rations than their neighbors and were often singled out for praise and promotion in Soviet Karelia as hero workers. To be sure, the difficult adaptation to a new land, to new occupations, to modern Finnish (as opposed to Finglish), and later to Russian are well detailed, but always in the context of the privileges and ongoing segregation of the North Americans from the “others” they were meant to inspire and “modernize” with their North American tools, know-how, and labor procedures. Not surprisingly, the North Americans were often the objects of envy and suspicion to the “others”—which would work against them when Soviet nationality and language policy underwent a massive revision later in the decade. Most striking of all, however, is this: in Saramo's analysis, considerations of gender, generation, recreation, and leisure activities mesh seamlessly in her discussion of the lifeways of these settlers—a most unusual accomplishment. Indeed, her fourth chapter (on childhood, those raised “in the revolutionary spirit”) and her sixth chapter (which deals with community life and leisure and also has much information on youth culture) are not only extremely useful but are also strikingly novel contributions to the literature.Of course, as one reads the first six chapters, there is a constant sense of foreboding, as we all know what is coming—the Great Terror. But even before Stalin's terror was unleashed on Karelia in general and the North American Finns in particular, there had been more than a few who grew disenchanted with the Stalinist project. Thus, even in the relatively “good old days” of 1931–35, approximately 20 percent of those who had come to Karelia returned to North America. Their reasons for leaving varied, but for many of these returnees there was definitely a sense of disenchantment with their experience in the Soviet Union. Their disenchantment would be as nothing, however, compared to the lived experience of those who remained behind.It is in the chapter on the Great Terror that Saramo's life writing approach faces its most severe methodological challenge, for most of the letter writers she has been citing go silent—for good reason. Thus, this chapter relies more heavily than others on secondary sources, most notably on the well-known works of Robert Conquest, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Nick Baron, Irina Takala, and Auvo Kostiainen, and memoirs written long afterward, transcribed interviews with survivors and various other post facto life writings. Yet even the silence of her correspondents speaks volumes to Saramo, and she interweaves their sparse and heavily self-censored or coded missives with all available sources to produce an excellent, if tragic, telling of the denouement of the community in the face of Stalinist terror. Indeed, she makes a strong case that the North American Finns paid a disproportionately high price during the purges. Though they constituted only 1 percent of the Karelian population, the North American Finns may have accounted for up to 15 percent of those purged. Perhaps even more to the point, this was but the tip of the iceberg, for the families of those purged were ostracized, forced out of their homes, and sent to labor camps, and they often suffered the same fate—albeit more slowly—as those who received the “five kopeck sentence” (i.e., a bullet).All in all, this is an incredibly nuanced work of transnational history and a fascinating exploration of the possibilities of the life writing approach. But it is also a profoundly moving human story, a story of those who had a dream—for themselves, their families, and others. Even more to the point, for all the difficulties that were encountered, it was a dream—or rather a series of dreams—that seemed to have had some success until destroyed by the unfettered paranoia of Stalin. Truly a tragic tale—but one well worth exploring.

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