The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s by Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala (review)

Between 1931 and 1934, more than 6000 Finns from the United States and Canada moved to Soviet Karelia, located in northwest Russia on the border with Finland. Although the immigrants departed with high hopes, they were shocked by conditions when they arrived, and some quickly returned to North America. For those who stayed, the experience often was quite harsh and, in 1937 and 1938, many of the men were caught up in the Stalinist purges; several hundred of them were executed and buried in unmarked graves. In most cases, their fates were unreported and families often did not learn the truth of their deaths until decades later. The North American Finnish immigration to Karelia was known as “Karelian fever” and has attracted attention in recent decades, especially in the Finnish diaspora in the US and Canada and in Finland itself.

A few people researched the topic prior to the 1980s, beginning with the pioneering work of Finnish historian Reino Kero. But the key development that has made it possible for scholars to study Karelian fever in depth was the opening of previously closed Soviet archives in the late 1980s and 1990s. Irina Takala probably is the leading scholar in this field, publishing widely in Russian on this episode and related topics for more than 25 years. She and Alexey Golubey have worked extensively in Karelian archives and utilized interviews with survivors of Karelian fever and their families. In some respects, The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the culmination of a generation of research conducted in Russia, Finland, Canada, and the US. Though there are some real points of disagreement among those who have worked on this topic, Golubey and Takala have treated the difference perspectives with balance and provide the most substantial treatment of North American Finnish immigration to Karelia to date.

Karelia itself holds a special place in Finnish culture in that it was the land of the Kalevela, or the source of the tales and legends that made up the epic poem of Finland. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Finland became independent from Russia, and Karelia emerged as a borderland in where the population consisted largely of Karelians, a non-Slavic people who spoke dialects of Finnish, and Russians. For practical political reasons, Lenin agreed to turn over the leadership of Karelia to “Red Finns” who had lost out in the Finnish Civil War of 1918. In addition to their small numbers, there were other Finns who crossed over into Karelia in the 1920s and 1930 (or “border hoppers”), but the two largest ethnic groups there were native Karelians and Russians, whose numbers would continue to increase as a result of migration from other parts of the Soviet Union. During the period when Red Finns dominated government and economy in Karelia, that is, between 1920 and 1935, Finns were a distinct minority of the overall population, roughly 3 percent at its peak. Led by Edvard Gylling and Kustaa Rovio, the Red Finns sought to build a model socialist society and a base that ultimately might serve to establish a “greater socialist Finland,” incorporating Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and, of course, Finland itself. Such dreams, however, reflected a cruel irony that would be turned on the Red Finns in the mid and late 1930s during the Great Purge, as then they were charged with bourgeois nationalism and plotting to detach Karelia from the Soviet Union to join it to capitalist Finland.

The Red Finns always were concerned with the ethnic balance in Karelia and once the Five Year Plan was implemented in 1928, Karelia was assigned the responsibility of producing raw materials for export so as to attract foreign currency. Timber was the region’s greatest natural resource, and now it was required to produce more of that...