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vii Preface This book arose from our participation in two research projects that studied emigration from Finnish communities in the United States and Canada to the ussr during the early 1930s. Life trajectories of these Finnish American and Canadian emigrants are a fascinating case that gives multiple novel perspectives on the turbulent history of the first half of the twentieth century. They crossed the Atlantic twice, first emigrating from their native Finland in search of a better life in the New World and from there moving back to Europe, to the Soviet Union, which, it seemed to them, promised a just social order and better opportunities to work, to raise children, and to preserve their language, culture, and identities. To their new socialist home, Soviet Karelia, they took critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money—much was put to use and transformed certain sectors of the Soviet Karelian economy, but much was lost through inefficient Soviet bureaucratic management . Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformation who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of the socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as a dark, uneducated, and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. In Soviet Karelia, they created a unique culture based on the Finnish language and revolutionary aspirations of their generation; however, just as it became an important factor in the cultural transformation of Soviet Karelian society, immigrant communities were severely affected by witch-hunting campaigns of the late 1930s, targeted and victimized by the same regime that had recruited them for socialist building, and then finally destroyed in the course of the Second World War. With their lives, North American immigrants to Soviet Karelia stitched into one whole three different worlds—Finland, an Old World nation-state; the United States and Canada, two countries of seemingly endless opportunities for European immigrants that, after the Great Depression, turned unfriendly and even hostile to many of them; and what they thought was the first workers’ state, the Soviet Union. The history of these Finnish immigrants is, in a way, a history of the world—of its Atlantic part at least—in upheavals and tragedies of the twentieth century. It is hardly surprising that the history of Finnish emigration from North America to Soviet Russia appeared recently in research in the four countries affected by it: the United States, Canada, Finland, and Russia. In 2006, the Canadian-Finnish-Russian project Missing in Karelia: Canadian Victims of Stalin’s Purges was launched, headed by Varpu Lindström from York University in Toronto and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It aimed to collect biographical data on Canadian and American Finns who had emigrated to Soviet Karelia in the early 1930s. The project team developed the website Missing in Karelia, which presents the gathered information. It coincided with the research project North American Finns in Soviet Karelia from the 1920s to the 1950s, headed viii| Preface by Irina Takala from Petrozavodsk State University, one of the co-authors of this book, and supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities and the Government of the Republic of Karelia. Its participants looked at the history of the North American immigrant community in Karelia to better understand Soviet regional history and focused on the impacts of American and Canadian immigrants on the cultural, economic, and social development of Soviet Karelia during the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union. These research problems have not yet been properly addressed in contemporary scholarship, and the fates of hundreds of immigrants, many of whom became victims of political repression and ethnic cleansing in the late 1930s in the ussr, still remain unknown. Even in Karelia, where these events occurred, few knew about the people who were agents of prominent political, economic, and cultural change in this Soviet republic and who, in the early twentieth century, twice changed their homeland in search of their El Dorado. This book would never have been written without the help of many people. We are particularly indebted to Varpu Lindström at York University in Toronto whose commitment to creating an international research network on the history of Finnish emigration from North America to the ussr was instrumental in pushing us to write this book. We are very sad that it is too late to express our deep gratitude to her in person. Thanks...

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