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

Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala’s work is reflective of a pattern that the historical profession seems destined to follow in the near future. In an increasingly interconnected world, historians seek to explain the origins of the rise of the modern global village, in the process challenging nation-building-oriented historiographies, instead alluding to the complexities and the interconnectedness of cultures, ideologies, social, economic, and political structures across and within national boundaries. As the authors note, by examining the history of North American Finnish immigrants in Soviet Karelia in the 1930s, they, in a way, study the “history of the world – of its Atlantic part at least – in upheavals and tragedies of the twentieth century” (P. vii).

Soviet Karelia emerged as a result of transnational political interaction between the bourgeois government of Finland, émigré Finnish communists, the Soviet government, and the local Karelian population. Since Karelia as a region emerged in this agenda of socialist nation building, when the accelerated industrialization campaign was launched in 1928 (First Five-Year Plan), the Finnish leaders of Karelia looked at Finnish immigrants in North America as a solution to the labor force shortage. The text is a social, cultural, and political history of about 6,500 Finnish Americans and Canadians who responded to Karelia’s call.

Through the lens of migration, the authors pick up on this fascinating, but often forgotten story of North American immigrants in the interwar Soviet Union. Concentrating specifically on North American Finns, who in the majority congregated in Karelia in the 1930s, the authors explore the history of the region, treating it as place of convergence of Finnish, American, Canadian, Karelian, Russian, and Soviet cultures, where all met to form a new socialist reality, which however, was sacrificed “to satisfy the political ambitions of the Soviet bureaucracy” (P. 173).

Although many immigrants were disappointed with the harsh realities they encountered in the Soviet Union and turned back, and while the ultimate ending of the North American Finnish community was tragic, as many would perish in Stalin’s purges, the authors do a great job of veerring away from the deterministic and centralist tendencies to interpret Soviet history of the 1930s as leading inevitably to Stalin’s “witch hunts.” While not dismissing the influence of the latter, they skillfully, and through a maze of documentary sources, obtained on both sides of the Atlantic, construct a narrative to reflect immigrants’ aspirations, struggles, success, and the significant social, cultural, and economic imprint they left on Karelia, and the Soviet society in general.

Leaning toward the revisionist interpretation of Stalin’s Russia, the authors challenge the Stalinocentrist explanatory models that are still common in today’s academia. They interpret immigrants’ attempts to build a new socialist reality in Karelia as a form of continuous negotiation with the central authorities, where North American Finns play an important role in shaping the history of the region and the state. The story of the Karelian fever (by which the immigration of North American Finns to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s is known) is a particularly potent example to study the convergence, or the in-betweenness of cultures and social structures. The authors do this well by demonstrating the way immigrants infused elements of Western modernity into Soviet socioeconomic structures. Immigrants were by far the most effective and productive workers in Karelia, and the authors argue that the fact that they were subjected to purges, with their community virtually destroyed by the end of World War II, suggests that they succeeded in constructing a new, alternative socialist reality, which the central authorities needed to crush if they were to secure their own dominant vision of the sociopolitical order.

The book is based on an impressive collection of primary...