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

Like so many other Russian cities, Petrozavodsk, on the shores of Lake Onega in northern Russia and near the border with Finland, bears the telltale symbols of the former Soviet Union. In a square named after him, a stone statue of Vladimir Lenin, rises above the bustling northern city. A statue of Lenin is not an unusual sight in Russia today, but a statue built by Canadians in the 1930s to commemorate the leader of the Russian Revolution is. The Canadians who built the statue were of Finnish descent and they, like their American counterparts, left families and lives behind them in North America to follow a dream.

Approximately 7,000 North American Finns ventured to Soviet Karelia in the early 1930s. There they were joined by Finnish nationals and most of the newcomers were young, gifted, and Red. This mass immigration became known as Karelian Fever. The immigrants were initially received with open arms and celebrated as international comrades. They were given better jobs, pay, and housing. North Americans also had access to special stores and were given the freedom to work toward the development of the creation of a republic in the Soviet Union where the Finnish language and culture could thrive. The honeymoon with North Americans and Finns soon came to an end with the Great Purge orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. The fate of the immigrants is reflected in the downfall of Edvard Gylling, a prominent Finnish Social Democrat who became leader of Soviet Karelia but was removed from his position in 1935, arrested and tried for treason in 1937 and executed in 1938.

The idea of a Karelian El Dorado ended in the mid-1930s when thousands of Canadian and American Finns experienced the same fate as Gylling, and their stories, like their bodies, were buried deep in the woods of Soviet Karelia. By one estimate, 739 people, or about ten percent of all the Finnish North Americans who went to Karelia were executed and only about 5,000 were still there in the late-1930s. Of the victims, ninety percent were men in their twenties and thirties. This amounted to approximately twenty percent of the male immigrant population at the time, and since children could not be accused of spying, the percentage of adult males who were caught up in the purges was more like sixty percent. Their dreams were betrayed and the outbreak of war in 1939 trapped the survivors in what had become a nightmare.

This is the context for Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala’s new book on Karelian Fever. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is a survey of immigration by ethnic Finns from the United States and Canada in the 1930s. The book is a welcome addition to a growing list of recent literature on Soviet Karelia. Several books, articles, and films have emerged in recent decades, but most of them reflect the geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural divisions that were evident in Karelia in the 1930s when Finns, Russians, Karelians, Canadians, Americans, and others came together to construct a proletarian utopia. In this respect the work of the late Varpu Lindstom stands out because she created a research network of Canadians, Finns, and Russians focused on the question of Karelian Fever and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is, in large part, a result of her efforts to bridge the divide.

Golubev and Takala’s book is significant because of its extensive use of Soviet and Russian sources to tell a story that has previously been told almost exclusively from the Finnish or North American perspective. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided a period in the early 1990s when...