The Saga of A Century

Citizens of Russia, Finns by nationality, born in America, Elmar and Miriam Nousiainen (83 and 73, respectively) have led remarkable lives.

Elmar and Miriam’s parents were ordinary Finns who moved from impoverished Finland to America at the turn of the century. Their families were doing well in the US (Elmar’s father was a miner, Miriam’s a farmer), even after the Great Depression hit, but they were influenced by socialist aspirations. Elmar was 15 and Miriam 8 when their parents left the US separately. On the eve of their departure, Miriam’s father poured her some fresh milk. “Please drink it,” he said. “There will be no milk where we are going.” Why would she want to go where there is no milk, Miriam wondered. She refused to go to the Soviet Union. To her, home was Bondville, Vermont. Her parents had to physically force her on board the ship.

Soviet propaganda had called out to the “best sons and daughters of the Finnish people,” saying that “the world’s first country of workers and peasants” needed their help. Elmar and Miriam’s parents couldn’t not respond to such an ardent appeal—since they left Finland, they had never lost the dream of a country that was fair to working people. Their parents were determined to help build the young Soviet republic. “This is the country of the future,” they told their children. “There will never be any war here...”

For Elmar it was all an exciting adventure. He thought it would end soon enough and he would come back home to America. But Elmar’s father got seriously ill and they had to move from the mining city of Leninsk-Kuznetsk, in Kuzbass, to Karelia. It was about then that “Karelian fever” began. Some 15,000 Finns and Swedes from America moved to Karelia in the early 1930s, enticed by the socialist experiment.

Miriam, meanwhile was angry. She had been uprooted and forced to leave all that she loved: her spacious house, her friends, her school. This made her a very difficult child. Once, Miriam’s mother lost her temper and slapped Miriam while they were on the street. A woman ran up to them and said with indignation: “They don’t beat children in the Soviet Union!”

From that moment on, Miriam said, her relationship with her new home got better. Or perhaps she simply changed her attitude towards inevitable circumstances. She graduated from a Soviet school, then from a Pedagogical Institute, then worked for many years in Petrozavodsk as the principal of a secondary school specializing in English.

Elmar delayed as long as he could making his application for Soviet citizenship. For too long probably. Only when it was hinted that he might lose his job at the Radio Committee did he apply for Soviet citizenship. Alas, it didn’t help. Shortly afterward, he was fired on a false pretext. Three years later, in 1938, he was arrested in Moscow, when he went to the Finnish embassy to clarify some details about his parents’ passport. Eight years in Stalin’s camps were followed by eight years of forced exile to the Northern Urals. Such were Elmar’s “Soviet universities.” He said his American background was what saved him, namely the fact that he could play a saxophone. The camp bosses formed a prisoners’ band and took care of its members.

In 1956, Elmar was rehabilitated along with millions of other Soviet citizens. A relatively calm period ensued. Elmar married Miriam (their parents had known each other in the US). He got a good job as sound operator at the newly-created Karelian TV (he worked there until his retirement in 1981), and they got a two room apartment where they brought up the orphaned daughters of Miriam’s sister. And they got a dacha, where they still grow vegetables—a more than welcome supplement to their meager pensions, on which one simply cannot live.

Thanks to the new openness brought by perestroika, the couple was able to visit their homeland. In this they were aided by Charles Hosford of Vermont’s Project Harmony, who also helped them re-secure US citizenship.

Today, their home is in Russia. As Elmar said, they have gotten used to living here; if only it weren’t for the poverty in which they have to live as pensioners.