In 1931, hundreds of Finnish families across the US and Canada started packing. Lumberjacks, farmers and factory hands – most of them first-generation immigrants who had moved to North America only 10 or 15 years earlier – sold their newly-built houses and land, and embarked on steamboats back to Europe. Their crated-up possessions traveled in the cargo bays: double beds, Fords, grand pianos, professional and agricultural tools. They were going to Karelia – a new country of their own in the north of Russia.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the West followed the Soviet Union’s success story with amazement and disbelief. Far from falling apart soon after the Revolution of 1917, as many had predicted, the new, multinational Soviet state seemed to be delivering on its dreams. Once an agrarian monarchy where only one person in five could sign his or her name, it now boasted cutting-edge industry and intercontinental railways, a 90% literacy rate and international influence.
Of course, few foreign observers realized the uglier truths, that forced industrialization had already claimed millions of lives, and that the survivors often lacked basic human comforts in their struggle to secure the young country’s future. On their return from the land of the Soviets, common travelers and prominent public figures alike felt obliged to testify to the unprecedented progress made by this country of enthusiastic working people. J. Neill Greenwood, professor of metallurgy at the University of Melbourne, wrote that, “having passed through Canada, the USA and England on the way to Russia, and having seen in those countries helplessness and despair – just the same as had been left behind in Australia – the unparalleled enthusiasm and optimism of Russia came as a refreshing change.”
Lion Feuchtwanger added the authority of his own personal experience in his book Moscow 1937, a stunningly naïve apologism of Stalinist Russia that approved of the Show Trials: “More and better food is available here per head of the population than in Germany and Italy... at prices quite affordable for an average citizen; the whole enormous city of Moscow exudes content and accord – moreover, peace.”
Not speaking the language, most foreign guests saw what they were shown and heard what they were told, not knowing that a few dozen miles away from Moscow’s groaning shop shelves starvation had set in. It would take another 30 years for the world to learn that factories, mines and railways had been built not so much by young enthusiasts as by emaciated political prisoners; that in order to meet the first five-year-plan quotas, reports had been doctored, resources overestimated and horrendous famines decreed; that people’s optimism was rooted in their wholehearted belief in their leader’s infallibility.
So it was that political visitors’ reports bolstered the young country’s image as a blue collar paradise. All over the world, the hearts of working people went out to the nation that had dared to challenge the old order and was winning the struggle.
The Finnish community in North America felt an especially strong bond with the young Soviet country. Some 150,000 had left their homeland – long a part of the Russian Empire – in the first decade of the 1900s, to avoid oppressive Russification begun in 1899. Quite a few who came later were so-called “Red Finns.” They fled Finland after Finnish independence (December, 1917) led to a failed revolution, followed by a bloody civil war (January-May 1918). In America, they stuck to their principles, comprising by at least one account as much as 40% of all Communist Party members in the U.S. They ate, dreamed and breathed the ideas of communism and class struggle, awaiting the signal to embark on a full-scale world revolution. Entire families of Finnish immigrants participated in strikes, demonstrations and anticlerical disputes.
“The American Finns had the reputation of clean and hard-working people,” said Paavo Alatalo, who was nine years old at the time, in his dictated memoir. “At home, we spoke a lot about the Soviet Union: that there was no deprivation there, that in a few years’ time they would have built a dream country for all working people. I don’t blame the speakers: they sincerely believed what they said and in 1937-1938 in Karelia, they were among the first to face the firing squad.”
Each Finnish-American diaspora had its own community hall, the heart of the local social life, holding everything from dances, parties, art and theater classes, to workers’ meetings. In the 1920s, the halls also became centers of Soviet agitation, urging people to support the young republic and donate to its development. Cash, tools and equipment were collected for Soviet factories and farms, letters of support were written for their fellow countrymen – the first Finnish emigrants left America for Russia in the early 1920s, to help build huge industrial sites like Kemerovo and Magnitogorsk.
Finnish-Americans had raised over $2 million for the Soviet Republic’s needs. But it took more than charity to prompt six thousand people to leave their homes and, once again, traverse the globe. In fact, Finnish immigrants did not always feel wanted in the U.S. and Canada. “Immigration is never easy, both psychologically and economically,” said Professor Irina Takala, of the University of Petrozavodsk, Karelia. “The Finns’ adaptation in North America was complicated by the language barrier: not speaking English, they had difficulty integrating and often chose the company of their compatriots. In such cases, an immigrant often consoles him or herself by thinking there is a better, perfect society somewhere.”
Finnish immigrants dreamed of a land of their own – a peaceful, prosperous country where they could work, raise families, and educate their children in Finnish. And their dreams were abetted by a Finnish patriot in Europe who had made the creation of such a homeland his life’s ambition.
Demographer’s Dream
Edvard Gylling was born in 1881, in the small Finnish town of Kuopio. He graduated from Helsinki University and went on to become a leading economist, philosopher and demographer. His demographic research took him to the most remote and poor corners of the country. His doctoral thesis studied the evolution of small land tenancy in Finland: small tenants, or torppari, had the fewest rights and were the most exploited citizens in poor, rural Finland.
Gylling watched peasants’ children die of disease and malnutrition and realized the threat it presented to the country’s demography – to its future. For that reason, he passionately opposed Finnish emigration to America: in the first two decades of the 20th century, some 200,000 Finns – almost 10% of its population – had left Finland for the U.S. and Canada.
At the age of 23, Gylling joined the Social Democrat Party of Finland. In 1908, he became a member of parliament (Finland had been an automous duchy since being absorbed into the Russian empire in 1809); and a few years later, the party’s Central Committee member.
His party activities took him to Russia, where he met Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders, who promoted the idea of Finland’s independence from the Russian Empire. As the unrest in pre-revolutionary Russia grew, Finland began talking of self-determination. When, in 1916, Gylling’s party gained a majority in parliament, Finnish workers started creating their own councils, militia and the Red Guard.
The October Revolution in neighboring Russia triggered unrest in Finland. On November 13, 1917, mass strikes resulted in armed workers’ units taking over Finnish railway stations, telephone and telegraph exhanges, and administrative buildings. The Finnish revolution had begun. On December 6, Finland declared its independence. On December 31, 1917, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic recognized it, hoping it would become a sister socialist state. But their optimism was short-lived.
The revolution in Finland sparked off a brutal civil war. The communist Red Finns turned to Russia for military help; the opposing White Guard turned to Imperial Germany. Yet the new Russian government was wary of openly confronting Germany just as Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations were about to begin. The Finnish revolution did not stand a chance. Ruthless repression of captured Reds followed.
Gylling escaped prosecution, fleeing Finland for Sweden. In 1920, he emigrated to Russia. Bitter at his party’s failure, he had no intention of giving up his dream. He believed he had the power and expertise to create a new, Red Finland for working people. He had a plan.
RED KARELIA
Gylling’s plan was to create a new Soviet Republic of Karelia, in the Northwest of Russia, bordering Finland. The region was sparsely populated and culturally very close to Finland. The Karelian language was related to Finnish although, like their lifestyle, it was heavily influenced by Russian culture. Gylling approached Lenin, arguing that such a republic could be a socialist model for other Scandinavian countries to follow. Lenin approved, appointing Gylling in 1920 chairman of a newly-created Karelian Labor Commune, later (in 1923) renamed the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
Once in Karelia, Gylling showed himself to be a down-to-earth economist. He drafted a plan for the republic’s development, including dozens of new factories and farms, paper mills, schools and railways. But the most important item on his list was the development of the timber industry, Karelia’s biggest asset.
As a demographer, Gylling foresaw the dangers of rapid industrial development. It meant more jobs – 60,000 as a start – but the local Karelian population was well below that. Which meant that the Finnic people would have to be watered down by thousands of Slavic newcomers: Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, threatening Gylling’s dream of a homogeneous, Finnish republic.
Gylling also realized that the region had no store of tools, equipment or professional know-how. And the struggling Russian Federation had little to spare.
But the Finnish-Americans could solve both these problems in one fell swoop. Red Finns in America had everything the republic needed: money, advanced equipment and specialist expertise. And numbers. When the Great Depression struck, in 1929, American immigrants suffered the most, making them all the more susceptible to dreams of starting over, of a better life on distant shores.
“Gylling was in fact far more conservative than the Finns who came,” said Alexis Pogorelskin, professor at the University of Detroit, and Director of the Center for Genocide, Holocaust, and Human Rights Studies. “He was a Finnish nationalist who envisioned a greater Finland, and he never lost his idea of Finland being socialist. As a demographer, he realized the implications the Finnish emigration to the United States had for their native country, just as in Karelia he realized the ethnic dangers of Russian immigration. So, in Karelia, when he needed a Finnish population, he knew where to get it. In the Finnish-Americans, he had a perfect counterweight to Russian immigration to Karelia.”
Of course, no one could see what history had coming. At the end of the 1920s, Gylling and many other first-generation social democrats were still intoxicated by revolutionary ideas of justice, equality and internationalism. But the signs were there. The first “rehabilitative labor camp” for political prisoners had been set up on Solovetsky Island, in the White Sea off Karelia, in 1920. By the end of the 1920s, the power and size of the Gulag system was swelling – to reach horrific scale with the White Sea Canal built across Karelia with prison labor in 1932-34. Stalin’s power was taking root. Firing squads had taken the place of justice, and paranoid spy hunts were sealing off international contacts.
So the new party bosses weren’t amused when Gylling, in 1930, applied for entry visas and consequent Russian citizenship for his ex-countrymen from the U.S. and Canada. The visas were denied; Gylling demanded, begged, and finally issued invitations under his personal responsibility.
The first group of American lumberjacks arrived in September 1930, followed by two thousand who received entry visas in 1931 – instead of the ten thousand requested by Gylling. Also in 1931, a labor recruitment agency named the Soviet Karelian Technical Aid Committee was created, to simplify the entry process. On the whole, by the mid-1930s, over six thousand Finnish immigrants had moved from the American continent to the USSR.
They were eager to start building their dream Finland in the Soviet land of plenty.
reality check
Once the travelers stepped off the train in Petrozavodsk, real life clashed with the Soviet Union’s glossy media image. Each family was assigned a room in a temporary hostel, with a wood stove. They had to fetch water from a well down the street and use an unheated communal toilet out in the yard, even in winter. “The atmosphere was depressing: the whole family in one large room plagued with cockroaches,” Paavo Alatalo remembered. Many Red Finns left almost immediately. Over time, a quarter of all newcomers chose to go back to America or, alternatively, to Finland.
“The immigrants were totally unprepared for Soviet reality,” Petrozavodsk University’s Irina Takala said. “These people had no idea what they were getting into. Everything added to it: the poor conditions, impossibility of freely choosing a job, the animosity of the local population, who were annoyed by the privileges the newcomers received... Plus the language barrier. Their American situation repeated itself.”
Takala quoted the words of a survivor: “One thing I don’t understand is how the locals survived at all without any of the meager privileges we had.”
Those who stayed set to work. The new settlers had come to help create new lumber camps and building sites. But they were used to hard work. The kids started going to school and could study in Finnish, their mother tongue, for free. “If only one good thing came out of this experience, it was the fact that the children got first-rate education free of charge – this was something we could have never been able to afford at that time in America,” said survivor Kerttu Viljanen.
The Karelization of the region went according to Gylling’s plan. Ethnic Karelians and Finns took major posts in the government, the justice system and party committees, their numbers in some organizations exceeding 50%. New publishing houses were printing newspapers and books in Finnish, and more were being imported from Finland. A Karelian National Drama Theatre opened in autumn 1932 – its Finnish-American actors putting to good use the amateur drama experience gained in American workers’ halls.
“In mid-1930s,” Pogorelskin said, “Karelia had the fastest growing economy in Europe. The Finnish Americans brought their own heavy equipment – and most importantly, they knew how to maintain it – and introduced assembly line techniques. They brought sports to Karelia, like trampoline and baseball; they had first-rate classical and jazz musicians.”
Still, things didn’t always go smoothly between the locals – Russians, Karelians and Finnish Civil War refugees – and the American newcomers. The lifestyle of the “American Finns,” their work habits, imported cars and shopping privileges annoyed those who worked alongside them yet had to queue for rancid soap and kerosene. But gradually, the newcomers started to fit in, sharing the same hopes and ambitions, learning each other’s languages and sending their kids to the same schools. Finally, after years of struggle, they had their lives under control. Or so they thought.
enemies within
Like the rest of Russia, Karelia was hard hit by the purges of the 1930s. The republic’s national diversity and its proximity to Finland (which had become openly aggressive; Russian and Finland would go to war in November 1939) nurtured the security organs’ wildest fantasies. Many of the Finnish immigrants were devoted communists. Yet they were accused of treason and espionage activities on behalf of Finland. Many Finnish-American immigrants attempted to leave Russia at this time, only to find out that their U.S. and Canadian passports had expired.
“The local population had a lot of resentment against the American Finns and the privileges that Gylling gave them to entice them,” Pogorelskin said. “In a way, the terror was payback time for all the privileges, and it was also about redistributing – shifting – possessions. As in, ‘arrest the orchestra, confiscate the instruments.’ Resentment and bitterness are not positive emotions, but when they become patriotic, people start to believe it’s not bad anymore. Righteous feelings like patriotism help fuel resentment.”
As Russo-Finnish relations soured, the repression reached its height. In 1938, the Finnish language was banned, schools were closed and teachers arrested. As were the editors and publishers of Finnish-language publications. The terror culminated in the arrest and execution of the entire personnel, from director to janitors, of a Petrozavodsk ski factory that employed many Finnish-American immigrants.
Most of the arrested believed to the end that they had fallen victim to an unfortunate mistake, a mix-up. The clandestine nature of arrests helped conceal their scale, making those not involved believe nothing was happening.
“I was shattered when I first heard Grandma’s stories about her dad’s arrest,” said Mihkel Alatalo, immigrant Paavo Alatalo’s grandson. “He was buried in Sandarmoch, near Medvezhegorsk, where mass shootings took place. Later, I went there – in 1997, when they were opening the memorial. You don’t want to know how it felt to see heaps of human skulls and bones they’d exhumed from mass graves, piled head-high. It was like a copy of Vereshchagin’s Apotheosis of War, only for real. And it was a war with your own people.”
The number of Finnish-American immigrants that fell victim to the purges between 1935-1938 is unknown, but is estimated at between 10 to 15 thousand people.* Edvard Gylling was executed in June 1938, sharing the fate of those who had shared his dream.
survivors
For many years after 1938, there was no official Soviet mention of the Finnish-American immigration to Karelia. In 1956, most political restrictions were lifted in Karelia, and Finnish once again became the second official language of Karelia. Those who survived the purges kept a low profile, but their presence and their influence had added a lot to the Karelian Republic’s culture and lifestyle.
The “American Finns” gave Karelia some of its most prominent personalities, including Karl Rautio, a leading composer, educated in Chicago and California; U.S.-born soprano Sirkka Rikka; Elsa Balandis, a ballerina arrested in 1937 for “disclosing classified information.”
In the 1990s, many ethnic Finns took advantage of the new freedoms to leave Russia and move to Finland or the U.S. But some descendants of American immigrants still live in Karelia. Paavo Alatalo’s great-grandchildren are raised with Finnish traditions and speak both Finnish and Russian.
“I can move to the USA tomorrow if I must,” said Mihkel Alatalo. “My father has dual citizenship without ever setting foot on American soil. As his son, I have the right to come and live in the U.S. But why would I want to?
“In the 1990s, when life in Russia was turbulent and often dangerous, I sat down with my pregnant Russian wife, Natasha, and made a list of all the pros and cons concerning our future life in Russia vs. moving abroad. The balance tipped to Russia then: despite all the poverty and crime that reigned here, despite the fact that so many of my classmates had died in Chechnya... we chose to stay.
“I know a lot of Finnish Americans that moved back in the 1990s. You might say I refused a better lot in life. But somehow I doubt it’s so much better. Often, a creative and charismatic individual moves abroad, hoping to find there the self-fulfillment and understanding he deserves. They attempt to start a new life, not speaking the language, unable to fit in, unwilling to understand a different culture... gradually they turn into your average, grumbling next-door neighbor, constantly unhappy with their new home country.”
Mihkel speaks from experience. His grandfather, Paavo Alatalo, moved back to the U.S. in the 1990s, when he was 80. But within three years he was back, bored with his safe and predictable life there. He dictated his memoirs to Mihkel, so that his part in the story of the Finnish Promised Land not be lost to history. RL
KARELIA TODAY: The republic within Russia has some 800,000 residents, over 70% of whom are Russian and just over 10% Karels, or of Finnish ancestry. The region is 50% forested and 25% covered by water, with over 60,000 lakes and 27,000 rivers.
* Anne Applebaum, in Gulag: A History, writes that Stalin “targeted foreign fellow travelers,
of whom the 25,000 American Finns were probably the most numerous.”
Additional Reading
Karelia: A Finnish-American Couple in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. Sylvia and Laurence Hokkanen, Anita Middleton, with preface by Professor Alexis Pogorelskin. (North Star Press, 1991)
They Took My Father. Finnish Americans in Stalin’s Russia. Mayme Sevander, Laurie Hertzel. (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
Red Exodus: Finnish-American Emigration to Russia. Mayme Sevander. (OSCAT, 1993)
A Grave in Karelia. Ernesti J. Komulainen. Ritva Koivu (trans.), (Braun-Brumfield, 1995)
Disillusionment On The Grandest of Scales: Finnish -Americans In The Soviet Union, 1917-1939. Emily Weidenhamer (The School of Russian and Asian Studies, 2005)
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