The Search for a Socialist El Dorado

Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

Alexey Golubev, Irina Takala

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781611861150
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628950113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the "Karelian fever" among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Finnish Immigrants in North America and Russia
• Chapter 2. Two Perspectives on Soviet Immigration Policy: Moscow and Petrozavodsk
• Chapter 3. To Karelia!
• Chapter 4. The Failure of the Immigration Program
• Chapter 5. American and Canadian Immigrants in the Soviet Economy
• Chapter 6. North American Finns in Soviet Culture
• Chapter 7. Challenges of Cross-Cultural Communication
• Chapter 8. American and Canadian Finns in the Great Terror
• Chapter 9. Wartime and After
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index