These two books are devoted to one and the same subject – Russian-Finnish relations – but they differ a lot in their method, attitude and scope. The first one, appropriately named Border and People, is a brilliant example of the genre of oral history, which is little known in Eastern Europe. It is the first attempt to record the recollections of Soviet settlers in Karelia and the Karelian isthmus after the territories’ annexation in March 1940 and again in the autumn of 1944 and thereafter. The final incorporation of these territories was confirmed by the Paris peace treaty of 1947. In spite of the Soviet government decree of May 28, 1940, few people were anxious to resettle former Finnish Karelia. The authorities then used force to bring some 188,000 people to the north by the spring of 1941 when a radical change of the infrastructure was carried out – small private farms were destroyed and large kolkhozes were set up. The second migration lasting from 1944 till the early 1950s was more successful because the war brought about the massive destruction of property in the USSR, and people were much more prepared to move and change their lives. The newly acquired territory went through an identity replacement as well, since all Soviet toponyms were substituted for Finnish ones. In many aspects the acquisition of Karelia by the Soviet empire is similar or identical with the process that was carried out in East Prussia (now the Kaliningrad region). But while Soviet settlers encountered former inhabitants of East Prussia, all of the Fins had left Karelia well in advance of the Russians moving in. Communist propaganda, which indoctrinated the settlers, claimed that the territory ostensibly belonged to ancient Novgorod and was later occupied by Finland. They were constantly warned to be “on their guard” against Finnish sabotage and revenge killings. Of course, nothing of this sort happened. On the contrary, former owners who surreptitiously crossed the border and visited their former houses, showed hoards of hidden products and utensils to the new occupants, and in some cases hanged themselves in the barns during the night due to acute grief.
While Soviet-Finnish relations before and during the so-called Winter war of 1939-1940 are well studied on both sides of the border, the postwar reclamation of the newly acquired lands has received scarce attention. In recent years it has become the focus of study of an international project titled The Conditions for Constructing New Russia: Interactions of Tradition and Europeanness in the Development of 20th Century Russia, financed by the Finnish Academy.Three expeditions have been carried out between 2001 and 2003 by a small joint group of the European University in St. Petersburg (Russia) and the University of Joensuu (Finland) – questioning the inhabitants and registering their responses. The expeditions focused on two places in the Karelian isthmus (the village of Mel’nikovo) and the Republic of Karelia (the town of Landenpoh’ja), although nearby settlements were also visited. 95 informants provided 84 interviews. Most of them – 51 persons – were born in the 1920s, while 29 persons were born in the 1930s. Some of their children born in the “new lands” were consulted as well. The large majority of the interviewees were under twenty years old when they arrived with their parents. Of their total number 73 are women and 22 men, which reflects the general trend in Russia of women living much longer than men.
The stated aim of the interviewing campaign is the study of the extent to which the Soviet settlers adapted to the new cultural landscape and social environment, the preservation of oral tradition from the period before resettlement and the creation of a new one, the setting of borders around their own community and self-identification with the former autochthonous inhabitants of the territory, and the attitude towards the pre-war past of the region and its previous inhabitants. It must be acknowledged that the expeditions managed to achieve their aim. When interviewers started their work, they did not avail themselves of a set of formulated questions but were anxious to discover the topics that interested the inhabitants and which dealt with the formation, change and use of local tradition. While oral historians are suspicious of stereotypical answers, the members of the expedition expected and relied on repetition and the common places (topoi) of the discourse which distinguishes any society and sets it apart from all others. The interviews collected are not published in full, but as excerpts which are arranged according to their dominant topics. Almost all features of the speech of interviewers and interviewees have been preserved. Syntax and orthography are not corrected, even in cases when they are clearly mistaken. Responses tend to be both stereotypical and diverse. Each chapter begins with a foreword that introduces the theme and provides a brief description of its main features. A shortcoming of this approach is that the narratives of the informants are often torn from the context of the whole talk. The whole collection of interviews covers the following chapters: History of the Migration; Land Reclamation; Interrelations of the Settlers; Tales about the Finns; Religiosity; Notions of the Settlers about Their Native Land. The book ends with four interviews provided by two male local historians and two ordinary women who lived in Karelia for the last half century and were actively involved in local life.
Of special interest is the attitude of Soviet Karelians to religion, which was neither officially banned during the communist rule nor tolerated. In the 1980s, during the period of perestroika, many sects and cults flooded in and attracted followers by distributing clothing and food. When the Russian Orthodox Church finally reasserted itself in the region in the early 1990s, many returned to what one un-ecumenical priest called “the Russian God” and churches were rebuilt. But the worldview of most people, especially women, remains a curious mixture of age-old pagan superstitions, poorly understood traditional Christian beliefs, and modern occultist notions inculcated by TV broadcasts or gossip.
The second book, titled Many-sided Finland: The Image of Finland and Finns in Russia, reflects an attempt to reconsider the historical fortunes of Russia through the prism of relations with its northern neighbor. A project was launched by the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2001, which was implemented in several seminars. In 2004 it continued within the framework of the Dialogue Between Cultures and Civilizations project.
The prevailing images of Finland in Russia depended on the particular period of history, often abounding in military conflicts, and the prevailing state ideology of the time. Geographically, Russia and Finland were and are incompatible entities. While Finns feared the unpredictable and often aggressive Russians, Russians in the Middle Ages considered the withdrawn and silent Finns to be inscrutable and unfriendly people prone to witchcraft. The nineteenth-century Russian stereotype of Finland was based on a combination of ideas about its heroic romantic past and poor present. With the exception of the second article by G. M. Kovalenko, most articles in this miscellany focus on the last two centuries – from the assimilation of Finland into tsarist Russia (1809) until the end of the twentieth century. They are arranged chronologically and deal not only with history and politics, but with literature and arts as well. Discussed are the literary links between Russia and Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (E. G. Karhu); the reflection of Finland in Russian arts and literature between 1890 and 1930 (E. G. Soini), or in Russian historiography (I. M. Solomesht); the stereotypes of Finland and Finns in popular Russian ethnographic essays of the second half of the nineteenth century (M. V. Leskinen); Finland as viewed by conservatives and liberals (M. A. Vituhnovskaia); by Russian army men involved in WW1 (E. Yu. Dobrovskaia), and in WW2 (E. S. Seniavskaia, D. D. Frolov); and the changing Soviet press image of Finland during the Krushchev regime (A. I. Rupasov and A. N. Chistikov). O. P. Iliukha offers an intriguing microhistorical analysis of the Karelian border town Kostomuksha, where a joint Russian-Finnish washery plant operated in the 1970s and 1980s. Mixing with Finns and admiring the achievements of Western civilization brought about the wide deconstruction of communist stereotypes and propaganda lies. Hence local people became psychologically more adapted to the radically new conditions of passage to capitalist economic and social conditions in the 1990s. The miscellany concludes with a study of similarities and differences between the two countries as viewed by Finnish and Russian students at the University of Helsinki (A. Mustaioki and E. Yu. Protasova). The tone of the articles tends to be objective with the exception of those that are devoted to war relations and touch a very sensitive Russian nerve.
This intends to make clear the richness of material and breadth of issues examined in this miscellany. However, it lacks a study of Russian-Finnish church relations, which remain a sizeable link between the two countries. It is impossible to discuss in detail all the articles in this miscellany. Instead, I will focus on one of them which is in my view the most important and fascinating, as it stands out both in scope and approach. The title of A. N. Tsamutali’s The Image of Finland in Russia: The Influence of Environment and Time on Its Formation (Pp. 12-34) is too broad because the article actually deals only with the period lasting between the 1890s and the 1930s. It examines the attitude of Finland by the Russian revolutionaries M. Bakunin, P. Kropotkin, the Russian state functionaries N. Bunge, S. Vitte, I. Tolstoy, as well as other representatives of Russian liberalism, arts and science. The revolutionaries considered Finland to be a base for subversive actions and a land of asylum, but they were mistaken in their beliefs that Finnish nationalism could complement and assist their often anarchist socialism. Equally naive were the expectations of anti-Bolshevik leaders that the Finnish army would join their forces in the fight against communism. One drawback of this article is that it relies only on printed sources and not on archival materials which must be abundant.
Both books, albeit inherently different, offer fresh insights into the attitudes of Russians to its smaller, enigmatic but much cleaner and richer neighbor. No doubt they will be complemented by Finnish volumes on the same topic. These two books should be of great interest to both specialists and non-specialists who are interested in integrating the history of Russia and Finland with the traditional European historical narrative by re-imagining the role that big and small nations played in the creation, definition and dissipation of empires.