SUMMARY:

The article tells the story of a political formation that emerged on the territory of White Sea Karelia in early 1919 and was disbanded by the Red Army in summer 1920. The author interprets this Karelian quasi-state as a form of Civil War–era peasant resistance to the central authorities. Pressured on all sides by hostile political and military forces, threatened by looming hunger, Karelian peasants pursued a strategy of survival through self-reliance. The merger of eleven counties (volosti) of White Sea Karelia into a self-proclaimed polity was facilitated by a sense of ethnic and cultural unity, which, under the pressure of wartime circumstances, had forged a common national identity. Nascent Karelian statehood demonstrated loyalty to the Bolshevik government in Moscow and hostility to or mistrust of the white forces, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region, or the Finnish attempts to incorporate Karelia.