The search for a socialist El Dorado : Finnish immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s / Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Golubev, Alexey, author.

Takala, Irina, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Finnish Americans--Russia (Federation)--Karelia--History--20th century.

Finnish Americans.

Finns--Russia (Federation)--Karelia--History--20th century.

Finns.

Emigration and immigration.

History.

Karelia (Russia)--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.

Karelia (Russia).

United States--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.

United States.

Canada--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.

Canada.

Soviet Union--History--1925-1953.

Soviet Union.

Russia (Federation)--Karelia.

Physical Description:

xvii, 236 pages ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

East Lansing, Michigan : Michigan State University Press, [2014]

Summary:

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Finnish immigrants in North America and Russia

Two perspectives on Soviet immigration policy : Moscow and Petrozavodsk

To Karelia!

The failure of the immigration program

American and Canadian immigrants in Soviet economy

North American Finns in Soviet culture

Challenges of cross-cultural communication

American and Canadian Finns in the great terror

Wartime and after.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611861150

1611861152

OCLC:

854906198