The Specific Character of Professional Statuses of Finns in Russian America 1

Lack of scholarship on the Finnish population may stem from the fact that many documents connected with the Finns were written in Swedish and preserved in archives in Finland where access for Russian researchers has been rather difficult for several reasons (e.g., the "iron curtain" until the beginning of the 1990s, inadequate financing of scholarly research in modern Russia, difficulty with the Swedish and Finnish languages, and so on). [...]not much interest has been shown on the question of Finns in Russian america by american researchers.3 It is natural that, in Finland proper, the fate of its residents in the Russian colonies has been investigated in more detail, in several books and articles as well as online.4 as early as 1990, for instance, a large volume on the ethnographic collections of a. K. etolin, acquired by him in Russian america, was issued in Helsinki, with an extensive foreword by Pirjo varjola about Finns who lived in the Russian colonies (varjola 1990). in 1995, a well-illustrated book on the same topic was published in Jakobstad by Karl-Gustav Olin, which was reprinted in 2009 in Stockholm (Olin 1995).