Making “Former” the Former Finnish Karelia

This article explores the Sovietization of Finnish Karelia, i.e. Ladoga Karelia and the Karelian Isthmus ceded by Finland to the USSR in 1940 and 1944, as a multifaceted and contradictory process that produced feelings of national loss and erasure which Finnish visitors experience when they travel to the region today. Ironically, the Sovietization process in this region also had the seemingly opposite effect of creating and preserving a general impression of Karelia as a foreign territory in the minds of the Soviet citizens who moved there and whose descendants still inhabit the region. These seemingly contradictory outcomes of the Sovietization of Karelia can be traced to the political climate of the post-war era in the region, when nationalization discourse to some extent promoted a union between Karelians and Finns. The ceded area around the Ladoga Lake became part of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic and maintained its Finnish place names despite the fact that the migrants who resettled the Ladoga Lake region after the war spoke neither Finnish nor Karelian and knew nothing about the territory’s history. Ladoga Karelia preserved what appeared to be an exotic character to its new residents from throughout the USSR. Relying on the published and archival materials from the 1940s and 1950s, the author focuses on the production of a new socio-territorial identity of this space and addresses the historical legacy of the region, its appropriation in the official Soviet narrative, and aspects of Soviet migration there. By analysing the oral history of the local inhabitants, the keystones of local memory in the region are discerned.