Reflections on Karelian Fever 90 years later

When I first came to Duluth in 1987 the circles I moved in, the university and that part of the community tied to it, were abuzz with our Sister City relationship to Petrozavodsk, the capital of Soviet Karelia.  That consuming interest and social commitment (citizen diplomacy ending the Cold War) seem as passé now as the Cold War itself.  

A unique historical connection between our two cities had encouraged the Sister City connection, a bonding that remains even if the electric moment of discovery and Cold War diplomacy has passed.  North American Finns, the majority from the Upper Midwest, most probably from the Iron Range and northwest Wisconsin, between 1931 and 1934 with great enthusiasm sold their farms and property, giving up whatever profession they had pursued.  They traveled to New York city, many in caravans, where they booked passage to Sweden.  After a brief stop over there, they traveled to Leningrad, and from Leningrad made the overnight journey by train to Petrozavodsk.  The town forced a rude awakening.  They found no sidewalks, no running water.  One new arrival called it a “one horse town, if that.”  

In the good years, that is 1931-1936, the North American Finns got to work and prospered.  They built sidewalks and the plumbing system that carried water from Lake Onega to the city.  The tools used to build the system belonged to the Matson family whose members had recently used them to build the Empire State Building.  The logging operations introduced by Finnish Americans became a model for the whole Soviet Union.  

They introduced culture and the arts.  The Finnish bookstore flourished.  The American kids studied in a Finnish language school their parents built.  One of them won a fellowship to the Mathematics Department of Leningrad State University.  

The Finns were musical.  They brought their instruments with them and formed a symphony orchestra.  They introduced the Soviet Union to jazz and treated their neighbors to an exotic dish, apple pie.

“And then it all went bad,” as one survivor told me.  Starting in 1937, the newcomers from North America were accused of treason.  They were labeled spies for Finland and the United States.  They had taken the region away from the native Karelians and Russians (many of them new arrivals to Karelia themselves, seeking work on the big industrial projects that had only recently become the hallmark of the Soviet economy).  Many Finns paid with their lives.  In one night, Finnish members of the orchestra and jazz ensemble were arrested.  Most were quickly shot.  The Finnish language was outlawed, and all books in Finnish were ordered burned.  Finnish radio stations were closed, and you were spat upon in the street if you spoke Finnish.  The idealism of Karelian fever had turned toxic.

Is the story unique?  In the past 20 or 30 years, it seems less so.  Or at least bits and pieces of it repeat themselves as part of the massive migrations of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that is the last 100 years of human history.  

Starting with Karelian fever, why did the North American Finns immigrate to the far northwest corner of the Soviet Union?  What generated a “fever” among them?  And what relationship does Karelian fever of nine decades ago have to current migrations.  The answer in part lies in the recruitment.  The biggest inducement: in the Soviet Union one’s children would be educated for free all the way through university.  The recruiters, from the Finnish American community itself, made no attempt to convey the truth of conditions in pre-industrial Karelia in the 1930s.  On the Karelian side, the local administration sought North American Finns who would automatically maintain the ethnic character of the region.  Finns were recruited because they were Finns.  Finnish identity along with leftist politics, both in abundance in Finnish the immigrant communities of North America, encouraged people to seize the opportunity migration to the Soviet Union was proclaimed to offer.   

Migration, then and now, comes at a price.  A considerable amount of money changed hands over the recruitment to Karelia.  The Swedish shipping company paid the recruitment operation $11.50 for each adult who purchased a ticket and $5.75 for each child.  Nearly 10,000 went. Today smugglers and recruiters exact a heavy price from those who seek to reach the U.S. as well as from those who need to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.  Desperate people pay to escape economic and sexual exploitation or ethnic violence.  They seek to live in safety in hope of a better life for their children, if no longer the promise of a free education.   

In the Soviet Union the regime came to see the migrants as spies.  Some who came from Finland were.  Now the newcomers are accused of being Islamic terrorists, Isis infiltrators who would impose Sharia Law.  But spies and infiltrators, then as now, are hardly appropriate labels for the decent enthusiasts in Karelia or the desperate numbers from Africa or Latin America who make the journey.   

The final question of Karelian fever is one of commemoration.  How might the contributions of Finns in Karelia be honored?  How might the Finnish community in North America make peace with the phenomenon and honor its own who gave so much to another society, to another place in another time.  Can we at last honor their idealism and identity that is so much a part of our own region as well as Karelia’s.  Not likely in Russia where the current climate is nationalistic and xenophobic as well as touchy about whether Karelia’s loyalty lies with Finland or Russia.   

Or should we simply honor the human impulse to live well-or just better-the very impulse that underlies the creation of culture, society, the most basic enterprise of civilization that motivated human migration out of Africa so long ago and that, with the fervor of idealism, to Karelia a mere 90 years ago.

- Alexis Pogorelskin, University of Minnesota-Duluth, emerita  

Dr. Pogorelskin has published extensively on Karelian fever.  She is a member of the Karelian State Archive Commission that is publishing documents held in Karelian state archives regarding the migration of North American Finns.