At the Intersections of Nations, Diasporas, and Modernities: North American Finns in the Soviet Union in the 1930s

In the early 1930s, approximately seven thousand North American Finns, many of whom were born in Canada and the United States, left for Soviet Karelia, an autonomous republic in north-western Russia, bordering on Finland. Through the case study of the Karelian fever (a term by which North American Finnish migration to Soviet Karelia is now known), this work analyzes processes of identity construction at individual, regional, and national levels. My argument is that transnational migrant labour became a means by which diasporic, regional, and national leaders defined and redefined the cultural and political borders of their imagined communities. Whereas the movement of people was physically and psychologically transnational, national and diasporic imaginaries on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in a perpetual effort to include, and in other instances reject, the cultural, social, economic, and political memberships of these migrants in their communities. The study focuses on a specific community, but transcends geographical boundaries in a period of less than a decade and shows a vibrant, tumultuous historical process of identity formation, both structural and subjective.

In addition to analytical frameworks of nation and diaspora, my work looks at immigrant lives in dissimilar and competing versions of modernity, western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Finns on the move across the Atlantic in the 1920s and the 1930s were transnational agents, who by virtue of their mobility infused elements of western modernization into the Soviet society. As a result, these Finnish migrants who moved across land and sea borders in search of a social, economic, and political haven, became embroiled in the process of modern nation-state construction, but also found themselves within a larger, global contest of alternative modernities, that is between competing notions of what the new subject of the modern nation-state should look like. What follows is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the way immigrants’ ethnic identities were forged, and contested in different social contexts and varying levels of scale. In other words, what were the ways by which social spaces such as diasporas (locally), nations (regionally), and modernities (globally) were culturally produced.