"In the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the population of Soviet Karelia, especially of its border areas, which were directly affected by Soviet-Finnish conflicts, could easily be influenced by reports of “Finnish danger” and felt animosity toward “white Finnish bandits.” At the same time, the closer people lived to the border, which in the 1920s remained easy to cross illegally, the easier it was for them to compare lifestyles and policies on both Finnish and Soviet sides. This comparison often was not in favor of the latter, which, to a certain degree, negated the efforts of Soviet propaganda to convince people that Finnish neighbors were their main enemy. Quite the contrary, the Karelian population increasingly tended to blame their misfortunes on the new power that, as they believed, had brought only hunger and unemployment. In this context, anti-Soviet propaganda from Finland in the early 1920s had a much stronger effect than Bolshevik agitation. This was evidenced by thousands of Karelian refugees who saw the main danger for their families not in white Finnish incursions but in the Bolsheviks in power and who sought refuge in white Finland so much hated by Soviet leaders.
When the Civil War was over, the Soviet government set a goal to “distract attention of Karelians from Finland,” which had to be implemented, in particular, by émigré Finnish Communists. The government of Edvard Gylling sent Red Finns to establish Soviet power in ethnic Karelian regions, for it believed that they would find a common language with people who barely spoke Russian easier than Bolshevik activists. Most Red Finns, however, were former industrial workers full of revolutionary enthusiasm, but hardly aware of the peculiarities of rural life, which caused additional problems when they communicated with Karelian peasants. Finnish Communist émigrés readily condemned the “white bourgeois regime” of Finland but had no means to effectively fight hunger and unemployment, so their arguments deflated; moreover, because of very poor infrastructure on the Russian side, provisions to certain remote Karelian areas could be delivered in winter and spring months only from Finland, which strengthened the sympathies of Karelians for their neighbors.
Since Red Finns were the immediate authority that represented the Bolshevik power in Karelian areas, local inhabitants started to blame them as the people responsible for their misfortunes. Economic hardships among the Karelian population resulted in images of white Finnish aggressors, which they adopted from Soviet narratives, superimposed onto Soviet Finnish leaders. Soviet security organs kept a close eye on this tendency. In its report for May 1928, the GPU of Soviet Karelia informed the Soviet government that
there is widespread antagonistic sentiment among the Karelian population toward Finns, which is caused, on the one hand, by the introduction of school teaching in Finnish and, on the other hand, by a large number of Finns in the central administrative bodies of Karelia. This also leads to talks of a possible incorporation of Karelia into Finland: “Finns are at the head of our government, Finnish is taught in schools, and what if we will be annexed by Finland?” Kulaks and the well-to-do element of the Karelian population try to intensify this sentiment using agitation: “While we have Finns at power, we will live poor, because they issue wrong laws,” and in a number of cases they claimed: “We should create our own organization and expel all Finns from the government.”
However, anti-Finnish feelings among the local population were seldom addressed to the Karelian government. Instead, their grievances were aimed first at local officials and managers, who were always in the public eye. People were dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in management: “Why [do] Finns keep on occupying leading positions in the [state timber trust] Karelles, while Karelians are not allowed to them?” Such sentiments were sometimes generalized to the entire Finnish leadership of Soviet Karelia, and this was perceived by Soviet authorities as a real threat.
Some Karelian returnees who fled to Finland during the Civil War, for example, argued that in Finland they were treated much better than back home, where “[Red] Finns control everything and life is miserable,” and they called for the “expulsion of red scoundrels from Karelia.” Similar complaints were made by workers of factories in which the top management consisted of Finns: complaints included wage discrimination of Russians compared with Finns and Karelians as well as the reserve and self-restraint of Finns and their tendency to keep their distance from others, to “stick to their nationality.” Workers of the Kondopoga pulp and paper plant complained that “there are two classes in Karelia: exploiting Finns and exploited Russians and Karelians, [and] this should be eliminated before it is too late.”
This confrontation between Red Finns and the local population embodied, in fact, a much larger conflict between Soviet authorities and this population. Similar antagonism could be observed in places and organizations where Karelians, Russians, or Jews occupied authoritative positions. Inhabitants of northern Karelia were reported to say that “there was one revolution in Karelia, but we will have to make a second one, for too many Russian administrators came to us,” while workers of a lumber mill in Medvezhyegorsk complained of a “Jewish stranglehold” because “managerial positions were all occupied by Jews.”
Thus, by the late 1920s, the image of Finland and Finns formed in Karelian society was quite discrepant. Bourgeois Finland and its revolutionary proletariat, which “suffered under the yoke of white terror,” as newspapers wrote, were somewhere far away, while Red Finns were nearby, and among the local population they were perceived as “masters” (khoziaeva) dreaming of taking over their native land or sometimes even as a “fifth column”: “Now, under Soviet power, there are many Finns working as Soviet bureaucrats, but if a war breaks out they would betray, as [Russian] Germans betrayed in old times under Nicolas [II].” During the 1920s, this image of an internal alien clearly dominated images of hostile Finnish bourgeoisie and friendly Finnish proletariat imposed by Soviet propaganda.
To make things even more complicated, the Finnish influence on Karelian territories was still strong in the 1920s, and idealized memories of prerevolutionary life accentuated current economic hardships and provoked accusations: “If we had been annexed to Finland, we would have lived much better. If Finns hadn’t given away Karelia in 1920, we would have lived like barons.” At the end of the 1920s, the population of border regions listened almost exclusively to Finnish radio stations, which, as Soviet party documents worrisomely noted, would have a negative impact on “politically undeveloped listeners.”"
- Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala, The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Lansing: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 111-112.
