Building That Bright Future: Finnish North Americans in Soviet Karelia

Please join us on Monday, September 19th at 10:00 am in ARTS 211, where visiting scholar Dr. Samira Saramo (Migration Institute of Finland) will present her research on Finnish North American migration to Soviet Karelia.

In the early 1930s, approximately 6,500 Finns from Canada and the United States moved to Soviet Karelia, on the border of Finland, to build a Finnish workers’ society. They were recruited by the Soviet leadership for their North American mechanical and lumber expertise, their familiarity with the socialist cause, and their Finnish language and ethnicity. By 1936, however, Finnish culture and language came under attack and ethnic Finns became the region’s primary targets in the Stalinist Great Terror.

Utilizing personal letters and memoirs written by Finnish North Americans in Soviet Karelia, this presentation offers a History of Everyday Life view of what it meant to live in a transitional period for both North American socialism and Soviet policy. Through the voices of men, women, children, and youth, we gain vivid descriptions of daily life but also insights into the multiple strategies these migrants used to make sense of their rapidly shifting positions in the Soviet hierarchy and the relationships that rooted them to multiple places and times.

This study is a microhistory of a long moment of change. The migrants’ narratives are analyzed in the contexts of the writers’ Finnish and North American backgrounds, Finnish-Karelian history and relations, and 1930s Soviet culture, including its ideals, realities, and contestations. Through these lenses, this study emerges as a transnational North American history, largely set in the hinterland of the Soviet Union.

Dr. Samira Saramo is a Transdisciplinary Historian whose research focuses on place, emotion, migrant settlerhood, community-building, and the everyday in both historical and current contexts. Most often, Samira’s work centers on the histories of Finnish migrants in Canada, the United States, and Soviet Karelia. She engages methodologically with the challenges and opportunities of life writing, qualitative research practices, mapping, and multi-sensory story telling. Dr. Saramo is currently a Kone Foundation Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland. She is a Docent of Cultural History at the University of Turku and holds a Ph.D. in History from York University. Samira is the founder and Chair of the international History of Finnish Migration (HoFM) Network and the Vice-Chair of the Finnish Oral History Network (FOHN). Her recent publications include “Capitalism as Death: Loss of Life and the Finnish Migrant Left in the Early Twentieth Century” (Journal of Social History 2021), “Archives of Place, Feeling, and Time: Immersive Historical Field Research in the (Finnish) U.S. Midwest” (Qualitative Research 2021), and Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans (University of Toronto Press 2022).

Website: www.samirasaramo.com

Twitter: @samira_saramo