The Search for a Socialist El Dorado

In the 1930s, more than six thousand Finns emigrated from Canada and the United States to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of a socialist Finland. Educated and skilled, North American Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformation who would modernize the Soviet Karelian economy and enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants in the socialist colonization agenda and created a unique
culture based on the Finnish language and revolutionary aspirations of their generation. But just as this new culture began to influence the cultural transformation of Soviet Karelian society, the immigrant communities became the targets of witch-hunting campaigns of the late 1930s, were victimized by the same regime that had recruited them, and were finally destroyed in the course of the Second World War. ‘The Search for a Socialist El Dorado’ is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press coverage, and oral history interviews, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala present an in-depth exploration of the causes and consequences of the “Karelian fever” that swept through the North American Finnish community, and bring to light a heretofore neglected area of research in Soviet and immigration history.