The main aim of the collective research presented in this book is to examine contemporary folk narratives about migration processes in the northwestern borderland regions of Russia. The majority of the articles are based on fieldwork conducted by Finnish and Russian scholars from 2001 to 2003.
The papers focus mainly on the interpretation of personal experiences in the context of forced migration. The authors are more concerned with case studies on the personal, individual level of cultural processes than with constructing general theoretical models. Accordingly, personal stories hold a central position in the book, complemented by archival sources. Personal narratives help to reveal people’s subjective attitudes towards particular historical periods and reveal a different perspective on human experiences from that reflected in official documents.
Pekka Hakamies, the editor of the volume and leader of the research group, makes a clear distinction between the goals of history and those of folklore studies. The general emphasis of the collection is not to test the historical accuracy of the narratives, but to reveal relationships within the collected corpus of migration texts. The international group of scholars attempts to analyze some of the cultural consequences of the tragic political events of the 1940s from a new perspective.
Antti Laine’s paper is dedicated to the overview of reforms instituted by the Soviet government during the 1940-50s in the Russian part of Karelia. A portion of Karelia was occupied by the Soviets as a result of the Winter War (1939-1940) between the Soviet Union and Finland; during the Continuation War (1941-1944), Finland temporarily regained Karelian territories but lost these areas to the Soviets again. So the political situation in the region changed several times within a short period, and the simultaneously organized migrations and re-migrations of Karelians and Russians influenced the mood of people’s memories even half a century later. Although there have been several subsequent waves of immigration, these first movements had a decisive impact on the way people feel about Karelian history and their own role in local processes of social change. Laine’s historical overview is adequately detailed, involving the data from several Russian archives, and refers to several recent works on this area of research.
Marina Hakkarainen analyzes the way the members of migrant communities in former Finnish Karelian territories interpret their historical identity and local cultural landscape. Hakkarainen demonstrates that different waves of migrants talk about the past differently. Early newcomers moved to this area to escape starvation, war destruction, etc., in their former native villages. In her analysis of the migrants’ narratives Hakkarainen applies two cognitive models of the Russians (“deterioration of times” and “paradise lost”). The author attempts to demonstrate how the Russians adapt the “alien” (Finnish) cultural landscape that the migrants discovered when they moved to these areas during the 1940s, into their own concepts of local identity and history.
Ekaterina Melnikova and Oksana Filicheva deal with pre- and postmigrational experiences in the contemporary oral narratives of the Russians in former Finnish Karelian territories. According to Melnikova and Filicheva, Russians treat the territories they inhabited before moving to Karelia as their homeland and compare their later life on the Finnish land continuously with their earlier experiences. Melnikova uses the notion of a “premigrational past” to examine the processes of adaptation to the new social and cultural environment. Melnikova concludes that the Finns (as Russians call the Karelians, whom they in fact never met) have become one of the migrants’ identity markers, helping to construct their senses of self and otherness. Filicheva draws attention to the fact that many migrants also treat Karelia as a forced homeland. People cite kinship ties, graves of relatives, and a long period of habitation (the older immigrants oppose themselves to newer immigrants who moved to the area in the 1990s) to prove their right to the land.
Pekka Hakamies concentrates on the narratives that indicate how immigrants experience former Karelian territories, how they have mentally adapted the old Finnish cultural environment according to Russian or Soviet traditions and understandings. New inhabitants arrived in Finnish settlements and houses that were abandoned but still in good order at the end of World War II. Karelian-Finnish material culture was very different from Soviet Russian village life, and these new places made a great impression on the Russians. Hakkamies demonstrates that even sixty years later, they feel a complex connection between these territories and their former Finnish inhabitants.
In her paper Irina Razumova analyses contemporary local identity as it appears in migratory narratives in northwest Russia. Razumova’s research reveals the connection between migratory strategies and ethnic, local, and family identity. The disintegration of the totalitarian state has resulted in a number of new factors that influence migration and the sense of place in post-Soviet Russia, especially in borderland territories. Decisions concerning the movement between different territories (south-north, Russia-West) are nowadays made more on personal (individual, family) levels and are less dependent on public political orientations.
Alla Sokolova’s article is dedicated to an analysis of the experiences of local identity narrated by the Ukrainians who have recently moved to former Jewish settlements in Podolia (a region in the Ukraine) after the mass emigration of the Jewish population to Israel, the USA, and Germany. Although this paper is marginal to the topic of the collection, it deals with similar feelings of strangeness that new inhabitants experience after moving into a culturally unfamiliar material environment.
The aim of the book—to analyse some patterns in migratory narratives—is adequately achieved. People moving to new territories attempt to adapt themselves mentally to the new environment despite their knowledge of the controversial history of the area. The narratives help to build up identity and thereby to establish a right to habitation. This collection represents a balanced, collective approach on the topic, which for many people is still a delicate, complicated, and painful issue.
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[Review length: 967 words • Review posted on September 5, 2006]