Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the familiar story of emigration was one of a lone individual or a family leaving a homeland that was without promise and searching for renewed prospects in life, boarding a ship to take them to a virgin land
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the familiar story of emigration was one of a lone individual or a family leaving a homeland that was without promise and searching for renewed prospects in life, boarding a ship to take them to a virgin land to pursue a dream. For the overwhelming number of these people, that virgin land was in the Americas, and the dream that they were pursuing has been termed “the American dream,” one still being chased by millions today. Yet for a brief time in the early 1930s, thousands of Finnish immigrants in the United States and Canada turned that story on its head, leaving the new world for the old to live the dream of socialism. Recruited to help build East Karelia—the Finnish land of national legend—into a bastion of socialist industry, they were welcomed by the Soviet government, allowed to set up schools and factories, and even given special treatment. Beneath the surface, the situation was less ideal: over half of the would-be Soviets left in short order due to harsh conditions, while the more open atmosphere fostered in the first half of the decade gave way to paranoia and government-imposed terror.
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