The search for a socialist El Dorado : Finnish immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

Resource Information

The work The search for a socialist El Dorado : Finnish immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The search for a socialist El Dorado : Finnish immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

Title remainder

Finnish immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

Statement of responsibility

Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala

Creator

• Golubev, Alexey

Contributor

• Takala, Irina

Author

• Golubev, Alexey
• Takala, Irina

Subject

• Karelia (Russia) -- Emigration and immigration | History -- 20th century
• Soviet Union -- History -- 1925-1953
• United States -- Emigration and immigration | History -- 20th century
• Canada -- Emigration and immigration | History -- 20th century
• Finnish Americans -- Russia (Federation) | Karelia -- History -- 20th century
• Finns -- Russia (Federation) | Karelia -- History -- 20th century

Language

eng

Summary

In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the 2Karelian fever3 among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror. --Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

305.894/54104715

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

DK511.K18

LC item number

G65 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography