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118 POLYAKOVA Tamara / ПОЛЯКОВА Тамара University Of Альманах североевропейских и балтийских исследований / Nordic and Baltic Studies Review. 2016. Issue 1 POLYAKOVA Tamara / ПОЛЯКОВА Тамара University of Wisconsin-Madison, History Department / Университет Висконсин-Мэдисон, Исторический факультет USA, Madison / США, Мэдисон [email protected] THE MEMOIRIST AND THE EDITOR: WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR IN KARELIA МЕМУАРИСТ И РЕДАКТОР: НАПИСАНИЕ ИСТОРИИ ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ В КАРЕЛИИ Аннотация: В статье через анализ мемуаров Фёдора Акуловича Лесонена, служившего в годы Гражданской войны в Карельском легионе, и через изменения, внесенные в текст мемуаров редактором Полиной Павловной Нежельской при подготовке рукописи к печати, исследуется, каким образом отображалась в советской историографии роль этого национального воинского подразделения в Гражданской войне в Карелии, что при этом умалчивалось и почему. Kewords / Ключевые слова: Memory, Soviet historiography, Russian Civil War, Karelian Detachment, Karelian Legion, Karelian Battalion, Karelian Regiment, Vienan Karjala, Venehjärvi, Kem’ / Память, советская историография, Гражданская война в России, Карельский отряд, Карельский Легион, Карельский батальон, Карельский полк, Беломорская Карелия, Суднозеро, Кемь. Russian Civil War in borderline Olonets and Arkhangelsk gubernii was a perplexing entanglement of domestic and international actors: the familiar standoff of Reds and Whites was complicated by the involvement of pro-Bolshevik Finnish immigrants and an anti- Bolshevik Finnish volunteer force, as well as British, French, American, Italian, and Serbian troops, which were deployed in Russia as part of Allied intervention. The fate of the town of Kem, a White Sea port on the Murmansk Railroad, can serve as an illustration of the swift transfer of power from one administration to another. As early as the summer of 1917, Kem railway workers established a soviet, which completely replaced the city’s zemstvo government in March of the following year.1 Soon afterward, anti-Bolshevik Finnish volunteer troops (dubbed belofinny — White Finns — in Soviet historiography) crossed the Russo-Finnish border and moved eastward toward Kem in an attempt to annex territory they considered to rightfully belong to Finland. Kem Bolsheviks were able to successfully repel this attack, but lacked the manpower and weapons needed to drive Finns back across the border, and the latter remained stationed in frontier villages.2 Several months 1 Nikolai A. Korablev et al. (eds), Istoriia Karelii s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Petrozavodsk: Periodika, 2001), 346, 366. 2 Ibid., 385. 118 Альманах североевропейских и балтийских исследований / Nordic and Baltic Studies Review. 2016. Issue 1 later, in July 1918, Allied troops pushing south from Murmansk arrived in Kem. They shot the leaders of the Kem soviet and occupied the town.3 While many residents of Kem were ethnically Russian, the borderland territories of Olonets and Arkhangelsk gubernii were populated by Karelians, members of the Finno-Ugric ethnic group, who spoke a language closely related to Finnish. Karelians employed by the Murmansk Railroad responded to political uncertainty and frequent transfers of power by establishing the so-called Karelian Detachment, and with the aid of British command and supplies undertook a successful campaign to expel Finnish troops from Russian territory. However, the lifespan of this ethnic military unit was short: when a year later Allies attempted to mobilize Karelian troops for battle against the Bolsheviks, they refused and deserted, returning to their villages.4 The Civil War and foreign intervention in the Russian Northwest has received much attention from Soviet historians, who have published multiple monographs on the topic, as well as collections of relevant documents, and memoirs by Civil War participants.5 The National Archive of the Republic of Karelia preserves materials gathered by local historians for one such memoir collection, published in 1963.6 These materials include memoirs by Fedor Lesonen, a soldier of the Karelian Detachment. The fifteen-page typed transcript of Lesonen’s memoir is especially interesting because it includes corrections local historian Polina Nezhelskaia made in order to prepare it for publication. In this paper, I will analyze the original text of Lesonen’s memoir together with Nezhelskaia’s stylistic and political interventions, exploring the way in which the Karelian Detachment was incorporated into the official Soviet historical narrative. 3 Ibid., 389. 4 Perhaps as a reflection of this military unit’s tentative status, it has variously been called “Karelian Battalion,” “Karelian Detachment,” “Karelian Regiment,” and “Karelian Legion.” According to Lesonen, it was titled “Karelian Detachment” (karel’skii otriad) until the spring of 1919, when it was renamed “Karelian Battalion.” In this paper, I therefore use the former term as the unit’s “original” title. For reasons discussed below, little historical research has been published on the Karelian Detachment. See Nick Baron, The King of Karelia: Colonel P. J. Woods and the British Intervention in North Russia 1918—1919 (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2007); Elena Iu. Dubrovskaia, “Karel’skii batal’on i ego vremia: iz istorii natsional’nykh vooruzhennykh formirovanii na Severe Rossii v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny i inostrannoi interventsii,” in Istoriia Narodov Rossii. Materialy 15 Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii (Moscow: RUDN, 2011), 161—7. 5 For some examples, see Efim S. Gardin, Razgrom belofinskoi avantiury (1921—1922 gg.) (Petrozavodsk: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Karelo-Finskoi SSR, 1947); Iakov A. Balagurov and Viktor I. Mashezerskii (eds), Kareliia v period grazhdanskoi voiny i interventsii, 1918—1920. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Petrozavodsk: Karel’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1964); Mikhail I. Shumilov, Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia na severe Rossii (Petrozavodsk: Kareliia, 1973). 6 Viktor I. Mashezerskii (ed.), Za sovetskuiu Kareliiu, 1918—1920. Vospominaniia o grazhdanskoi voine (Petrozavodsk: Karel’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1963). 119 Альманах североевропейских и балтийских исследований / Nordic and Baltic Studies Review. 2016. Issue 1 *** In order to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Russian Civil War, Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Karelian branch planned to collect and publish memoirs of participants and eyewitnesses of the conflict in the Soviet Northwest. The Institute sent out calls for contributions to the collection to 125 respondents, and had by late 1958 collected a total of 79 memoirs.7 Although the publication was originally planned for 1960, it did not come out until 1963 due to delays in collecting and editing the memoirs.8 Fedor Lesonen was one of these memoirists. He was born in 1900 in Sudnozero (known as Venehjärvi in Karelian), a small village located about thirty kilometers from the Finnish- Russian border. The son of a poor peasant, Lesonen began working at the age of nine, first employed as a farm hand (batrak) in his native village, then as a lumberjack in Finland. Between 1915 and 1917 he participated in the construction of the Murmansk Railroad. By the time his memoirs were recorded in 1958, he had spent most of his life working as a logging foreman.9 Fedor Lesonen as a young man and in later years. Dates unknown. Source: Archive of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, R-O 1279. Along with employees of the Institute of History, a representative from the Karelian branch of the Institute of Party History was invited to participate in the project and charged with preparing Lesonen’s memoir for publication.10 This representative was Polina 7 Archive of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences (KarNTs RAN), fund (fond) 1, inventory (opis’) 4, file (delo) 429, folio (list) 5. 8 KarNTs RAN, f. 1, inv. 4, file 401, fol. 8—9; f. 1, inv. 44, file 10, fol. 15. 9 National Archive of the Republic of Karelia (NA RK), f. R-3716 (Jaakko Rugojev's personal collection), inv. 1, file 853, fol. 16. 10 KarNTs RAN, f. 1, inv. 4, file 413, fol. 12. 120 Альманах североевропейских и балтийских исследований / Nordic and Baltic Studies Review. 2016. Issue 1 Nezhelskaia, who was, like Lesonen, an ethnic Karelian from a poor peasant family.11 Born Pelageia Potapova in 1919, between 1921 and 1923 she lived in Finland with her parents.12 After they died of an illness in 1928, she was placed in an orphanage. Having graduated from Petrozavodsk Teachers’ College in 1938, she returned to north Karelia and worked in a small village school for a year, after which she began her successful Komsomol career: in 1944, the future General Secretary of the Communist Party Iurii Andropov, then the head of the Karelian Komsomol, praised her initiative and skill in organizing a national skiing competition in 1940, and partisan detachments deployed to the frontline a year later.13 In December 1939, she went on her second trip to Finland, this time in fulfillment of a “special task from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.”14 After the war she attended the Karelo-Finnish State University (later Petrozavodsk State University), where she studied history and wrote her thesis on the Winter War. She then attended graduate school in Moscow, and in 1954 successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “Finnish Right-wing Social Democrats in Service of Finnish Reactionary Forces and American Imperialism (1944—52).”15 After graduation, she held, among
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