CHAPTER NINE

GREATER FINLAND AND CULTURAL HERITAGE FINNISH SCHOLARS IN EASTERN , 1941–44

Tenho Pimiä*

Our obvious and urgent obligation is to save for scholarship everything that is about to vanish. Th at could be the motto of the present. It would indeed be diffi cult to describe a scholarly task more worthy of generous support from academic institutions than this one. Only the future gen- eration will enjoy all the opportunities to work on clarifying the material we have compiled. But only the present generation has been assigned the work of preserving the ingredients; the ingredients without which eth- nology cannot attain its goal.1

Th e above statement was written in 1926 by Professor E.N. Setälä, Finnish linguist and infl uential social fi gure. As “national scholarship,” the task of ethnography, the study of , folk poetry and history was to save from extinction the still available ancient cultural heritage that was understood to be Finnish. Th e view was that this information was fi rst and foremost to be found in the nooks of Eastern Karelia—in villages where the Karelian folk and rune singers had pre- served the age-old traditions uncorrupted by modernization and “foreign infl uences.” Already in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, Elias Lönnrot had compiled Finland’s , the , mainly using Karelian folk poetry, and, according to the strong national romantic mode of thought, the living roots of Finland’s people were most readily discernible expressly in the east.2 Aft er the border separating independent Finland from Soviet Russia was ratifi ed in Tartu in 1920, Eastern Karelia closed to Finnish research- ers for over two decades. Finnish national activists participated in

* Translated from the Finnish by Hannu Tervaharju 1 E.N. Setälä, “Kansatiede, sen ala ja tehtävä,” in A. Kannisto et al., eds., Suomen suku, Vol. 1 (Helsinki, 1926), pp. 21–2. 2 On Finnish and its conceptions of the Finnish past in English, see Derek Fewster, Visions of Past Glory: Nationalism and the Construction of Early Finnish History (Helsinki, 2006). 396 tenho pimiä

1918–22 in voluntary expeditions fi ghting against the Red Army in Eastern Karelia and the Ingria region. Th e expeditions failed in their objectives to separate Eastern Karelia and Ingria from Soviet Russia and to incite a widespread uprising in the area against the new Bolshevik regime. Many of these activists were students, scholars, mili- tary offi cers, physicians and cultural fi gures who worked toward vari- ous nationalist objectives throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them cherished the notion of Greater Finland that would include at least Eastern Karelia but possibly also Ingria and other eastern regions.3 All in all, during the time between the world wars Eastern Karelia was a cherished obsession of university people who saw it as their calling to preserve the national cultural heritage. Th e leading ideologues were mainly humanists whose explicit task was nation-building and defi n- ing the notion of “Finnishness” over and against pressure from both west and east, that is, from both Sweden and Russia.4 News leaking from behind the closed border provided Finnish scholars, already horrifi ed at the threat of eastern dominance, with indisputable evidence of the downfall of Karelian culture in the Soviet Karelia of the 1930s. Several Russifi cation and collectivization projects as well as campaigns of terror directed against ethnic minorities changed the region’s population structure dramatically.5 Finnish schol- ars could do nothing but helplessly witness how Stalin’s reign quickly disrupted the Karelian population’s language use and the Orthodox worship so important to them. Against this backdrop, the beginning of the Continuation War in 1941 and the rapid progress of Finnish troops into Eastern Karelia across the border of 1920–39 seemed to open up unprecedented oppor- tunities for ethnological research. One of the largest projects directed at Finnic cultural heritage was realized in the regions Finland occupied in the east between 1941–44. Th e occupation gave scholars time to gather a large ethnological collection of artifacts from cemeteries, prayer houses and homes abandoned because of the war. Within those

3 Toivo Nygård, Suur-Suomi vai lähiheimolaisten auttaminen: Aatteellinen heimotyö itsenäisessä Suomessa (Helsinki, 1978), passim. 4 Next to humanities, natural sciences, foremost geography, geology and biology, also took part in defi ning “natural borders” for Greater Finland, see Mari Vares, “Luonnollinen Suomi: Käsityksiä Suomen ‘sijainnista ja suuruudesta’ 1917–44,” Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 108 (2010): 1, pp. 47–59. 5 Antti Laine, Suur-Suomen kahdet kasvot: Itä-Karjalan siviiliväestön asema suoma- laisessa miehityshallinnossa 1941–1944 (Helsinki, 1982), pp. 92–6.