Summary:

Anna Laakkonen, The Image of the Enemy in Soviet Karelia’s Finnish Newspaper During the 1920s

Thousands of socialist Finns moved to Soviet Karelia after the Finnish Civil war of 1918. These Red refugees aimed to build a socialist society in what was deemed the heartland of their ancestors on the Soviet side of the Finnish-Soviet border. This state of affairs was resolved in accordance with Bolshevik national policy by the Reds and the Soviet authorities in 1920 with the formation of a new administrative region, the Karelian Labour Commune. The goal was to promote a socialist worldview among the Finnish-speaking population, both Finnish and Karelian, mainly through the incorporation of a notion of Lenin’s, namely the Soviet press.

The Reds began publishing a Finnish newspaper in 1920. Initially, it was called Karjalan Kommuuni (Karelian Commune), but in 1923 it was renamed Punainen Karjala (Red Karelia). From the very beginning, the newspaper’s rhetoric promoted a socialist worldview through an image of the enemy that underscored the Whites as evil. The main arguments against the Whites in editorials written during 1920–1929 were all related to either the Finnish Civil War of 1918 or the Karelian uprising on the Finnish-Soviet border in 1921–1922. The Whites were depicted as murderers in both instances, while the Reds and the Karelians were portrayed as innocent victims who had sacrificed themselves for their ideology or their country. For these minor nationalities, the Bolsheviks were acclaimed as saviours. As Soviet Karelia was purported to be the gate to the West, the Reds were described as Eastern gatekeepers who defended socialist society from aggressive Western attacks, all the while dutifully promoting Karelian economy and development.

There were both political and national motives for identity building of this kind. In the case of the former, the enemy image was used to promote a specifically Bolshevik identity among readers. In the case of the latter, the image was touched with appeals to common roots and history as premises for writing off the Finnish and Karelian tribes as one united nation. Interestingly, most of these nationalistic assertions were the same as those employed in the rhetoric of the Whites in Finland during the 1920s and 1930s for justification of their desire to annex Karelia to Finland! In fact, it seems that the Whites were building the same border as the Reds, using the same arguments, but from another point of view located on the other side of the border.