Soviet Identity Politics and Local Identity
in a Closed Border Town, 1944–1991
Alexander Izotov
Introduction
This study will attempt to understand how local identity was constructed in theexceptional historical context of the closed Soviet border town Sortavala and to describe
processes of place-making under the socio-economic conditions of the Soviet period. It
will illustrate shifts in dominant Soviet discourses at various historical stages throughnarratives encountered in the local media and official documents. These narratives covera wide spectrum of social life in Sortavala: political and ideological, social and economic, cultural and religious. Particular emphasis will be put on the construction of a local
spatial identity in Soviet times.
Sortavala today is one of the administrative centres of the Republic of Karelia in
Northwest Russia. It is located in approximately 60 km from the Finnish-Russian borderin the North Ladoga region. Due to its geopolitical position the region has a dramatichistory. In course of history it was a part of Swedish and Russian empires, and the Grand
Duchy of Finland. As part of the Finnish independent state in the 1920s and 1930s thetown experienced dynamic development. After the WWII the territory was annexed tothe USSR and was settled by migrant community from different parts of the former
Soviet Union. Finnish population moved totally to Finland. In the Soviet era the town
was closed for both, internal and external visitors, and knowledge about neighbouring
Finland and the Finnish everyday culture was limited. The main question for this study
is what the border meant for the local community during the Soviet period (1944–1991).
The empirical material for the analysis of the local identity construction is based on thelocal newspaper of Sortavala (Krasnoe Znamia) and on archive documents from The
National Archive of Karelian Republic (NA RK f. R-2203, R-1051, R-757 and the otherFunds).
The first section will discuss and analyse the political and ideological mechanismsof identity construction. Its starting point will be a study of the institutional agents andframeworks of identity construction with reference to structuration theory i.e. the roleof social structures, actors and institutions in processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation (Giddens 1984). According to Allan Pred, social structures saturated with1

power produce place (Pred 1984). The focus will here be on the role of political institutions. This study also takes into account spatial theory in human geography, whichemphasises links between place and people and the ways in which people create senseof place through production of images, signs and meanings. Essentialist interpretations(Tuan 1977, Cresswell 2009) emphasise emotional ties of human beings with territory.
Anti-essentialist views postulate that a sense of place is the result of socio-economic
mechanisms (Harvey 2000: 194). However, these two approaches do not have to be
mutually exclusive. Obviously, they are closely interrelated in the study of specific contexts like post-WWII Sortavala. Essentialist vision of the significant role of a particularplace for people’s sense of place is especially important when we analyse the North
Ladoga Karelia’s migrant community of the 1940s and 1950s. Emotionally, this community was not rooted in the territory, and the contradictory and complicated processof the newcomers developing their place perceptions will be analysed in detail later inthis study. This process demonstrates how people with diverse cultural identities createcommon senses of place and spatial identity. Place-making is a process in which people
are involved. They constitute place, and this is a significant element in the identity formation (Massey 1994; Harvey 1996). At the same time, the role of social and economic
factors enhances understanding of how the Soviet socio-economic system impacted local identity formation. Inspired by David Harvey’s views on place as a product of socialand economic mechanisms (Harvey 1993), territoriality and locality in Soviet Sortavala
will be investigated in the context of political and economic conditions. This will befollowed by an examination of various discursive fields of identity formation. After theannexation of the North Ladoga territory by the Soviet Union in 1944, the area wassettled with culturally and ethnically diverse migrants, mainly from the Belorussian
SSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Vologodskaia Oblast. Soviet authorities created stateand socio-economic institutions broadly in line with common practices and the legal
framework of the Union. A key task for the political elite was then to socialise thispopulation in the sense of transmitting core Soviet values. The studied sources—botharchive documents and newspaper articles—illustrate ways and methods of this projectand reveal the political and ideological instruments at work in shaping local identity. It
is argued here that these took a peculiar character in the case of Sortavala whose status
as a closed border zone provided a local context clearly distinct from that of other regions. The studied documents and media narratives highlight the role of Soviet border
symbolism in this process.
Soviet identity concepts changed over time. Thus, Theodore Hopf, in his periodisation of Soviet history, has advanced that the years from 1947 to 1953 were marked
by a strong us-versus-them dichotomy (Hopf 2002: 3) and that the predominant official
discourse about what it meant to be a New Soviet Man (NSM) was not allowed to bequestioned during that period. Then, ‘Stalin’s death buried the NSM’ and inaugurated
the Thaw period during which this dichotomy was significantly weakened in favour ofa more neutral stance or was simply becoming irrelevant (Hopf 2002: 11–12).
Stalinist discourse had been characterised by ideological dogmatism, orthodoxy
and intolerance towards difference. The Thaw period brought the institutionalisationof a new discourse of difference which established new boundaries for what was now

2to be permissible or not. The changes brought about by the political liberalisation under Khrushchev had their limits and were often contradictory. The empirical material
provides ample illustration of how these attempts to overcome shortcomings in thedevelopment of socialism changed communist education and identification. In Karelia
the year 1956 represents a major turning point as the region’s administrative statuschanged from that of a Soviet republic to an autonomous republic within the Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (Vihavainen 1998: 38).

The institutionalisation of post-Stalinist discourses also meant new institutional
agents for promoting them. Indeed, one of Khrushchev’s favourite ideas was to gradually replace institutions of the state with public and voluntary structures. In the late
1950s and early 1960s, the official discourse thus abounds with people’s voluntary
patrols, communist labour brigades, comrades’ courts and so on (Kharkhordin 1999:285). Later on, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became, for example, customary for newspaper readers to send letters to the editors, which offer excellent markers for the boundaries of difference in everyday discussions and in mass publications. Local newspapers
thus represented a sense of place, a space where the authors of these letters expressed
their feelings and emotions.
Another characteristic of the three decades that followed the de-institutionalisation of Stalinism in the early years of the Thaw (1960s) was the institutionalisation ofboth a new dominant discourse and rival discourses. Among the latter was a manifest

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détente1 (as a desirable future for Soviet society, a view emerging as an alternative beyond the boundaries of permissible difference in the 1970s and 1980s). After Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964 (see Smith and Ilic eds. 2011), anti-Stalinist
rhetoric remained still present, but became more low-key in media narratives. Whilethe boundaries of permissible difference were not narrowed, the media during this period focussed on the technocratic revolution, stressing science and technology, and on
efforts to overcome the failures of the command economy.2 In the 1970s, the media
increasingly came to reflect signs of stagnation in the local context.
Another emerging subdominant discourse of the 1960s and 1970s was promotedby the writers of the ‘village prose’ movement, such as Valentin Rasputin, Vasilii Belovand Viktor Astaf’ev, who emphasised an ethnic-national Russian identity in terms of
the well-known debate on a specific Russian development, distinct from that observedin Western Europe. The attitude of the national political elite towards these narrativesof ethnic Russian traditionalism was contradictory. As Hopf (2002: 18) has shown,
this discourse was officially tolerated but also represented a challenge to the dominantdiscourse of internationalism that defined the relationship between the Soviet Union’snationalities. In the context of the Karelian Republic, the sources emphasise the rhetoric of friendship between Soviet peoples.
Members of the intelligentsia were among the key social agents to produce alternative discourses on Soviet society, which were often reformist in nature. Scientists andartists had their own institutions in the form of unions, journals, publishing houses, theatres, educational and scientific institutions, and the more famous they were, the more
freely they could express their views and opinions. However, in a peripheral region
such as North Ladoga in Karelia, the local intelligentsia mostly reproduced the dominant discourse of socialist identity, except during the later years of Gorbachev’s perestroika, when reformist alternative discourses started to appear in local public debates.
The narratives studied in this study open the possibility to trace how an identityof the local community was constructed in official discourses and everyday practices inthis border area. In particular, they show how the self-identification of an ethnically andsocially diverse community was (re)shaped in accordance with the goals of the Soviet
project of national identity that is the construction of a New Soviet Man. Their analysis
also allows to describe how this community perceived its habitat and how local media
created a new sense of place in Sortavala. The main focus will be on the changing
spatial imagination of political agencies, above all the party apparatus, the military, industrial and, finally, cultural institutions and their role with regard to issues of ethnicity
and language in the representations of Karelia.
1 The general easing of the geo-political tensions between the Soviet Union and the UnitedStates which began in 1969.
2 During the Brezhnev period, official repression was aimed at those dissidents who organised public protests, a phenomenon limited to big cities and not at all typical of smalltowns such as Sortavala. Information about dissident activities was mainly disseminatedthrough Russian-language broadcasting services from Western Europe (Voice of America,BBC, etc.).

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