week local radio programmes. The year before, she had checked 169 issues of the district newspaper (f. R-757, op. 4C, d. 2/20, l. 38).
Cutting off Soviet citizens from the influence of capitalist foreigners remained
important even during the years of the Thaw. In the early 1960s, Turpeinen censored
two exhibitions—one on agriculture and the other of paintings—and inspected 85 local
libraries. As a result, 378 copies of forbidden or outdated books were withdrawn fromthe shelves. On average, she paid five annual visits to the Sortavala publishing house(eight in 1964). Among other things, she informed the CPSU town committee that abook printed there and bearing the censor’s stamp had been sent to a bookshop. The
case was hotly debated at a meeting convened by the committee’s bureau, to which a
director, a chief engineer and a secretary of the primary party organisation of the publishing house had been invited (f. R-757, op. 4C, d. 2/20, l. 39).
As the media were reproducing almost exclusively the official discourse and its
dominant narrative during most of the Soviet period and any other information was
being censored, many ordinary citizens, but members of the intelligentsia in particular,
were rather sceptical of these official sources of information. Until the 1970s, mostof them turned to alternatives, such as the Russian-language broadcasting services of
the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Freedom and others. After Stalin’s death, Soviet
mass media gradually underwent changes and a certain freedom of expression from the
Khrushchev period survived during the more conservative Brezhnev era (see above),
before Gorbachev’s perestroika led to a significant liberalisation. While the Stalinist
system had served the political purpose of reinforcing national identity at the expenseof others, the perestroika years saw the reappearance of individual counter-memories
that contradicted the earlier master narrative and production of national myths (Gero­
vich 2008: 223).

4. The Changing Geopolitics of Border Discourses
During most of the post-war period, local geopolitical visions and narratives were
dominated by the global geopolitical regime of the time. The Cold War rhetoric produced by the central elite was reproduced in the local context. Its grand narrativesof a struggle between two radically different socio-economic and ideological systems
produced in particular the identity of the defender of the holy socialist Motherland
described above, which prevailed over other elements of local identity. Borders were
invested with a symbolic meaning that reflected this view, such as in the metaphor ofan ‘iron curtain.’ Finland, for example, was not seen so much as a neighbour than as apart of the capitalist world, which was accused of being expansionist and militaristic.
In the Soviet discourse, the militarised border near Sortavala thus owed its existence tothreats held to be emanating from the West.
The power of symbols on which Soviet discourse was based (Medvedev 1994)
is especially obvious when it comes to the Soviet state border with the West. Beyond
it lay hostile imperialist countries closely identified with the threat of war. In Soviet
mass propaganda, but also in other forms of politicised discourses, such as art, thestate border had therefore acquired a sacred meaning: the border defended the ‘sacred33

boundaries of the Motherland’ (Gusseinov 1999). Sortavala’s ‘border mentality’ wasconditioned by this powerful symbolism, and the notion of a sacred border was central
to the self-image of Sortavala’s residents (Izotov 2013: 172).
This symbolic role of the state border was also present in popular culture. In amanner typical of the period’s patriotic sentiments and, more generally, of the Russian
tradition, the wartime song Katiusha, whose lyrics were composed by Mikhail Isakovskii, is about a girl waiting for her boyfriend, a border guard, whom she asks to preserve the Motherland just as she preserves their love (Pust’ on zemliu berezhet rodnuiu,
a liubov’ Katiusha sberezhet). Similar expressions can be found in Sortavala, where thelocal newspaper published the Russian translation of a poem by the Finnish-speaking
poet Ilmari Saarinen, ‘The Letter’ that evokes a border guard’s emotions and patriotic
feelings (KZ, 8 March 1960).
Official rhetoric and phraseology created a whole body of novoiaz, as somescholars named it after George Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ (see Zemskaia 1996), giving riseto neologisms such as ‘impenetrable borders.’ Official clichés thus entered everyday
language, although in some cases they were ridiculed in works of art, especially songs.
The famous poet-singer Bulat Okudzhava, for instance, used the ideological cliché of a‘border under lock and key’ in one of his songs (see Boiko 2000) that combined public
and biographical narratives.
4-1. Local Border Discourses
In contrast to the Moscow citizen who, in Okudzhava’s imagination, ‘walks by
the border under lock and key,’ residents of Sortavala rarely had a chance to even see
the state border, which was literally and figuratively located in a closed zone. In newspaper articles and official documents written between 1940 and the early 1950s, thestate border is practically invisible. Somebody reading only these texts would hardly
realise that they were produced in a completely militarised closed border town, populated by a significant number of soldiers and border guards. In later years, references
to the border turn sometimes up in unexpected places. Thus, a meeting on economic
issues held in the late 1960s contains the following statement: ‘The common interestsof our multinational state in defending our borders form the basis of the economic development in the USSR’ (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 2/85, l. 23).
In Soviet times, many local residents were involved in activities linked to thedefence of the state border. In the official discourse, they were portrayed as voluntary
border guards. There existed close ties between Border Troops units and local schools,
some of them going back to 1946 and 1947 (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 2/57, l. 7). Military
officers often gave lectures, informing students about their duty to defend the borderand explaining how they could assist the border guards’ work.
Similarly, labour collectives at local establishments were called upon to assist the Border Troops. A study of the role of people’s patrols (DND, short for
Dobrovol’naia narodnaia druzhina) in Soviet discourse has shown how citizens were
gradually drawn into taking part in this form of social control (Kharkhordin 1999:
285–286). In the border area, this led to the definition of special tasks. In 1971, forinstance, it was reported that 280 residents participated in people’s patrols at the bor-34

der settlement of Värtsilä and provided intensive assistance to the border guards (f.
R-2203, op. 1, d. 67/1260, l. 51).
In the 1950s and 1960s, the liberalisation of the regime under Khrushchev led tothe emergence of a new official discourse. In line with the idea that the establishmentof a communist society was imminent, approaches to educate the masses (vospitanie)
underwent slight changes. Henceforth it was emphasised that this education should bebased on the ‘moral code of builders of communism’ whose main task was the ‘education of man (as a member) of communist society.’ It was during this period that theterm ‘border town’ made its appearance in official speeches. To cite but one example
from 1964: ‘Comrades, Deputies! Our border town is fighting in the name of high labour productivity, the maintenance of order and a high standard of domestic culture’ (f.
R-2203, op. 1, d. 44/1005, l. 48).
The liberalisation also meant that local values and a local sense of place could
be represented through the opinions of ordinary citizens. In 1960, KZ thus publishedletters from local readers, reacting to the projected reduction of Soviet troops. The
author of one of them, an employee at the Värtsilä metallurgic works, expressed his
confidence by claiming that ‘our borders will still be safe after this measure’ (‘It’s wonderful!’ KZ, 19 January 1960).
The era of Stagnation, under Brezhnev, was marked by plans to develop the North
Ladoga territory, when the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, in the early 1970s, started to pay special attention to the Finnish-Russian borderlands by adopting a resolution
in favour of the social and economic development of territories in Karelia and Leningrad Oblast ‘that used to belong to Finland.’ This was followed by a similar resolution
passed by the Council of Ministers of the USSR, On Measures for the Further Development and Public Services in the Settlements of the Border Districts of the Karelian ASSR (O merakh po dal’neishemu razvitiiu i blagoustroistvu naselennykh punktov
pogranichnykh raionov Karel’skoi ASSR), which referred to the further development oflocal industries and the construction or reconstruction of cultural institutions. However, the implementation of this programme faced the typical hurdles of that period andonly partly achieved its aims. As a speaker during a meeting of the local administration
noted: ‘According to the resolution on the development of the North Ladoga region,
the implementation of public services and infrastructure should have been achieved by
1980. In fact, we are way behind the schedule. Our construction firms do not have thecapacity to solve the problem... We have funds in the budget for these purposes but lackthe labour force to carry out our plans’ (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 78/1347, l. 37).
Issues of border security were a regular feature in official documents. During
the same meeting, attention was also drawn to a speech made by A. A. Kochetov, thechairman of the Karelian Republic’s Council of Ministers, who had called for increased
political vigilance in the border area and expressed his opinion on the necessity ofstrengthening patronage ties (shefskie sviazi) between the collectives of local establishments and army units (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 78/1347, l. 38).
In official discourses on the education of the Soviet people, references to theprinciples of ‘vigilance’ were recurrent and obligatory, as witnessed by the rhetoric
employed by one of the local deputies, the military commissar of the town: ‘The CPSU

35

takes care of the education of the Soviet people in terms of their readiness to defend
the great achievements of socialism. Our major aim is to educate young people andstudents so that they will be ready to discharge their duty as defenders of the Motherland’ (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 78/1350, l. 4–5). Strengthening the ties between civilians
and the military as well as social networks englobing both was held to be a major aim
in public narratives and practices, expressed in the omnipresent motto ‘The People
and the Army are indivisible.’ This led, for example, to the establishment of units of
The Young Friends of Border Guards. In 1969, the local newspaper thus reported thatparticipation in the military game Zarnitsa-69 was not confined to the town but also
extended to small settlements, citing the ‘battle’ of two such units, recruited among theschoolchildren of Rantala and Taunan, who used self-made automatic guns made ofwood (KZ, 4 February 1969).
Soviet symbols were used until the very end of this era to promote the people’s
defence of the border. One was the Red Banner, passed from collective to collective
to reward activism in this field. In 1974, the regional committee of the CPSU and the
KSFR’s Council of Ministers thus passed a resolution that, in the noviaz typical of theperiod, awarded the Red Banner to Unit 2121 of the Border Troops stationed in Sortavala forthe ‘good results in the defence of the state border, good military and political training,
strengthening military discipline (and) successful participation in the socialist competition for carrying out the resolution of the XXIV Congress of the CPSU’ (f. R-2203,
op. 1, d. 79/1352, l. 4).
The local authorities, too, regularly participated in these efforts to promote theidentity of the homeland defender. In the 1970s, the town council organised Deputy’sDays, during which local deputies attended seminars and courses, where border issues
were a frequent subject. One such seminar was dedicated to the theme ‘Tasks of deputies
working with people in the border area’ (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 79/1352, l. 13). Sortavala’s
border town status also appeared in a variety of administrative contexts. In 1971, forexample, the local Commission for Youth Affairs expressed concerns about juvenile
delinquency and stated the necessity of improving the education of young people, because Sortavala ‘is located in the border zone’ (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 64/1232, l. 66).
Ties between the military and the civilian administration were not one-way affairs, particularly in the early Soviet times, when the troops often extended their assistance to the local administration. Sortavala’s border guards helped, for example,
redirect energy supplies for the town from the electric power station at Hämäkoski,
then in disrepair, to the hydroelectric station at Harlu. In 1945, they were involved inplans to collect scrap iron (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 1/2, l. 2 and 1/4, l. 2).
At the time, the administrative authorities also laid down detailed rules related tothe territorialisation of the border area. As early as March 1945, the Karelian government, that is the Soviet of People’s Commissars of the KFSSR, passed the resolution Of
a Regime for the Prohibited Border Zone in the KFSSR, which established an 800-metre-wide border strip (polosa) and a 22-kilometre-wide border zone and regulated access to them as well as defined rules for those living within the border zone. Everybody
wishing to enter the area had to obtain a permit from the local militia and had to registerwith the NKVD border guards or the local Soviet administration upon arrival. Access36

to the border strip was limited to NKVD border guards. Any construction work, including on local roads, in the border area required approval by a commander of the Border
Troops. Certain outdoor activities, such as hunting or fishing, were tightly regulated
as well, even pigeon-breeding, a popular hobby, was not permitted at the time. Taking
photographs or filming was strictly forbidden without prior authorisation (f. R-2203,
op. 1, d 1/5, l. 67–70).
It was during the Khrushchev period that ordinary residents, in line with the official ideology, came to be more closely involved in border protection. New regulationsin the form of The Statute on the Protection of the State Border, previously adopted
through a decree (ukaz) of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, were
published on 5 August 1960. The border strip and border zone remained in place, as did
strict rules regulating entry of the area, residency and citizens’ movements within theborder zone. The passport regime was indeed high on the agenda. The border regime
was under the control of the militia and border guard units, but the local administrations
as well as the managers of local establishments were charged with taking prompt action
in case of any infraction and to safeguard the local population’s support of the borderregime (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 38/936).
Documents from the Sortavala’s municipal archives offer, indeed, evidence that
this participation was more than rhetorical. In a report to the executive committee ofthe town council, a chairman of the commission for Socialist Law and Public Order,
informed the meeting that local residents and voluntary patrols (DND) played a significant role in protecting the border, mentioning in particular the people’s patrol at
Värtsilä. A notable number of people infringing the border regime and trespassers weresaid to have been identified and captured because they had been signalled by thesepatrols. The speaker evoked, for instance, a DND member at the sovkhoz Zastava [TheFrontier Post] personally arresting a trespasser, who was later awarded a medal ‘forextraordinary participation in the protection of the state border’ (Za otlichie v okhranegosudarstvennoi granitsy). Due to information offered by another DND member, yetanother trespasser was reported to have been arrested.
At the same time, officials apparently did not always respect regulations of theborder regime. According to the chairman quoted, ‘organisational errors lead to the entry of “undesirable individuals” into the forbidden zone, make it easy to trespass at thestate border and undermine public order in the town and the area.’ Another report mentioned that individuals without proper permission from the militia officers or without
the required documentation (neformennye spravki) and telegrams from relatives living
in Sortavala had succeeded in entering the forbidden zone. It was recommended thatthese people should be deported from the border zone, but the author also noted that
infringers often had big families, which would make expulsion difficult. Documentsfrom the late 1950s and early 1960s, indeed, refer to residents without a job, who are
drunkards and of whom nobody takes care. One example quoted in more detail is thatof a resident of Värtsilä, who did not work and exhibited anti-social behaviour. Once,
while being drunk, he was said to have followed the rails leading to Finland, but wasapprehended by a border guard preventing him from leaving the country. Other inhabitants of Värtsilä were reported of not working regularly. It was stated that people like37

them should not be able to live near the border. Their cases are among the examples
found in official documents of lives that strongly contradicted officially sanctioned
social norms.
According to the 1960 border regime, residents of the border area was obliged toalways carry with them their passport or another form of identity proof while moving
in the area. However, the report mentioned that many residents fail to do so and thatborder guards or DND patrols therefore had to arrest them until they could prove theiridentity. This was said to be a time-consuming affair and due to the fact that ‘people
had not received enough explanations how to comply with the regulations of the borderzone.’ The responsible officials were admonished to redouble their vigilance. Participants of the meeting then decided that local political actors should be obliged to inform
local residents about the regulations of the Statute and stated that members of the local
militia, border guards, as well as members of trade unions, the Komsomol and theCommunist Party, too, ought to participate in these efforts.
Similarly, it was reported that the local administration did not enforce the compulsory registration (propiska) within three days of any person entering the border area.
In some cases, individuals and even whole families had only registered a month later.
This was said to constitute an additional burden for the border guards and people’s
patrols, who had to spend time tracking suspicious individuals and trespassers, andto negatively affect their vigilance. In other cases, housing committees had submitted
incomplete documents (spravki), with missing stamps and information, instead of thepassports handed in for registration by the individuals concerned.
In the official view, some problems of defending the border stemmed from tourism. The Sortavala district attracted not only geologists and seasonal workers, but also
numerous tourists. It was reported that border guards sometimes were informed toolate about their presence in the area. Residents of Leningrad, for example, had madeboating excursions in the area during a visit to the monastery of Valaam, while theborder guards ignored everything about the presence of these ‘admirers of the region.’
Finally, the persons in charge had been obliged to inform the border troops about thesevisitor groups. It was held that timely control undertaken by the border troops would
help reduce the numbers of ‘undesirable individuals’ and ‘hostile visitors’ (vrazheskie
elementy).
Local archives from the 1960s also offer evidence of the participation of residents
from other localities of the North Ladoga area in activities related to the defence of thestate border. At the settlement of Pitkäranta, voluntary patrols were reported to workin close co-operation with the local militia to implement the border regime (pasportno-pogranichnyi rezhim). In 1963, workers at the factory Pitkäranta had apprehended
36 persons who had violated the regulations and a number of volunteers were awarded
distinctions by the local council for defending the border (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 38/935,
l. 71–72).
Local identity in Sortavala during the Soviet period was deeply marked by thesymbolic meaning and the mythologising of the border guards present in the town,
especially through various rituals and celebrations regularly reported by the local newspaper. In May 1978, delegates from many local establishments and organisations, led

38

by the first secretary of the local party branch, took part in the celebration of the 60th
Anniversary of the Soviet Border Troops (KZ, 30 May 1978). Similar to other Soviet
celebrations of professional groups, an annual Day of the Border Guard was celebrated
in May, the month in which the Border Troops had been established. The following
quote is typical of the way these events were reported.
All Soviet people love the border guard and appreciate his services. Reactionary circles in the West continue their attempts to undermine the USSR. Under these circumstances, the CPSU and the Soviet government pay constant attention to the defenceof the sacred boundaries of our Motherland... Hundreds of thousands of volunteers,
members of party committees, the Komsomol and the trade unions all the time takecare of increasing the vigilance of the population and the active participation of residents of the border area in the defence of the border and their assistance to the border
guards (KZ, 27 May 1978).

The programme of the celebration included a concert, various events in the town
park and the opening of memorials. Children attending groups that organised activities related to the defence of the border participated as well. Special meetings were
held in many local establishments, such as the one set up at the local railway depot(lokomotivnoe depo) on the eve of the Day of the Border Guard to honour veterans of
the Border Troops and to offer them presents (ibid.).
The state border with Finland was closed in Soviet times and Sortavalans, asother Soviet citizens, could only cross the border at Vyborg after having followed therequired procedures. It played a crucial role in dividing the two nations. In everyday
life the real border and the ‘capitalist enemy’ beyond it remained invisible. The lackof contact and unfamiliarity with the Finnish neighbours resulted in mythologisingof the border, the border area and the foreign neighbours. Nor did the latter’s misrepresentation as ‘them’ in official discourses favour understanding of what ‘us’ meant.
The process of demythologisation only started in the 1990s, after the collapse of theSoviet Union.
Moreover, official narratives of the border, as exemplified by the newspaper articles published between the 1940s and mid-1980s, never depicted the border guards asreal people, or individual personalities. Under the condition of censorship, there were
no opportunities to publicly discuss certain aspects of the coexistence of border guards
and civilian residents. Only during Gorbachev’s perestroika did journalists from thelocal newspaper start to treat border issues in the light of individual experiences. During the May 1986 annual celebration of the Day of the Border Guard, a local journalist
wrote for the first time in detail about the daily life at the local garrison, mentioning
private issues and identifying border guards by their family name (KZ, 28 May 1986).
Since then, lively and realistic descriptions of border-related issues have become a frequent feature in the local newspaper. Thus, it was only in the second half of the 1980s
that subjective elements were added to representations of locality in this border area,
contributing to create a sense of place as described in the approach of human geographers such as Tuan (1974b; 1977), Buttimer (1994) and Relph (1976).

39

4-2. Pending the Arrival of the Other: Discovering the Border
Between 1944 and 1988 Sortavala’s Finnish neighbours represented a dispelled
Other, and the state border the boundary of socialism rather than a frontier with Finland. This explains the complex character of residents’ first experiences with cross-border contacts. One might be tempted to think that Sortavalans perceived the border zone
simply as an obstacle or barrier in their everyday lives. However, spatial representations of the North Ladoga area were much more multi-faceted. When the border regime
started to become less strict, some biographical narratives emphasised the advantage ofthe town’s close location to the border. Discussions about the consequences of expected visits by the foreign neighbours intensified in the late 1980s. But, as prospects ofcross-border interaction still remained uncertain, many of the ideas vented by ordinary
residents or representatives of the local authorities were of a speculative nature.
One of the discussion threads published in the local newspaper centred on fears
that ‘wealthy Finns’ would come and buy up land or islands of Lake Ladoga. In 1989,
a Soviet-Finnish joint venture, ‘Ladoga,’ established to promote the development ofinternational tourism in the Sortavala area, thus led to heated and controversial debates,
after the local paper had reported that a working group of Finnish and Russian experts
had decided to allot a plot located on the nearby island of Kukkosaari for a tourist
centre, whose construction was to be financed by AO Sovfinturproject, Goskomturist
USSR and the Council of Ministers of the KASSR (KZ, 12 January 1989). Many local
residents voiced concerns about losing control over their territory (KZ, 21 and 28 January, 11 and 15 February 1989), while Vladimir Stepanov, a member of the CPSU’s
Central Committee and First Secretary of Karelia’s regional party committee, describedthe decision as valuable and important for the socio-economic development of the area
and actively supported the project during his election campaign (KZ, 9 February 1989).
At the same time, this example shows that local residents now were given the opportunity to publicly express their opinions.
One of the articles spoke about a ‘massive attack by Finnish firms on the economic basis of the town’ (KZ, 11 February 1989) and raised a number of questions: Would
Soviet citizens have access to the planned tourist centre and be able to establish contacts with Finnish visitors? On what basis would commercial activities be organised in
the border area? And, more particularly, would the newly established Karelvneshtorg, aregional organisation responsible for foreign trade, have a branch in Sortavala? To what
extent the local budget would benefit economically from the Ladoga project?21 Would
local residents be given the opportunity to visit border towns in Finland? There wasalso some apprehension about how Finnish visitors might perceive the Soviet Union:
If Finnish tourists will have free access to our town, they will have the opportunity
to compare life in two societal systems. They will make certain evaluations of oureconomic and social problems, comment on the poor state of our roads etc. It is hard
to believe that Finns will have lunch in a stolovaia [a basic Soviet canteen; A. I.] orbuy food in our shops. Perhaps they will be shocked by the long waiting lines in our
shops (KZ, 11 February 1989).
21 This has to be seen in the context of the legislation on holding foreign currency in Soviet times.

40

On 27 November 1990, the Soviet Union’s Council of Ministers passed a resolution that introduced new simplified rules for residents and certain categories of persons(tourists, veterans, artists, economic experts, etc.) wishing to enter the closed borderzone. The issue was widely discussed in the local media and led to mostly negative andcritical reactions (KZ, 5 January 1991). Local newspaper headlines, such as ‘How can
we live without a border zone?’ reflect these concerns. The paper also published several
letters by ordinary residents that unanimously protested against the decision. One ofthem, signed by a whole family, noted: ‘We totally agree with the author, her conclusions
and suggestions. We believe that it is not necessary to open up the border. It is not very
difficult for us to obtain permits for our relatives and friends from other regions’ (ibid.).
On 27 December, a decision made earlier by the Supreme Council of the KASSR
to simplify regulations for entering the border zone located on Sortavala’s municipal
territory after 1 January 1991 was being discussed at the fourth annual session of thetown council. One of the deputies held a speech in which she called the abolishment of
the border zone inadmissible and was supported by several other deputies. The council
unanimously voted in favour of a note to be addressed to the republic’s Supreme Council, which contained the following suggestions:
Given the serious crime situation, the beginnings of foreign tourism, the lack of adeveloped services infrastructure, the complex ecological situation and the unpreparedness of the town council for this measure, we ask the Supreme Council to annul its
decision on opening up the closed border zone and also ask that the earlier passport
regime remain in place’ (ibid.).

The hostile attitude of the local community towards the liberalisation of the border regime requires some explanation here, because it concerns the main subject of thisresearch, i.e. the production of a sense of place. It should thus be seen in its historical and geographical context. For decades, local residents had been living in a closed
territory associated with a ‘quiet’ and ‘clean’ environment. Any changes to its status
were therefore perceived as a threat to an environment familiar since early childhood.
The unanimous position taken by local actors with widely diverse political views andbackgrounds can therefore be interpreted as concerns for losing the privilege of living
in a border zone. Interestingly, this apprehension seems to have been directed mainly
towards an internal threat, stemming from visitors from other territories of the former Soviet Union, because many of those opposed to the Supreme Council’s decision
adopted a favourable attitude towards opening up the area to foreign tourists, economic
actors and other visitors from abroad.
Newspaper articles published during the following years appeared to confirm thevalidity of local arguments made both against and in favour of a lighter border regime.
The arrival of organised crime, drug trafficking and prostitution lived up to the expectations of those who had warned against the impact of international mass tourism ona relatively small area, while opportunities created by cross-border interaction offered
new prospects of life to many local residents. And, indeed, this situation gave rise torival local narratives about cross-border interaction: euphoric stories about social andpolitical changes that inaugurated a new era, on the one hand, others, deeply pessimist,
denouncing the dramatic fall in living standards and a state no longer providing for the41

welfare of its citizens, on the other. This debate took place in a situation where foreign
tourists who looked rich and respectable arrived in unfamiliar big busses and a certain
number of North Ladoga residents eventually succeeded in finding informal ways ofobtaining foreign currency from these visitors.
The early period of this meeting of East and West culminated in an international event that celebrated the inauguration of the new era, the festival ‘Worlds Meet’in June 1990. During this music festival, which also included The World Party organised in Joensuu, visitors non only from Finland but also from other countries arrived for the first time in huge numbers in the formerly closed border area. A special
train linked Joensuu with Sortavala. With the assistance of Finnish experts, the townof Sortavala built an imitation of the legendary Laulurinne [Singing Slope] in the local
Vakkosalmenpuisto Park.22 The programme included performances by Soviet, Finnish
and various international artists, among them Karelia Brass, a jazz ensemble from the
Finnish-speaking collective Manok from Petrozavodsk. A second World Meets festival
was successfully organised two years later, in June 1992, but did not attract as many
visitors. Its programme was a combination of Russian and Finno-Ugric folk art that wasreminiscent of earlier Soviet cultural practices in Sortavala, and performers wore ethnic
costumes. The main attraction was Samppa Uimonen (1927–2001), the Finnish kantele
player and rune-singer, who performed Kalevala epic poetry.23
4-3. The Homeless Soviet Man: Discourses on Socio-Economic Identities
Inspired by Marxist-Leninist doctrine, Soviet official discourse schematicallydescribed Soviet society as composed of the working class, the peasantry and a layerof intelligentsia between the two. In a more realistic approach, it would be possible toidentify various interest groups, foremost among them the nomenklatura, which was
the main promoter of Soviet identity politics, from its earliest Stalinist strongly dichotomous expression to its later, more alleviated forms, such as the notion of ‘developedsocialism’ characteristic of the late Brezhnev years (see above). The nomenklatura system, whose constitution was more or less complete in the late Stalinist period, wasintroduced in Karelia in 1946. Access to the nomenklatura was on the basis of criteriasuch as party membership, nationality, social or family background and the level of
education. The most important quality required by the pretender to a nomenklatura
position was his (implicit) willingness to execute directives issued at higher levels of
authority. In terms of territorial identity, this means that Karelia lost any hope of developing regional self-governance after the war. Although the region was then given the
22 The site is reputed to offer Europe’s best acoustic environment because it is partly enclosed by a high rock (Karelia, 17 February 2001).
23 Uimonen was born in a village located on the Lake Ladoga island of Tulola, about 10
kilometres from Sortavala, and spent most of his life in Kitee, a twin town of Sortavala on
the Finnish side of the border. A cable TV company from Petrozavodsk produced a short
documentary of the second Worlds Meet festival that included an interview with the artist
by anchorman Alexander Nikolaev. The documentary can be consulted at: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Uh8kyt8Diyo (last accessed on 27 October 2016).

42

status of a national republic,24 the latter’s significance was a far cry from that definedby the nativisation or indigenisation (korenizatsiia) policy of the 1920s and early 1930s(see Kangaspuro 2000: 143–147).
In political science, social identity is usually conceived in terms of particulargroups or categories (nation, social class, subculture, ethnic group, gender etc.) that
individuals use to describe themselves as belonging to. How then did residents of postwar Sortavala perceive themselves? As already mentioned, most of them were resettled
from other parts of the Soviet Union. In addition to their ethnic and cultural diversity,
they were also characterised by their different social backgrounds. Many of them had
been born into a peasant family. Stalin’s modernisation project, with its emphasis on
rapidly industrialising the country and the leading ideological role of the working class,
had led to the formation of a specifically Soviet type of socio-economic identity that
also shaped the identity of Sortavalans.
An examination of this identity must take into account the structure of the local economy, which was based mainly on agriculture and the production of consumer
goods, as well as on transport—Sortavala was located at a railway junction. The mostimportant establishment of the consumer goods industry was the furniture and ski combine in Helylä, one of the main producers of skies in the Soviet Union, with which not
only its employees but also most residents of Sortavala proudly identified themselves.
Its disappearance in the post-Soviet years is thought to have profoundly affected Sorta­valans, leading to radical changes in their self-identification as economic actors and areframing of local identity.
Many of the Sortavalans who resettled there in the late 1940s came from villages
elsewhere in the Soviet Union, became town dwellers and received an education or
technical training during the country’s modernisation, which allowed them to join theworking class or the intelligentsia. In the agricultural sector, the authorities establishedseveral kolkhozes after the war, which soon were transformed into sovkhozes that is state
enterprises that employed agricultural workers. People working in this sector not only
had to live in rural areas that lacked a basic infrastructure but also had few privileges.
For instance, they did not have internal passports, which would have allowed themto leave their village. Industrial workers, on the contrary, were held in high esteem.
Official discourse, relayed by the local media, glorified the working class as the mostimportant strata of the population and attributed to it a strong socialist consciousness.
In the 1940s and 1950s, there were numerous newspaper stories about representatives from the various migrant communities that had resettled in Sortavala. Mostof them experienced significant changes in their life after moving to North Ladoga.
In addition to living in an unfamiliar cultural environment and becoming part of newsocial networks, many took up a new professional career. It can therefore be assumed
that work identities were often in a state of flux.
24 The Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic (Karelo-Finskaia Sovetskaia Sotsialisti­
cheskaia Respublika) was established in 1940 and was incorporated into the Russian
SFSR as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Karel’skaia Avtonomnaia
Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika) in 1956.

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The institutional agencies promoting this new identity were labour collectives aswell as schools and other educational institutions. According to the official Soviet discourse, members of the working class demonstrated their moral values to other socialgroups through their ‘heroic labour.’ In media narratives, this idea was used as a tool
to encourage practices aimed at socio-economic development. Between the 1960s andearly 1980s, newspaper publications often used these kinds of narratives with the intention to improve working ethic or reinforce a culture of labour. Their authors generally
called upon the working population to revise its attitude towards work. Higher labour
productivity was seen as the ultimate goal of the Soviet economic model.

5. Production-based Professional Identities
Public narratives emphasised full employment as one of the major achievementsof the Soviet economic system, which thus distinguished itself from capitalist economies. Unemployed people had no official status in the Soviet Union and were considered criminals. In Sortavala as elsewhere in the USSR, full employment was consideredmore important than other economic goals, but here in a context of an insufficient labour supply. Under the conditions of a planned economy, this led to frequent difficulties
of implementing state-funded programmes of socio-economic development in North
Ladoga (see section 4-1.).
5-1. The Industrial Sector
Industrial production in Sortavala partly relied on the old technical infrastructureof former Finnish companies, partly on new establishments created in Soviet times,
such as the furniture and ski combine (SMLK) at Helylä. Sortavala’s industrial sector
also included a sewing factory, a brewery, a meat factory, a printing house, a metallurgical factory, mineral quarries and an establishment producing materials for road construction. In the late 1960s, the town counted eleven establishments of the primary andindustrial sectors: in addition to the above mentioned enterprises, there were a dairy,
a bakery, a fish-processing factory, the West-Karelian Electricity Company, Leskhoz[forestry], a combine producing construction materials (Kombinat proizvodstvennykh
predpriiatii) and a state establishment for repair works and other services (f. R-2203,
op. 1, d. 60/1205, l. 32).25 The local state enterprises accounted for five per cent of
Karelia’s industrial production. Technologically, few had changed since Finnish times.
Sortavala’s industrial landscape had therefore remained virtually unchanged.
Public narratives about the sector focussed on efforts to fulfil the objectives defined by yearly or pluriannual plans, a subject treated in close connection with party ef25 The four main industrial establishments in the Sortavala district, the SMLK, a metallurgical factory at Värtsilä, a plywood combine at Lahdenpohja and a marble-and lime-processing factory at Ruskeala, together employed about 4,000 people; the sixteen other local
factories accounted for 2,600 employees (f. R-2203, op. 1, d. 54/1133, l. 25). A significant
number of people were also employed at the local railway station and depot. The little-developed construction sector suffered from a lack of labour.

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