Finnish everyday Bolshevism on the Murman Coast 1935–1938
Abstract
This is a case study of the ordinary life of Finnish speaking communists in extraordinary times, to quote Sheila Fitzpatrick. It is based on the local party organisation’s protocols of the Finnish-speaking Pohjantähti (Northern Star) kolkhoz on the Murman coast. When the revolution took place in Russia in 1917, and when the Bolshevik party had in practice won the civil war in 1920, the majority of Russian workers, and even less the population at large, were not Bolsheviks. Socialism had to build Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union and define how it would work. At the same time, the population had to learn to “speak Bolshevik” – to describe the new social system.
The central questions are: Which themes and deeds were legitimated regarding kolkhoz work? How were obligations to the party argued for, and how did the Finnish communists on the Murman Coast apply them? What kind of image of mass terror did the local sources offer? The results show that the community’s quite closed ethnic and previous religious background influenced the identity of the local party organisation, strengthening tensions between local practices and all-Union norms regarding party membership in the 1930s.
Keywords: Murmansk Finns; Bolsheviks; norms; practices
