‘A dark, backward and oppressed periphery'

The territory between the White Sea and the Gulf of Finland, an area characterised by its glacial landscape of lakes, marshes and dense coniferous forest, having been settled at the end of the first millennium by a Finno-Ugrian tribe named the Karelians (they were not the indigenous population before this time), became known as Karelia – in Finnish, Karjala. ¹ The region which is the subject of the present work, the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Karelian ASSR), existed from 1923 to 1940 within precise geographical co-ordinates delimiting an area of 146,900 square kilometres, but the layers of myth and contested meanings accrued over centuries on the periphery of two historically hostile civilisations defy the cartographer's geometry. ² Geologically, botanically and climatically, Karelia forms part of the Fenno-Scandinavian crystalline massif. Its landscape is classified as sub-Arctic taiga, in contrast to the barer, rockier tundra further north on the Kola peninsula. Ethnically, linguistically and culturally, Karelia's Finno-Ugric population has long occupied an ambiguously intermediate and correspondingly controversial position between the Finnish and Slavic peoples. ³ This chapter traces the region's complex and conflictual territorial evolution, and the shifting spatial roles and relationships which defined its political, economic and demographic development.