Memory is a fragile thing: Consider the saga of 15 elderly men and women who recently surfaced here, 60 years after disappearing into an obscure historical footnote.
They were children of the Great Depression, young boys and girls taken to the Soviet Union by their idealist fathers and mothers who eagerly embraced the utopian vision preached to them by socialist and communist organizers.
Their Finnish-American parents` dream of a new society, in which distinctions of rich and poor would vanish, was all the more alluring in the dark days of the 1930s, when one of every four workers in America was unemployed.
Their families` decision to forsake the U.S. split many Finnish-American communities, with those who left being as denounced as ”Reds” and anarchists.
But there were no recriminations, only tearful reunions, when a handful of the exiles returned here thanks to an unlikely turn of fate.
”These people were forgotten for all these years,” said Alne Petroske of nearby Superior, Wis. ”I remember how they were so happy and singing when they went off.”
Scarcely off the jetway at Duluth`s airport, Anna Yakotsevskaya was wrapped in a bear hug by Ellen Elliot, an older sister she hadn`t seen in decades.
Yet until Yakotsevskaya and the others were invited to be guests of honor at Finnfest, the Finnish-American community`s annual national gathering, the ill-starred crusade she took part in-along with 6,000 other Finnish-Americans- was scarcely remembered even by loved ones they`d left behind.
Yakotsevskaya and Elliot, who had chosen to stay in the U.S., might never have been reunited except that, in 1986, some Duluth civic leaders traveled to Petrozavodsk, hoping to establish sister-city ties with that Russian city.
Nobody suspected that, decades earlier, thousands of Finnish-Americans had migrated to that very part of the Soviet Union, a district in the northeast called Karelia.
The Duluth delegation had chosen Petrozavodsk knowing only that, like Duluth, it had a sizable Finnish-speaking population and is a mining center.
With Mikhail Gorbachev saying he wanted better relations with the West, the Minnesotans had written Petrozavodsk`s municipal authorities proposing their two cities jointly commemorate the Cold War`s ending. Not having recieved a reply, they arrived not knowing what to expect.
”Getting off the train, I was startled to hear someone speaking perfect English,” recalled Brooks Anderson, a leader of the delegation. ”She said,
`Welcome to Russia! What`s going on in Duluth these days?` ”
`Karelian fever`
Anderson`s new-found friend was Mayme Sevander, a high school teacher who had chanced to spot the Duluth group`s letter lying unanswered on a Soviet bureaucrat`s desk.
Having lived in Duluth as a young girl, Sevander resolved she would greet the Americans because, in those early days of glasnost, Petrozavodsk`s city leaders were still leary of foreigners. Sevander brought a few friends who, like herself, had been born in places such as Hibbing, Minn., and Brule, Wis. From them, the Minnesotans first learned of ”Karelian fever”-the revolutionary ardor that had swept through the Finnish-American community during the Great Depression.
Amazed that such a dramatic chapter could have been left out of textbooks, Anderson and his traveling companions insisted that Sevander become the historian of that mass migration from Middle America to the Soviet Union. They arranged for her to be a visiting professor, in 1989 and 1990, at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, where she wrote ”They Took My Father” (Pfeifer-Hamilton), an account of her family`s life in the Soviet Union.
During her visit, Sevander also started tracking down relatives of other Finnish-American exiles, thus laying the groundwork for this year`s reunions. ”For us fear was a daily companion during Stalin`s time,” said Sevander, 69, while autographing her book at Finnfest. ”But you can`t say Americans haven`t known fear. Sen. McCarthy knew something about instilling fear too.”
In the Red-baiting era of the 1940s and `50s, Sevander explained, Finnish-Americans with relatives in the Soviet Union weren`t eager to acknowledge having communists in the family. In Russia, too, it wasn`t prudent to draw the censor`s attention by writing letters to America. So ties were broken.
`Little Red` and `Big Red`
At Finnfest, Sevander alternately signed books and scribbled down names of other long-lost emigres, promising their American relatives she`d search for them upon returning to Petrozavodsk.
She also took a sentimental journey to Duluth`s Civic Center. There, 60 years before, as a child of 9, she had carried the Red flag in a demonstration of workers who had lost their jobs during the Great Depression.
”I was called `Little Red,` ” Sevander said. ”My father, Oscar Corgan, was `Big Red,` an organizer for the American Communist Party. During the 1930s, Dad traveled through all the Finnish communities in America, recruiting workers to go to the Soviet Union and help build a socialist society.”
Because the Finns had a long tradition of radical politics, her father`s message found a considerable audience. As Finland had been ruled by other nations for centuries, Finnish-American immigrants had been second-class citizens in their own land before coming to the U.S.
In America, many Finnish immigrants did back-breaking labor for low wages as lumberjacks or in the iron-ore mines of the upper Middle West.
If they protested against working conditions or tried to organize a union, the Finns would often be discharged en masse by their boss and blackballed by other employers.
As a result, many Finnish-Americans eagerly embraced the uptopian vision that organizers like Sevander`s father brought them. Virtually every town with a Finnish population had a meeting hall where itinerant lecturers and political dissenters would preach and argue for a new kind of society. All distinctions of rich and poor, worker and employer, would vanish.
”Karelian fever” inspired 6,000 Finnish-Americans to pull up stakes and move to the Soviet Union. Political radicals of other backgrounds also went, but no ethnic community sent anywhere near as many recruits as the Finns, a relatively small group in America.
Many Finnish-Americans wanted no part of radicalism, preferring instead to stay and cling to their religious heritage. Sevander recalled that every community was split into ”hall Finns,” a reference to those politically active community halls, and ”church Finns,” with the two groups barely talking to each other.
”Once, I went to Sunday school with a playmate and my parents were furious, saying, `As communists, we consider religion superstition,`
” Sevander said.
”Ironically, all these years later a Catholic college, St. Scholastica, gave me the opportunity to preserve the story of my parents` great dream.”
Just as the ”church Finns” predicted, that dream quickly tarnished soon after Sevander`s family arrived in the Soviet Union in 1934. Josef Stalin began his infamous Great Purge in which millions were killed or sent to slave- labor camps. The purge ultimately claimed as victims anyone who stood out in a crowd. As foreigners, the Finnish-Americans were especially vulnerable to being denounced as spies.
”When I heard they took my father away, I thought it had to be a mistake,” Sevander said. ”How could anyone accuse him of being disloyal, a man who had worked for the cause of socialism all his life?”
Not only did his family never again hear from Oscar Corgan, but it took decades to learn his fate. Sevander made it a personal crusade to press Soviet authorities on the issue, and in 1956 she received a death certificate that claimed her father had died of cancer.
In 1991, after Gorbachev`s reforms, Oscar Corgan`s family received a new death certificate showing that, in fact, he had been shot shortly after being arrested.
Avoiding arrest
Wilho Niemi, 78, who was born in International Falls, Minn., recalled that only a quirk of fate sometimes separated those who survived from those who died.
Proud of his heritage, Niemi had gone to the Soviet Union because the Bolsheviks promised Karelia was to be a special preserve of Finnish culture.
During the Stalin era, though, nationalism was denounced as socialism`s enemy. The Finnish language was condemned, and Niemi, who had trained to be an elementary school teacher, found he was unemployable. But he at least escaped imprisonment, if only because of the mechanical regularity with which bureaucrats operated.
”A friend and I noticed that arrests were always made in the middle of the night, so, for months, we left home before dark and slept in the woods,” said Niemi. ”One fellow escaped because when they came to arrest him, he was in Finland doing underground work for the Communist Party.”
Tony Rauhala wasn`t so lucky. Raised in Fairport, Ohio, he went to the Soviet Union with his parents because his father, a carpenter, was out of work. One night in 1938, he was arrested and sent to a slave-labor camp where he served eight years.
”There was no trial; they never even said what I was suppossed to be guilty of,” said Rauhala, 77. ”Half a dozen of my friends were arrested at the same time. I`m the only one to survive the camps.”
The stranger at the door
Mayme Sevander`s brother, Paul Corgan, was 14 when he was sent to a lumber camp in the Arctic. He had scarcely completed his sentence when Russia entered World War II. He was drafted and sent to a new labor camp.
Because he was born in the U.S., he was deemed unreliable for service in a regular army unit. For 4 1/2 years, he and the other inmates labored from dawn to nightfall building steel mills and living on a near-starvation diet.
”As you weaken, your philosophy of life narrows down to one thought:
food,” said Corgan, who accompanied his sister to the Finnfest reunion.
”Every night, I`d dream of a scrap of bread that would disappear just as I was about to bite into it.”
He was sitting in a Burger King on Duluth`s shoreline, devouring a cheeseburger and recalling that when he came back from the camps in 1946, he`d lost so much weight his family wondered who the strange-looking man was, dressed in rags who knocked on their door.
”I said: `Mayme, don`t you recognize me? It`s Paul, your brother,` ” he recalled.
After World War II, those Finnish-American expatriates who had survived the purges and the German invasion put their lives back together as best they could.
The numbers of those who survived is not fully known because many veterans of Karelian fever were forceably evacuated to interior regions of the country during the war.
The Soviets didn`t want them near a border region in the potential path of any foreign invasion. Mayme Sevander is researching the fates of those people for a forthcoming book.
Her brother, Paul, became a mathematics teacher and is now a secondary-school principal. He married a Russian woman and they have three children. His and Mayme`s mother, Katri Corgan, died in 1946, having spent her last years in virtual silence. She had never mastered Russian, and following the purges it wasn`t safe to be caught speaking Finnish.
Honoring the dreamer
Mayme worked as a journalist, then became a teacher, specializing in languages. She married Milton Sevander, who had been born in Eveleth, Minn. While serving with the Red Army during World War II, he was captured by the Finns and spent two years in a prisoner of war camp.
When he was repatriated in a POW exchange, the Soviets sent him to a slave-labor camp for four years.
Mayme and Milton, who died in 1973, had two children, one of whom, Stella, accompanied her mother to Finnfest, so she might see the place where her family`s saga began.
Some of the surviving veterans of Karelian fever are sorry their families moved to the Soviet Union. Tony Rauhala, who served eight years in a gulag, thinks the venture was doomed to failure.
But Wilho Niemi, who slept in the woods during the purge, thinks socialism wasn`t given a fair chance in the Soviet Union.
Even at 78, Niemi said he would sign up for a similar crusade if he thought the odds might be a little better this time.
Mayme Sevander said you have to honor the dreamer, even while recognizing that the dream was flawed.
”It breaks my heart to admit that the grand experiment of a country run by workers has failed and that our parents made a grave, fatal mistake,” she said.
”But the motivations behind that decision are as sound as they ever were, and I will stand behind them until the day I die.”
