At the Intersection of Modernities: Migrants as Agents of Economic and Cultural Change

Abstract

This article analyzes the infusion of North American ideas, culture and experience into the Soviet society, and depicts immigrants as agents of social and cultural change. Having embodied North American representations of modernity, they introduced new working methods, values and routines, as well as novel forms of labor organization to Soviet Karelia. With the help of imported machinery, tools, and equipment, immigrants drastically increased the production rates at Karelia’s industries. Glorified and publicized by the Karelian government and the media, their labour shops, and farm communes became models to be emulated in Karelia and throughout the Soviet Union. North American Finns also came to play an important part in Soviet elites’ attempt to modernize the Soviet society, both economically and culturally. Although they were agents of cultural and technological change in their own right, immigrants’ social and ethnic identities were subsumed and appropriated by the Soviet state and Karelia’s cultural producers in attempts to promote a Soviet version (an alternative) of economic and cultural modernity. Their physical and intellectual movement across national borders shaped and reconstituted the Soviet path to modernization, even if for a short period of time. In the process, concepts of the local, the national and the modern (that is, the global), became increasingly entangled.