The Sower Commune: An American-Finnish Agricultural Utopia in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Abstract In 1922 a group of idealistic American Finns decided to go to Soviet Russia to build an agroindustrial commune. After a harsh start, the Sower agricultural commune with its tractors and other modern machinery became a model farm that received a lot of attention as well as visitors from other parts of the Soviet Union and even from abroad. It succeeded in something that had not been thought possible. In less than a decade, the communards turned the dry steppe into a granary and a green orchard. But living and working on the isolated steppe proved to be dull, especially for those who had come from the United States or Canada and from very different economic and cultural conditions. Then, when more and more non-Finnish people joined the commune, the original communards started to feel themselves marginalized. Therefore, in 1930 a majority of the Finns left the Sower commune and moved to Soviet Karelia to start a new collective farm—the Hiilisuo. That experiment ended tragically with the Great Purge of 1937.