Soviet tourism and western consumerism: a meeting in Finland

This essay was in introduction to Ab Imperio Forum in 2011 about the studies of the closed cities and problems of "closed" society in Soviet history and historiography

European Planning Studies, 2013

This paper investigates the role of tourism in the construction of (un)familiarity in Karelia at the Finnish-Russian borderland. From a historical perspective, it deals with a culturally homogenous space, which more recently became divided by the border into two nation states that differ politically, ethnically and linguistically. In the course of the Cold War, unfamiliarity was one of the tools used by the Soviet political elite in construction of national identity. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the border regime became liberalized and cross-border interaction began, familiarity became one of the key factors of the regional identity construction. The case of Sortavala, on which this study focuses, allows us to analyse how identity was constructed in official and media discourses. Although familiarity in the local context is more prominent, unfamiliarity is also at stake, not only in a negative sense, but also from a sense of curiosity about historical ties between the different parts of Karelia. This paper contributes to an understanding of EU external bordering politics. It also highlights the role of local actors in the (re-)construction and (re-)interpretation of borders. Tourism is seen as one of the facets of local identity formation. This study attempts to understand tourism-driven cross-border region-building processes.

Geographia Polonica

The study aims to examine travel preferences of Finnish cross-border tourists with special reference to the Republic of Karelia, Russia. Data were collected using paper-based and online surveys from 300 respondents travelling from Finland to the Russian Karelia. Although cross-border tourists are a significant part in the inbound tourist flow to Russian Karelia, several obstacles for this type of tourism have been revealed. Measures to stimulate Finnish tourists to travel to Russian Karelia are suggested. The results of this study can be used to improve Karelian tourist products by providing services as expected by tourists. The findings are limited to visitors of Russian Karelia and should therefore be interpreted with caution.

Russian Studies in History, vol. 58, nos. 2–3, 2019

This paper examines the historical construction of the Western gaze and the Western observer as disciplinary mechanisms in Soviet cultures. It argues that they were important components of the Soviet subjectivity acting through the affects of pride and shame.

This article explores the Sovietization of Finnish Karelia, i.e. Ladoga Karelia and the Karelian Isthmus ceded by Finland to the USSR in 1940 and 1944, as a multifaceted and contradictory process that produced feelings of national loss and erasure which Finnish visitors experience when they travel to the region today. Ironically, the Sovietization process in this region also had the seemingly opposite effect of creating and preserving a general impression of Karelia as a foreign territory in the minds of the Soviet citizens who moved there and whose descendants still inhabit the region. These seemingly contradictory outcomes of the Sovietization of Karelia can be traced to the political climate of the post-war era in the region, when nationalization discourse to some extend promoted a union between Karelians and Finns. The ceded area around the Ladoga Lake became a part of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic and maintained its Finnish place names despite the fact that the migrants who resettled the Ladoga Lake region after the war spoke neither Finnish nor Karelian and knew nothing about the territory’s history. Ladoga Karelia preserved what appeared to be an exotic character to its new residents from throughout the USSR. Relying on the published and archival materials from the 1940s and 1950s, the author focuses on the production of a new socio-territorial identity of this space and addresses the historical legacy of the region, its appropriation in the official Soviet narrative, and aspects of Soviet migration there. By analyzing the oral histories of the local inhabitants, the keystones of local memory in the region are discerned.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021

Russian-Nordic borderlands are an important area of intense contact and cooperation between various communities with diverse sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds. During the recent decades, such contact has significantly intensified, bringing into life new linguistic and cultural strategies and creating new identities in the region. Based on field data, we argue that this borderland region features a unique linguistic and cultural landscape imbued with multilingualism and multiculturalism, most of whose residents-indigenous and nonindigenous alike-become involved in the cross-border contact in one way or another. The contact becomes an indispensable feature of the local landscape, defining its sociocultural image and acting as the strongest marker of the local residents' identity. The study also highlights the general idea of linguistic and cultural contact as one of the main life strategies in the region.

SYMPOSIUM: LANDSCAPES OF SOCIALISM: ROMANTIC ALTERNATIVES TO SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Serguei Alex Oushakine Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life: Editor's Introduction 2. Fabien Bellat An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens 3. Juliana Maxim Building the Collective: Theories of the Archaic in Socialist Modernism, Romania circa 1958 4. Mari Laanemets In Search of a Humane Environment: Environment, Identity, and Design in the 1960s–70s 5. Oliver Sukrow Subversive Landscapes: The Symbolic Representation of Socialist Landscapes in the Visual Arts of the German Democratic Republic 6. Alexey Golubev “A Wonderful Song of Wood”: Heritage Architecture and the Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 7. Elena Gapova “The Land under the White Wings”: The Romantic Landscaping of Socialist Belarus The contents of the first issue of volume 29 of Rethinking Marxism are reflections on the relation between space and society. They all explore how the imaginations of particular historical eras take shape in space. In that spirit, we start the volume with a symposium, “Landscapes of Socialism: Romantic Alternatives to Soviet Enlightenment,” edited by Serguei A. Oushakine, on architecture, art, and landscape design in former socialist countries, and exploring the relation between these historical forms and transformations in society. In “Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life,” Serguei A. Oushakine contextualizes the contributions to the symposium. He starts his narrative with a reference to a visionary of Soviet architecture, to El Lissitzky’s manifesto, wherein the leading constructivist set out the spatial imagination of suprematism, which would shape the new world of socialism. In this utterly radical imagining, the reshaping of the world would take place through the “rhythmic” dissection of space and time into meaningfully organized units, which would move together with the transformation of the tools of representation, resulting in what Lissitzky named a “new theater of life.” Oushakine argues that the utopian radicalism of the constructivists remained—despite the industrialization embarked on in 1928—with leading architects such as Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch designing Moscow as a “green city” that would be transformed into a huge park; this would be realized in an economical way with a view to solving the problems of the big city, such as dense traffic. The new imagination represented both a desire for a radical break with and erasure of the past and also a refusal to inherit. The contributions to the symposium, argues Oushakine, develop more critical and complex stories of this “historical nihilism” of Soviet modernity. Each points to how this original refusal to claim history gave way to historicizing and historicist perspectives. These disparate ways of alluding to the past are aggregated under the name of Sotzromantizm, in which the spatial vision of early Soviet modernity synthesized with influences of the past, a seminal reference being made by Anna Elistratova in 1957 when the author questioned Socialist realism, pointing at the romantic traditions as possible sources of inspiration. Sotzromantizm, argues Oushakine, flowed in the works of architects, artists, and writers in diverse forms, creating a new “politico-poetical theater of life” and along the way providing alternatives to the rationalism of Soviet Enlightenment.

This article examines architectural preservation in North Russia after World War II as a movement that treated local vernacular architecture as a key to understanding authentic national history of Russia. It argues that the activities of Soviet architectural preservationists were driven by romantic nationalist ideas that sought to establish northern Russian vernacular architecture as an aesthetic system that fully realized the expressive potential of wood as a construction material. Moreover, Soviet preservationists linked this system to a society free of social conflicts that allegedly existed in North Russia thanks to its geographic and political marginality until the tsarist oppression of the nineteenth century. While widely employing the conceptual apparatus of early Soviet Marxist architects, such as Moisei Ginzburg and Aleksei Gan, Soviet architectural preservationists petrified the transformative social agenda of early Soviet architectural theory.

Baltic Region

This article considers the development of cross-border trade and tourism in the Russian- Finnish borderlands in the 19th/21st centuries. We describe the evolution of cross-border trade in the Russian-Finnish borderlands at different stages of the territory’s development. The patterns of cross-border trade have always been depended on the national policies of the two countries. Since the 19th century, cross-border trade in the Russian-Finnish borderlands has been the product of two factors. The first one is the demand from local residents for certain imported goods that are either absent or much more expensive in their own country. The second factor is the possibility of receiving additional or even basic income. We distinguish several periods (peddlar trade, Soviet-Finnish tourism, shuttle trade, shopping tourism) in the evolution of Russian-Finnish cross-border trade and identify their major trends and characteristics. We describe the general patterns of cross-border trade in these...