Karelian evacuees: the 400,000 Finns who lost their homes twice

The Karelian evacuees were the largest forced migration in Nordic history, and the part almost nobody mentions is that most of them had to do it twice.

It is worth remembering now that an American president has signed an order renaming Lake Ontario, that Canadian officials have refused to use the new name, and that several mapping companies adopted it anyway. Maps are political instruments. Finland found that out in a fortnight.

What Finland lost

The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on 12 March 1940, ending the Winter War. Finland had held out against the Soviet Union for three and a half months, which the rest of the world found remarkable and which changed the outcome not at all.

The terms took roughly 35,000 square kilometres, about a tenth of Finnish territory. That included Ladoga Karelia, the Karelian Isthmus and Salla. It also included Viipuri.

Viipuri was the second city of Finland and not a provincial one. It had a medieval castle, a cathedral, a port shipping cellulose to New York, trams, department stores, newspapers in two languages and a market square that filled every morning. It was the most polyglot place in the country, which in Finland counts as a genuine distinction. All of it went in an afternoon of signatures.

Twelve per cent of a country

Around 410,000 people were moved in the first evacuation alone. Set against Finland’s population at the time that is about twelve per cent of the country. Across both evacuations the figure reaches roughly 430,000.

It is a difficult number to hold in your head, so try it this way. Imagine one person in eight, in the whole of your country, packing what they can carry and being told the place they are from is now somewhere else.

They went by sledge, by cart, by train and on foot, in the coldest winter anyone could remember, driving cattle ahead of them. At the other end they were billeted on whoever had room. Schools, parish halls and in the case below a music academy.

Then they went back

This is the part that turns a hard story into a cruel one.

The Continuation War began in 1941 and Finland retook Karelia. The evacuees were allowed home and around 260,000 of them went, roughly two thirds. They repaired houses that had been shelled, replanted fields that had been fought over, buried people and restarted schools. For three years there was a version of the future in which the whole thing had been temporary.

They were going back to this. The old cathedral had lost its roof in the Winter War and by 1941 it was a walled yard full of crates, open to the snow. Much of what they returned to was in the same condition, and they rebuilt anyway.

In June 1944 the Soviet fourth strategic offensive came through the Isthmus, the Finnish line gave way, and the same families were evacuated again. This time nobody was going back.

What Finland did next

The response is the reason Finland is still Finland, and it does not get discussed enough outside Finland.

The Land Acquisition Act of 1945 gave every evacuated household a legal right to land. Where there was not enough state or church property to go round, the state compulsorily purchased from private owners, mostly the larger estates in central and western Finland, and paid market rates for it. Owners who gave land up voluntarily got tax relief. Townspeople and business owners received money instead of acreage. The same right was extended to war veterans and to the widows and orphans of the dead.

It worked at a speed that is hard to credit. By late 1948, 96 per cent of evacuated Karelian farming families had been resettled. A country that had just lost a war, was paying reparations to the side that beat it, and had a tenth of its territory gone, rehoused an eighth of its population inside four years.

It is worth saying what this was not. Across the border the same decade produced land reform by confiscation. Finland bought the land and paid for it, at a price, from people who were in no position to refuse but were not robbed either. The bill was enormous and the country carried it.

What it cost the Karelians

Notice what was not done. The Karelians were not settled together and given a region of their own. They were dispersed across the whole country, into parishes that had never met them, speaking a dialect the neighbours found funny.

For most of them that meant absorption within a generation, which was probably the intention and is not the same thing as a happy ending. For one group it meant something sharper. Roughly 38,000 of the evacuees were Border Karelians, Orthodox rather than Lutheran and speaking Karelian rather than Finnish. Scattered into Lutheran Finnish-speaking villages in ones and twos, they had no community left to be a minority inside.

Karelian survives in Finland today as a language with no region. Its speakers were not forbidden it. They were simply distributed so thinly that there was nobody left to speak it to.

The names went too

Viipuri became Vyborg. Every town, village, lake and hill in the ceded territory was renamed and the Finnish names came off the maps.

This is the ordinary final step. First a border moves, then the people are moved, then the names are changed so that the previous arrangement becomes difficult to point at. The renaming is not the beginning of an erasure. It is the tidying up at the end of one.

Which is the thing worth noticing when a government announces that somewhere is now called something else. On its own it is a gesture and gestures can be ignored. Canadian officials have rejected the new name outright. What decides it is not them, but whether the maps people actually use quietly change. What made the Karelian names stick was not the decree. It was the four hundred thousand people who were no longer there to argue.

Also read

The same war erased a city at the other end of the Baltic. Read about Königsberg, the seven hundred year old city that was taken off the map entirely. For more on where displaced Finns ended up, try China Swedes, Forest Finns and the Great Migration.