My dissertation presents how several collective identities are bound by diverse transnationally spatial processes around one and the same geopolitical border. The Finnish-Russian border has several overlapping formal and informal meanings. My case studies between 2010 and 2018 display the border’s meaning-making, both as a boundary in its own right and as a small element of a larger scale. While it is defined as a national border in international and national perspectives, for people in North Karelia it is also a border with the most familiar Russia, which they differentiate from the Russia in bilateral and international contexts (Article 2). In discussions of regional identity on the eastern side of the border in the Republic of Karelia, the border can for some be a less highlighted signifier of identity than its borders with other subjects of the Russian Federation (Article 3). For Finnish-Russian dual citizens it is a border between two homelands (Article 4).
However, several contexts highlight it as a border between Russia and what is perceived as the “Western” world (Articles 1 to 4). In this chapter I briefly review the apparently classical geopolitical boundary and the complexities of its frontier, transnational, and borderland features as my dissertation’s contextual background.
When the Empire of Russia annexed most of what became known as Finland from the Swedish Empire in 1812, the bounds of this territory did
awakenings in the nineteenth century preceded the establishment of the modern state border which separated them in 1917 (Paasi 1996:83–85, 137–156). While their shared history before this separation has several remaining marks, particularly visible in the urban landscapes of St Petersburg and Helsinki, this common period is relatively little present in media and public commemoration in Finland (Lounasmeri 2011; Article 2) and in Russia (Davydova-Minguet 2019; Izotov 2018). In the late 1910s, before the establishment of what became strictly closed formal state borders, there was a brief period when the frontiers witnessed informal trade, and armed conflicts took place between the recently established Finnish state and a Soviet Russia riven by civil war (Roselius & Silvennoinen 2019).
The meaning of the Finnish-Russian border differs notably between national identity canons. The border was drawn in its current place as a result of the Second World War, and it became a key objectifying visualiser of the Finnish and Russian historical Selves. However, the Finnish national canon emphasises the Winter War (1939–1940), which is an almost forgotten skirmish in the Russian canon, which emphasises “the Great Patriotic War” (1941–
1945) (Kangaspuro 2011; Davydova-Minguet 2018; Wells 2020). Throughout the history of the Soviet Union the border was securitised, allowing low cross-border mobility. However, it is notable that all Soviet external (and to a degree even internal) borders were under a similar regime. Although its location remained unchanged, the meaning of this border changed significantly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it became more open (see e.g. Paasi 1996;
Moisio 1998; Kähönen & Laine 2019).
Karelia has been a vaguely located, imagined, and mythicised land for centuries, with great natural, cultural, and historical significance in both Finland and Russia (Suutari & Davydova-Minguet 2019:5–6). In the history of boundary relations the vagueness of Karelianness has functioned as both a source of connection and conflict. When the Russian Empire fell, there was no administrative region of Karelia. In 1920 most of the former Olonets Governorate was reformed as the Karelian Labour Commune, and again as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923. On the Finnish side of the border the province of North Karelia was formed in 1945 in the regions of the former province of Kuopio, and the province of South Karelia in the former
province of Kymi (the remaining parts of the ceded province of Vyborg 1812–
1945) in 1997. “Karelia” became a site of the political imaginaries of “Greater Finland” and the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic during the Second World War before the post-war order consolidated its geopolitical borders (Paasi 1996; Liikanen 2013). Their administrative significance changed first in 1956 with the establishment of the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then with the establishment of the federal subject of the Republic of Karelia in 1992, and then with the centralisation of its administrative power to Moscow in the 2000s (ibid.; Goode 2011). Most recently, in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of the border with Finland.
Since inner borders in Russia are discussed as a concern for corruption, criminality, and ethnic tensions, their quality and legitimacy have been a politically sensitive topic, particularly regarding ethnic federal subjects (Kähönen & Laine 2019). Within the Republic of Karelia, ethnicity is historically formed in formal and informal institutions and relations between Russianness, Finnishness and Karelianness. In practice these representations are characteristically flexible, political and transnational (Davydova-Minguet 2019; Sotkasiira 2019).
Bordering Russianness from Finnishness and vice versa goes well beyond territorial delineation. Paasi (2011, 23) calls the Finnish-Russian border an example of an “emotional landscape of control” in its labelling as a division between East and West. The geopolitical or “civilisational” boundary between
“the West” and Russia is much scrutinised due to the flexibility of this informal demarcation. This is arguably influenced by the popularisation of Samuel Huntington’s (1996) book The Clash of Civilizations title rather than its content.
While the civilisational division is widely criticised in the scientific discourse, the political myth is not false by default, because at times it refers to empirically real conflicts and has a self-realising function in producing identities (Bottici
& Challand 2010, 2; Eide 2008; Laruelle 2016).
“Westernness” manifests frontier functions of cultural, economic, and political exchange, among others things by the distribution and consumption of transnational media flows enabled by the increased mobility of people, goods, and information. If the EU, Schengen, and NATO borders are defined
new member state. This border definition has famously been incorporated in the encircled Russia narrative and discourse, affecting the geopolitical modalities of Russian situatedness. Whereas the states between the EU and Russian geopolitical ambitions have been referred to as “borderlands”
(Zhurzhenko 2014), EU-Finland is a little more ambiguously a borderland between Russia and NATO. However, in recent years Finland has increased cooperation with the transatlantic alliance.
For transnational subjects like Finnish-Russian dual citizens the Finno-Russian border reflects their everyday security and vulnerability. In the European context there are two major groups of discourse concerning Russians abroad: the diaspora due to the “emigrated” borders after the fall of the Soviet Union; and the people who have themselves emigrated.
Russian borders embed constitutionally different meanings for these two groups. Finland’s Russian speakers by and large moved to Finland voluntarily after 1991 from the former Soviet states, particularly from Northwest Russia, Estonia, and Ukraine. The border therefore differs for people who emigrated from Russia to Finland and the Russian-speaking minorities in the Soviet breakaway states. However, the geo-historical place of the eastern border contributes to the simplifying stereotype that all Finland’s Russian speakers are from Russia, which is a social reality for people of this group who have moved from other countries or were even born in Finland (Kananen, Ronkainen, & Saari 2018). The people who are bound by both sides of the Finno-Russian border have been securitised in cases like the extension of restrictions in real estate and land ownership for foreign nationals (Kolossov 2011:188; Oivo & Davydova-Minguet 2019). Further, the Russian state has instrumentalised Russian speakers “abroad” as an identity-political project to produce extraterritorial “Russianness” (Zhurzhenko 2014; Lähteenmäki 2015; Suslov 2017).
Making national or ethnic definitions has a global tendency to be ambiguous and controversial, which also applies to defining “Russians” in Finland. Russian legal status was strongly highlighted in the dual citizenship discussions in 2014 and 2017. Although the statistics exist, there is no legal obligation to register citizenship in Finland. According to the 2016 statistics, of 104,997 Finnish dual (multi-)citizens living in Finland, 27,456 had Russian
citizenship, outnumbering by roughly four times the next largest group of Swedish dual citizens. The 30,970 Russian citizens residing in Finland are the second largest nationality group after Estonians, some of whom are Russian speakers. Furthermore, 11,356 (2016) people born in Finland have either a mother or both parents from Russia or the Soviet Union, and while there is no census data on bilinguals, Russian speakers are the country’s largest non-official language group1.In 1990 the share of Russian speakers of Finland’s population was 0.5 per cent (3,884). By 2010 the number had grown to 54,559, and by 2017, at the time of the discussions in Article 4, to 75,444.
During the 1990s 60–70 percent of immigrants moved to Finland through a repatriation programme aimed at Finnic groups emigrating from the former Soviet Union. Geographically, Russian speakers reside largely in the eastern parts of Finland, with the largest numbers in the capital region (Varjonen, Zamiatin, & Rinas, 2017: 9–12, 16, 30).
Overall, a scrutiny of the statistics reveals how ambiguous and even misleading Russian identification can be. Official categorisation by language is an oft-used identification criterion that I have also used in referring to my informants, even though its point of reference is inaccurate. While some of Finland’s Russia speakers happily highlight their Russianness to other people, there are others who want to distance themselves from this identification, either because they do not identify themselves as Russian or wish to avoid negative reactions. Many of Finland’s Russian speakers have experienced prejudice based on the historically negative otherness discourse of Russianness in Finland (Klinge 1972; Paasi 1996). Several studies have exposed experiences of discrimination and prejudice against Russian speakers (Pöllänen 2014, Varjonen, Arnold & Jasinskaja-Lahti 2013). A Russian association has even been considered to undermine people’s social status (Ronkainen 2009:213; Krivonos 2019). Within a wider context, the discussion of the inclusivity of Finnish nation-ness emerged as a major politicised topic in the 2010s. Focusing as it has mostly on people from the Middle East and North Africa and issues of Islam, the relationship of Russianness to Finnishness has
1 By the end of the decade their number had reached almost 82,000
faded into the background of this discussion (Article 2; Davydova-Minguet &
Pöllänen 2017; Oivo 2021). In the Finnish media the long-term cultural and media production of Russian otherness has been recognised, less in the form of direct prejudice but in a negative overall picture (e.g. Raittila 2004; Ojajärvi
& Valtonen 2011; Laine 2015).