The two main corpora used in the articles of this study are official documents and newspaper publications. Official documents from the Soviet period are mostly preserved at the National Archive of the Karelian Republic (Национальный Архив Республики Карелия or NA RK). The main source used was the fund R-2203, which contains documents of the executive committee of Sortavala’s town council.
The executive committee was formed on 25 December 1940, but suspended its activities until 1944, because of the ‘occupation of the town by the German-Finnish invaders’. Documents covering the period 1944–61 and numbered 1 to 891 were transferred from the town council’s archives to the National Archive in 1966. At a later stage, documents going back to the early 1970s were transferred there, too.
Other funds (R-1051 and R-757) consulted and conserved at the National Archive deal with regional censorship institutions and the state editorial boards, as well as with the situation at Sortavala’s Printing House. Most of the collected materials are official documents. However, for some purposes I referred also to personal funds of particular public figures in Soviet Karelia (f. R-117). Many of these documents contain information on ethnic issues, in particular the situation of Finnish and Karelian culture in the republic, and on local aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church. More general information on religious issues can be found in fund R-310, which conserves documents related to the activity of the central government’s representative responsible for relations with the Church. Several of these documents are concerned with the registration of an Orthodox parish in Sortavala in the late 1940s (see Article 1, Chapter 6.4). Overall, some 180 files have been consulted at the National Archive, in particular from the following years: 1944–
1949, 1950–1951, 1954, 1959, 1962–1962, 1969 and 1970–1974. Documents of a later period are still in the town archives and inaccessible for legal reasons.
For the period after 1974, the main source used were articles from Sortavala’s local newspaper, but which have also been consulted for the period between the 1950s and 1974. In Soviet times and until March 1994, the paper was called Krasnoe Znamia (‘The Red Banner’) und published daily. Thereafter, its name was changed
to Ladoga and, during a short period in the 1990s, its Finnish equivalent Laatokka was being used simultaneously.14 For economic reasons, issues then became increasingly shorter and the daily finally became a weekly in 1999.
Material from the archives and the local newspaper complement each other.
Official documents are mostly protocols of the town executive committee’s meetings and resolutions, but also contain information about the so-called public organisations. In addition, there are directing letters, resolutions and similar documents addressed to Sortavala’s local authorities by the regional council and by party organisations. The correspondence between local and regional political bodies is interesting in the present context, because it reflects the opinions and views of representatives from the town council on socio-economic issues.
It must, of course, be noted that while all these official documents are an excellent source for analysing the official rhetoric, ideological discourse and material related to the education of the masses during the Soviet period, they offer only limited possibilities to gauge public opinion. The newspaper articles, by contrast, present a more lively picture of everyday life in town, despite ideological and political censorship and forms of self-censorship by editors and journalists during most of the Soviet period. After the period of Khrushchev’s Thaw, they allow for a better understanding of social, economic and cultural changes that occurred in Sortavala. In line with the generally accepted periodisation of Soviet history, consultation has focused on the following years: 1955, 1960, 1969, 1978, 1986, 1989 and 1991, to reflect views expressed during the late Stalinist years, the Khrushchev period of Thaw, the era of Stagnation under Brezhnev and the reformist period under Gorbachev. In terms of source criticism, the most liberal period were the late 1980s, when articles largely reflected public opinion and were critical of both the local and central government. Reading issues of the local newspaper published in post-Soviet times gives the impression that a certain independence from the local authorities, which was evident during the late perestroika and was due to the confusion and disorientation that characterised the former communist elite at the time, was gradually lost. In the 1990s the newspaper came to strongly depend on support from the local authorities and became the
‘mouthpiece’ of Sortavala’s mayor. This confirms a general trend observed for local media in post-Soviet Russia, which have lost their importance, appear less frequently and often depend financially on local authorities (Pietiläinen 2003, 26;
2002). Nonetheless, for the post-Soviet years, issues of Ladoga remain a valuable source of information for the present study.
More particularly with regard to border issues, Krasnoe Znamia remained almost silent until the early 1980s; there are only a few mentions of the border during this period, because censorship of this issue was far stronger in this border town than elsewhere in the Soviet Union (see Article 1, Section 3). Therefore, we can
14 From March 1994 to April 1997, the paper was published under the bilingual name Ladoga-Laatokka, a reference to the local Finnish-language newspapier of the pre-war era.
assume that the issues of military secrets and security in this particular case prevailed over ideological tasks and upbringing defender of socialist Homeland. In later years, the border increasingly became the focus of numerous articles, which reported on public debates of border-related issues and on everyday aspects of life linked to the border. For the post-Soviet period, newspaper publications have been a major source for cross-border co-operation and interaction, as well as of post-Soviet discourses on local identity.
To sum up, it should be noted that the case study of Sortavala’s Soviet period (Article 1) relies to a very large extent on archive material and contemporary newspaper publications. Archival documents here cover all aspects of local identity formation of the Sortavala’s community – from military issues to culture. To some extent, archival documents are also discussed in Article 3, in particular with regard to the discourse on the education of the Soviet Personality, the border and ethnic issues, and the so-called internationalist identity construction in the Soviet context.
As to the case studies focussing on the post-Soviet repositioning of Sortavala’s local community and on tourism (Articles 2 and 4), they are based solely on newspaper material of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.