Of Soviet bondage

By Mayme Sevander

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887801537
• ISBN13: 9781887801539
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: OSCAT
• Length: 157 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Of Soviet Bondage, Publ 1996, 157 pp, 4-1/2 Stars

The book is an account of a lesser known event involving the Soviet Union, that there were groups of people that actually gave up their citizenship's in the West and went to the Soviet Union during the 1920's and 1930's, in this particular case, Finns to a part of the Soviet Union bordering called Karelia. Karelia is a region where, before WWII, large parts were in Finland and some parts were in Russia. The Karelian language is a Finno-Ugric language, similar to Finnish and Estonian. As a background to events surrounding Karelia, the Soviet occupation of Karelia occurred during what is called the Winter War, which is when the Soviets invaded Finland in the Winter of 1939-49 in hopes of occupying all of Finland, were defeated badly by the Finns, but not bad enough to drive them out of Karelia, and the Soviet's did there what they did to Eastern Europe that they occupied in 1945, they stayed there, put up large standing army's and began the process of Russification. The events surrounding how Finland, a country of 5 million, was able to withstand an invasion from the Soviet Union, a country of 250 million or so is an amazing fact of history, and should be read by anyone with an interest in history. A reference given by Sevander is Engle and Paananen, The Winter War, The Soviet Attack On Finland 1939-1940. The author herself went back to Karelia in the 30's. It starts out very idealistic, and you start to think that this was going to be an account of how great Stalin and the Soviet Union was while library bookshelves are full of history books that give accounts otherwise. But really she is starting out with the idealism that surrounded all these people and on how they were looking forward to helping out this supposed ideology to the common man. Then the cold reality of Stalin's incredible brutality occurs. Sevander has done an exceptional amount of research into what had happened as far as can be ascertained by those Finns that relocated to Karelia and gives an excellent account of the tragedies that befell most of them. Whether it was accusations of anti-Soviet spying while logging timber, or being beaten for days until signing what ever confessions the Soviets were requesting, or estimates of 800,000 bodies that died from numerous events that were dumped in the concrete building of the canal in the Kola peninsula thus making the excavation and proof of these events cleverly hidden by the Soviets, Sevander gives an account of the horrors that faced these people that ironically were potentially one of Stalin's best assets in improving the productivity of the Soviet Union. But productivity and actual communist theory were of little interest to Stalin, terror was, thus in retrospect for those readers with even a little knowledge of the atrocities of Stalin, it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion in seeing many of these idealism's come to their inevitable end in Stalin's USSR. On page 61, Sevander makes one of the most chilling s