The Search for a Socialist El Dorado

The authors’ command of their subject matter is masterly, their approach combines both breadth of view and depth of detail. The book is unpretentious in tone, but impresses by the weight of sheer facts. This insightful book can be recommended for everyone, who wishes to understand the world of the 1930s, with its illusions and its harsh realities. The story is unique, well researched, and well-written.
—Timo Vihavainen, Professor of Russian Studies, University of Helsinki

Drawing on a vast range of new sources, including their own oral history interviews, Golubev and Takala have written the first major account in English of a most dramatic and revealing, yet still little-known, episode in twentieth-century history—the mass immigration of North American Finns to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this volume off ers powerful and moving insights into not only the causes and course of the immigration but also into the experiences of the migrants and the tragic fate that awaited many of them during the Stalinist repressions. With this superb book, Golubev and Takala confirm their reputation as two of the best Russian historians writing today. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado will be the standard work on this subject for many years to come, and will appeal to readers interested in the history of the Soviet Union, of modern Finland, and of diasporic communities in the United States, as well as anyone concerned about understanding the historical meanings and importance of migration, ethnicity, identity, political belief, space, and place.
—NICK BARON, University of Nottingham, author of Soviet Karelia: Politics, Planning and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1920–1939