“History of the Finnish-American
Labor Movement
Through Its Songs”

FinnFest USA, Duluth, MN

1992

I came up with the format in the title instead of a straight lecture on the subject for the 1992 Duluth FinnFest as my presentation. For its unique approach, I’d accumulated numerous Finnish language songbooks over the years from the Finnish immigrant labor and radical movements and their homeland collections I could put to good use. There was a Finnish IWW songbook called “Palkkaorjain Laulukirja” (Wage Slave’s Songbook.) It included “Solidarity Forever,” the virtual anthem of the American Labor Movement, written by Wobbly songwriter Ralph Chaplin in 1915, sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “Solidaarisuutta aina” was the literal Finnish translation of its title. It just had to include “The Internationale” (Kansainvälinen) that I learned as a boy on our Massachusetts farm hearing my mother singing it when scrubbing her Monday morning laundry at our sauna by the lake. Irish socialist James Connell’s “Red Flag” (Punalippu) was another basic favorite in this book, as were Joe Hill’s tunes.

FinnFest organizers were excited by my concept and gave me a slot on the program. I used the IWW’s Little Red Songbook as the source of a few of the songs which included several written by Matt Valentin Huhta, a second generation Finn of immigrant parents from Cleveland, Ohio, famous in IWW circles as “T-Bone Slim,” songwriter, cartoonist, humorist and traveling agitator. I decided to incorporate his song “Popular Wobbly” in my repertoire about a hobo who gets arrested for vagrancy and complains both humorously and poignantly about his life as a jailbird. So I got in contact with the late Professor Michael G. Karni, editor of Finnish-Americana magazine, who ran a literature table at FinnFests, asking if I could obtain a stock of Little Red Songbooks for him to sell since I would sing a number of selections from it, including “Popular Wobbly.” Franklin Rosemont, a full-timer at the Charles Kerr Publishing Company collective in Chicago, had edited a collection of T-Bone Slim’s writings in his book, “Juice Is Stranger Than Friction,” published by Kerr. Mike Karni agreed to sell both at Finn-Fest. “T-Bone” was the U. Utah Phillips of an earlier era as an entertaining IWW labor and folk singer. Duluth was the ideal place for a program like mine as the Upper Midwest was a vital center of the Finnish immigrant labor movement where Finns played a significant role in such struggles as the Mesabi Range mining strikes in Minnesota and the and Upper Michigan’s 1913 Copper Country strike around Houghton-Hancock. These areas had a history of producing thousands of Finnish immigrant socialists, communists, Wobblies, and Finn Co-op movement activists. So I was sure there would be goodly numbers of “Red Diaper Baby” progeny of these Labor Finns at the Duluth FinnFest who’d be interested in this musical history.

I also planned to include songs of a couple of popular Finnish immigrant working class songsmiths, Hiski Salomaa and Arthur Kylander, some of whose songs I had translated into English and would do them in both languages at FinnFest. Salomaa and Kylander might well be compared to later American labor and radical singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, as well as their Finnish-American compatriot, Matt Valentin Huhta. I had no formal training as a singer myself and little experience except in some plays I’d performed in, so I also needed a good accompanist to see me through them. So I got to the Twin Cities early to fill that spot. My good contacts were able to secure Dennis Halme, accordionist with popular Finnish-American Upper Midwest dance bands, to accompany me. We had a good practice session in Minneapolis before leaving for Duluth.

I also did some research at the Finnish Immigration History Archives of Minnesota University, then located in St. Paul and under the direction of its late archivist Timo Riippa. While working with Timo, we decided to perform a dramatized version of piece from Finnish-American literature he had translated from Finnish to English as a FinnFest offering. This program was accepted on the Festival agenda as well.

My musical history show was a popular hit at Duluth to a packed FinnFest house which brought me a solid reputation as an ethnic performer. I had passed out songsheets to the audience to join me in singing the chorus of “Solidarity Forever” in three languages, English, Finnish and Spanish (“Solidaridad Pa’ Siempre”) which it did with lusty passion. When I sang “The Internationale” solo in both languages, only one audience member walked out during my raised fist finale. (The Senator Joe McCarthy Era was decidedly over!) Many audience members came to talk to me at the rostrum after the show, including a tiny white-haired elderly woman who timidly announced she was a sister-in-law of Gus Hall, the Finnish-American US Communist leader. I was invited to a later interview by the host of the local AFL-CIO’s labor program. Mike Karni said that he had sold out my consignments of both the IWW songbook, and the T-Bone Slim “Juice Is Stranger Than Friction,” book immediately after the show.

My dramatic reading with Timo Riippa was also a great success later and Mayme Sevander, who had brought a sizeable contingent of Finnish Karelians from Petroskoi to FinnFest as discussed earlier, and gave me an appreciative hug. There was also a reception for the Karelian Finns most of whom were back on American turf for the first time since as children they were taken to Soviet Russia in the 1930s by their parents to start life anew, often with tragic results, as discussed earlier in these Memoirs. I met people like Ernest Haapaniemi, a ham radio buff, and Ruth Niskanen who had been a soldier in the Red Army during World War II, among others who were living normal productive lives in Karelia during this post-Soviet period. It was good to meet Stella Sevander again who accompanied all these folks to FinnFest who were all well-received. On another Festival occasion, her mother Mayme spoke about her book, “They Took My Father,” of which she sold many copies at Duluth. I had reviewed “They Took” in all the Finnish-American newspapers, and Mayme invited my collaboration on her next book, “Red Exodus: Finnish-American Emigration to Russia,” Oscat, 1993, which I gladly gave and which was published the following year.

As I was now sending and publishing sports and feature articles in the entire Finnish-American press, it was rewarding to meet the editors of all of them in 1992 at Duluth. Maritta Cauthen was present for Raivaaja, the early historically social democratic newspaper in Fitchburg which was now bilingual. I wrote all my submissions in English to all as the majority of their second an third generation readers were not sufficiently proficient in Finnish. Visiting editor Kristiina Markkanen was leaving her slot at the formerly hardline CP Työmies-Eteenpäin for graduate school at the University of Minnesota in Finnish-American studies for a Masters degree before returning home to Finland. Her replacement Johanna Lammi, with a recent journalism degree from the University of Tampere, her hometown in Finland, was also present at FinnFest.. The T-E was still published half in Finnish in Superior, WI for which Johanna’s language skills were needed like Maritta’s for Raivaaja. T-E had also raised funds to begin publishing an all-English language Finnish-American cultural monthly in Superior, with its eye on the future survival of our nationality’s press, called Finnish-American Reporter,whose editor was young Minnesota native Gerry Luoma Henkel, whose mother was of Finnish stock and his father of German origin, who did not know the Finnish language. He was also a kantele maker and player. Both he and Johanna Lammi later became close friends with me up to the present time. Leena Isbom of Finland was present as editor of the New Yorkin Uutiset (New York News) of Brooklyn, NY, also an early Finnish language 20th century paper which was once edited by Matti Kurikka, utopian socialist founder of Sointula, the early Canadian-Finnish communal settlement off Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Amerikan Uutiset (American News) a weekly published in Lake Worth, Florida, I believe was represented by Finnish editor Sakri Viklund at FinnFest. The A-U had the smallest English language section of any of the Finn-Am Press, and remains today as the only predominantly Finnish language newspaper in the United States, with Florida’s large Finnish language influx from both Finland and North America as a winter vacation retreat with many now year-round residents and businesses to support it. I had some good talks with Johanna Lammi who strongly urged me to send in articles to T-E. She came from a strong Social Democratic family background in Tampere and was familiar with the pro-CP origins and history of the paper with which she did not identify. Knowing that many of T-E’s readers still harbored sympathies for its old politics, she particularly would appreciate my democratic socialist orientation as a counter-balance to that fast-fading tradition being expedited by the rapid changes in world politics following the collapse of the USSR and Eastern European “people’s democracies.” With the McCarthyite “red scares” taking their toll on the old Stalinist politics of these red Finns, they were often publicly in denial now of their past and adopted with alacrity the politics of a “progressive” Democratic Party instead. These were mostly people of the sincerest motivations for whom their old politics were nothing to defend. I went through gyrations in my own early experiences in those politics (1948–1950) as I moved toward libertarian socialist options. I also wrote frequently for the new Finnish American Reporter (FAR).

It was fun to get to know Gerry Henkel better in Duluth as well as Faith Fjeld, a Saami of Norwegian descent who I first knew in San Francisco, and who at this FinnFest founded BAIKI, an organization of Nordic Saamis in North America and its excellent magazine of the same name. Faith chaired BAIKI’s founding meeting at Duluth, which quickly expanded to include its Norwegian and Swedish Saami brethren. She also became well known in the Scandinavian Saami culture which became the main focus of her life until her untimely death in 2014.

The major splits in the international communist movement from the time of the Khrushchev Revelations in the early 1950s through the demise of the Soviet Union had major repercussions among its adherents. At the CP-USA’s National Convention of 1989, Party Chairman Gus Hall’s controlling Stalinist faction expelled a large number of its membership who wanted to take the Party on a more democratic path and which became the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). Among them were many of its remaining Finnish-American members, including Urho and Irene Tuominen of San Francisco, who had known fellow Finn Gus Hall since their days in the Young Pioneers and Young Communist League in Minnesota. (I knew Urho and Irene from our days in the Bay Area Kalevala Players in the mid-1980s.) Urho had gone to the 1989 CP convention as a fully credentialed delegate from San Francisco with dues up to date. Urho was met at the registration desk by Gus Hall himself who refused to seat him “because he was delinquent in his dues.” That ended the Tuominen’s long loyal career in the CP who had been blacklisted in the 1950s from the teaching profession for their pains. They had affiliated with the majority of their Bay Area comrades with CCDS. Both Tuominens were at the Duluth FinnFest, but their Minnesota comrades from their youth refused to drive them to the airport for their return trip home to San Francisco as they were now seen as “the class enemy” by Hall’s cohorts.
 

BILL CLINTON ELECTED PRESIDENT

The 1992 Presidential election saw Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee, defeat the GOP’s lackluster one-term incumbent President George H. W. Bush to become the country’s 42nd President by a plurality, with Texas millionaire businessman Ross Perot getting a sizeable vote as a Third Party candidate. The country was in a recession and the personable youthful Clinton with his plain talking way of effectively reaching the common people, didn’t have that much difficulty taking the election with Senator Al Gore of Tennessee as his running mate. Clinton represented the corporate wing of his party through his Democratic Leadership Council in his middle-of-the-road politics. Personally, I registered my usual protest vote, this time for Ron Daniels, a Rainbow Coalition leader, who ran as an independent, along with the convention endorsement of California’s Peace and Freedom Party, receiving 27,396 votes. My former SF Chronicle co-worker and Typographical Union sister Gloria LaRiva was on the New Mexico ballot for her Workers’ World Party, recording 181 votes.
 

1993 —Väinämöinen Returns

It was so exciting returning to the performing stage at the 1992 FinnFest at Duluth, I decided to return in 1993 to the FF in Thousand Oaks, CA in the guise of my old Kalevala persona of Väinämöinen in the Kalevala Players productions at Hancock, Michigan in 1985 and Berkeley in 1986. Only this time I did it as a one-man show of the ancient hero of Finnish mythology reciting in both languages from the epic, ad-libbing in humorous asides, lecturing on an episode of the saga with creative body language added. Again it was a packed house, which included my sister Irma and brother-in-law Terry from the Los Angeles area; my good friend and old socialist comrade Niilo Koponen of Fairbanks, Alaska; old family friends, the former Irene Davis of Worcester, MA, and Irene (Tuomi) Kamila of Westminster, MA, among others. A Finnish documentary filming crew recorded my show which was shown on Finnish national television the following year, along with other footage taken at Thousand Oaks and a post-FinnFest interview at my home in San Francisco. I had a request to do this Kalevala show in a personal performance tour around Pittsburgh, PA by Finnish community leader Seija Cohen in that area, and later by Sinikka Garcia, spokesperson of the Finnish-American Club of Tucson for a single performance in Arizona. (In Pittsburgh, I shared the stage with Finland’s Marja-Leena Juntunen, a music professor at Oulu University and Sibelius Academy.) All travel expenses would be provided, plus room and board and a cash bonus in both cases for the following year.
 

 LIZ BOUTANG NEW F.A.R. EDITOR

During 1993 my good friend Gerry Henkel had quit the editorship of the Finnish-American Reporter due to political differences with the editorial board and was succeeded by Liz Boutang who was of Finnish descent but like Gerry knew no English, but was an elegant journalistic talent. Lynn Laitala and its other feature writers continued on with FAR while Gerry moved on to personal pursuits. I met Liz at the Thousand Oaks FinnFest and learned she was also a talented poet.
 

I’M ELECTED IWW GENERAL SECRETARY-TREASURER

Another other major happening of 1993 was being elected General Secretary-Treasurer of the IWW. Our General Headquarters was still in San Francisco but Jess Grant felt burned out and didn’t want to serve beyond his two one-year terms and was working full-time as a BART train operator.. Our marvelous office worker Melissa Roberts got a hire with Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in Mendocino County to help in the major lawsuit against the FBI over the still-unsolved bombing which almost killed them. I didn’t want the job as I was now turning 67 in March and felt the position should go to a younger working age person, male or female. The Ypsilanti GMB had nominated a woman member for the post on the condition that the GHQ would be returned to the Midwest. We felt that our Headquarters should stay in San Francisco at least another two years as the frequent moving of our main office was expensive and cumbersome. But no other electable candidate in the Bay Area emerged. Everybody was putting the pressure on me to accept the nomination which would be by mail ballot worldwide. It was something I didn’t want. Acting was my main interest and I had recently been hired to work part-time for a San Francisco children’s theater called Lilliput Players owned by a Sunset District family which did tours of Bay Area grade school assemblies, and which paid a very modest salary. Our performance season was getting into full gear. Our General Executive Board had budgeted our GHQ’s salaried jobs to be limited to a total of 40 hours a week at $10 an hour. So until Jess went to work for BART, he and Melissa had split their paid duties at 20 hours per week apiece, hardly a great career move. When Jess went on the trains, Melissa got the whole 40 hours to herself, as he waived any income for himself and pursued his GST duties as a volunteer.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

When Melissa went to the Redwood Empire to her Earth First! gig, Jess hired two Bay Area fellow workers to mind the office at 20 hours each splitting the allotted pay limit of $400 apiece. So William Meyers, an author and Yale graduate with considerable experience in the banking industry, took care of the bookkeeping part of the job, while a chap I’ll call Bill Jones worked the phones and did other public contact gopher duties as needed. During the years 1991 and 1992 we were fortunate to get the volunteer services of Robert Rush, a Wob from the early 1960s who had to drop his membership when he purchased a printing business in Berkeley and hired wage labor to work for him, which was a Constitutional no-no in the IWW. A proprietor member of the Pressman’s Union, he sold the business and retired, which enabled him to rejoin our Union and worked quite regularly and efficiently as a volunteer at GHQ organizing records and files. Robert also informed me if I accepted the nomination for GST, he would be on hand to help at the office with his considerable administrative know-how. So I agreed to run, and would take no salary as I was living on Social Security, my Union pension, savings and whatever I earned on acting gigs. Like Jess, I would just drop by at GHQ a couple of days a week, co-sign checks and fulfill other GST functions as necessary, including correspondence around the country, distance phone calls, and writing my monthly reports for the General Organization Bulletin. I had a lot of support around the country with fellow workers campaigning for me and won election quite handily for a one-year term for 1993. I was also firm in my statement that I would serve ONLY one term, hoping some younger Fellow Workers would run in 1994. Another piece of good luck was that our local attorney member FW Marc Janowitz was reelected to the General Executive Board and offered his steady, sensible hand in conducting our affairs.

We had a bit of a rocky start for the 1993 start of the General Administration. Our bookkeeper William Meyers had run and won election to the General Executive Board (GEB) but since he was a paid office staffer as well, objections about an “entrenched bureaucracy” at GHQ were raised in the Midwest with charges preferred against us. Hardly a promising start for our administration. So in order to diffuse any controversy over the issue, FW Meyers resigned his GEB position as his professional accounting skills were too valuable for us to lose. FW Jones left our employ soon for other pursuits. To take his place we hired Zimya Toms’ Trend, a recent Masters Degree graduate in film-making at San Francisco State University. Zimya was a warm-hearted happy soul we loved to have with us. For her Masters project at State she had made a documentary named “Older Is Bolder” about aging anarchists mostly from the Bay Area which featured Wobblies like folk singer U. Utah Phillips, Ruth Sheridan and myself, as well Bay Area Anarchist activists like Audrey Goodfriend and Jean Pauline. Zimya livened up our office tremendously with her good cheer and high spirits. With our annual IWW convention scheduled for Labor Day weekend for San Francisco, there was a considerable workload for our modest office, and Zimya’s industriousness and work skills were essential for its success.

1993 IWW ANNUAL CONVENTION IN SAN FRANCISCO

We held our convention this year at the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission District on Labor Day weekend. Delegates came in goodly number from the Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Mendocino, Michigan, and Alberta Province in Canada. Zimya worked hard in lining up housing for the out-of-towners and in the registration process. It would be a three-day affair, with a Saturday evening concert. Being GST, I was in the middle of everything and housed several delegates in my spacious flat in the Duboce Triangle District. Jess Grant volunteered to do the organizing of the Saturday concert which he did with Darryl Cherney from Mendocino, to relieve me of the load. We still had considerable money in our treasury we’d inherited from the Nelson and Anderson wills in the past few years. In a referendum vote of the Union membership a short time back we had granted a $25,000 loan to our Earth-First IWW Branch in Mendo during their crisis of the attempted murders of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. This time there was another sizeable request from them to help finance a startup lumbering operation on forest land in that area as a co-op which had been inherited by an EF-IWW member whose name I don’t recall, supported by Judi Bari, which asked for the Convention’s approval to put on a referendum ballot in the fall. Jess Grant who was part of a San Francisco Wobbly band also proposed a referendum item to organize a co-op café, bar, and performance space which could be used as an IWW union hall and requesting a sizeable amount for seed money. There was considerable opposition to both proposals, most vociferously by our Michigan delegates who felt stung by supporting the $25,000 loan they already had been given after a trip to the Midwest by Darryl to campaign for it in that earlier referendum. But it was voted by the Convention to put it on the ballot to let he general membership vote decide it.

Nominations for 1994 officers came from the floor. Bay Area wanted to keep the GA here for at least one more year for the stability of continuity. I, of course. declined nomination for reelection as I’d promised from the beginning. With a lack of younger local candidates, FW Robert Rush reluctantly accepted nomination for GST for the coming year. There was often factional bickering within the GEB, so I agreed to run for the Board myself as I had developed a good reputation as a unifier rather than divider or factionalist.

In the voting for General Officers in our November referendum, FW Rush was elected GST. I received the top vote in the Union for the GEB. Stan Anderson of Seattle, who had been GEB chair, was easily reelected to the Board. As we took office at the beginning of 1994 I nominated Stan Anderson as GEB chair which was accepted by acclamation. The two funding requests went down to defeat in the referendum vote.

By the time I had been elected GST, the Bay Area IWW had signed up the workers at the Berkeley Ecology Center’s Curbside recycling plant on Gilman Street and obtained a contract for them with minimum resistance from the Ecology Center. In subsequent years we won representation rights and contracts for the workers of Buyback Recyclers in the same yard as Curbside on Gilman. These efforts brought a sizeable number of African-American and Latino workers into the IWW. Later, we won recognition with Stone Mountain and Daughter, a fabric shop in downtown Berkeley, which employed mostly woman and gained a contract. These later successes were led by our Branch organizer Bruce Valde and other FWs. Well after my tenure as GST, we won union recognition by card check at Landmark Chain theaters, the Shattuck in Berkeley and the Embarcadero in San Francisco. We don’t have contracts in the latter two, which gives us the freedom to improve conditions through common understanding with managements or through direct action. Detailed written contracts through NLRB auspices or not a common pattern with us as these discourage direct action or strikes outside of the contract limits and duration. In the early days of the IWW written contracts were rare. So being mostly outside of the business union practices gives us more flexibility for action. Evergreen Press is a one-person IWW shop in the Bay Area operated by FW David Karoly.
 

TATIANA AGUREJEVA VISITS USA

I had been in constant correspondence and phone contact with my Russian crush Tatiana (Tanja) Agurejeva all year and toward the end of 1993 I invited her to spend the Winter Solstice Holidays with me in San Francisco. Except for her puppeteering performance tours in Finland she had never been out of Russia and was thrilled with the invitation. Although she lived a comfortable middle class lifestyle in Petrazavodsk there was no way she could pay for such a trip alone. So I bought her a Russian Aeroflot round trip flight between Moscow and San Francisco and picked her up from the air terminal upon her arrival. After arriving at my apartment, she unwrapped a most unusual gift for me. It was a handsome hand puppet of the Kalevala hero Väinämöinen, made especially for me by Boris Gudratsev, the gifted young puppet-maker of her Petroskoi Puppet Theatre, with the arms and legs operated by sticks instead of overhead strings. It was fully costumed to match my own that Irja Friend once made for me including cap, that Boris had made on his sewing machine for the puppet. The great sage’s white beard was cleverly designed and sewn together of white yarn. It would make a fantastic prop for my future shows! I still have the puppet with my estimated worth for it between $800 to $1,000. Although I had a strong romantic interest in Tanya we slept on separate beds and never had sex during her stay. She was Russian Orthodox religiously and related to me as a proper single Russian woman. She had never married at 39. I made no attempt to push my luck.

I showed her San Francisco from stem to stern, and rented a car for several days for a trip to Sausalito and an exploration of Sonoma County with its vineyards. She met a number of my friends with whom she could talk Finnish. So we were together through the winter holidays. I escorted Tanja to SF International for her return Aeroflot return to Moscow. As we were sharing coffee waiting for her boarding time, she remarked to me that “I reminded her of the father she hardly ever knew,” which was hardly the comment I preferred to hear. But with a 30-year age difference, it was unrealistic to expect anything more.
 

1994 — DeKalb, IL FinnFest

I scheduled no program of my own for the DeKalb, Illinois FinnFest in the greater Chicago Area but met my usual old friends like Niilo Koponen from Fairbanks. Minnesota’s Lynn Laitala, feature writer for the Finnish-American Reporter was present and I introduced her to Niilo for the first time. Both became FinnFest regulars and we deepened our mutual friendships. We traveled the lecture circuit, saw films and exhibits and attended the Festival evening dances. After FinnFest, I drove a rented car to the Chicago Airport for a flight to New York where I would pick up a Helsinki flight to spend the remainder of the summer in:
 

Finland & Petrozavodsk

Petrozavodsk named after Peter the Great

I made my usual rounds of visiting friends and relatives in Helsinki, Lahti, Oulu, and Kemijärvi. I also recall attending a couple of regional summer track meets in Finland, always a favorite lifetime pursuit. But my main focus was a return trip to Petroskoi (Petrozavodsk) in Russian Karelia where I wanted to get to know its Finnish community better, and to spend time with Tanya again, who offered her studio apartment for me to stay while she camped out at a woman friend’s. I took a FinnAir flight from Helsinki to Petroskoi, with a stopover in Joensuu in Finnish Karelia.

Boris and Tanya

Tanya’s Mom, Harry and Tanya

Getting off the plane in Petroskoi, I was greeted by Mayme Sevander and her son Leo who drove me to her apartment in the center of the city. Mayme was now dividing her time between Duluth where she taught Russian at St. Scholastica College and her place in Petrozavodsk where she was writing another of her series of books on the North American Finnish emigre history to the Soviet Union, which no longer existed in 1994, with the government now led by its first post-Communist administration of Boris Yeltsin. Tanya came over from her job at the theatre after work and took me to her place to stay from Mayme’s which was within walking distance. Tanya had a modest but tastefully furnished apartment where I stayed while she spent nights at her girl friend’s. The same first day we met with Boris Gudratsev, Tanya’s best friend, the young puppet-maker who had made my Väinämöinen puppet that she gave me on her 1993 San Francisco visit.

Old wooden churches in Kizhi

Boris became my guide in Petrozavodsk as his work hours were more flexible as Tanya worked in the theatre during weekday daytimes. I couldn’t use Finnish markkas or US dollars as currency in Yeltsin’s Russia like I did in 1991. Boris took me to the bank where I bought a thick bundle of Russian rubles for my expendable currency. My major excursion with Boris, who spoke good Finnish, was a visit to the outdoor museum island of Kizhi in the middle of Lake Onega where we traveled by a hydrofoil called “Kareliaflot”. The island was a hilly plot about 6 kilometers long and one kilometer wide and was crowded with old wooden log structures, many of them churches being moved there beginning in the 17th Century. Earlier, starting in the 15th century there had been some tiny farming villages but these were removed during the development that eventually become listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site for tourism. Two large log cupola covered churches are enclosed by fence in an area called the Pogost where two of the most imposing churches are featured. It was an all-day trip for us covering the island on foot, returning to the dock to pick up our hydrofoil for our trip back to Petroskoi late in the afternoon.

One evening after Tanya got off work, she, Boris and I spent the evening at an American-built Ben and Jerry’s ice cream parlor, the most popular meeting spot for the young people of Petroskoi. The building had originally been the club house of Konsomol, the Communist Party Youth League which now had been usurped by the creeping gods of commerce in the new Russia. I also had a chance to visit Martta Ranta-Aho with Tanya, Irene Erkkila’s cousin originally from San Francisco I had met in 1991, in her apartment surrounded by her young Russian-born grandchildren.

Some of the other 1930s Karelian Fever descendants I saw this round were Ernest Haapaniemi and Ruth Niskanen I had first met at the 1992 Duluth FinnFest, at whose home in Petroskoi I spent several evenings on this trip. They had escaped the purges of the terrible Thirties as they were still youngsters during those times but had lived normal lives in the post-war period when things were easier following the Stalin years. Ernest had been a lights and sound man for the Finnish National Theatre in Petroskoi and technically improved their functioning over the years. His inventiveness with the equipment had been adopted by the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in part! Some years ago he had approached the mayor of Petrozavodsk to request a spare room in City Hall to be converted into a museum to honor the North American Finnish immigrants who with their skills and dedicated efforts had contributed so much to the progress and growth of Russian Karelia despite all the political and economic difficulties of the 1930s. He promised that the Finnish community if Petrsokoi would contribute tools, furniture and artifacts of that time to such a museum as well as books, photographs and letters and would enlist scholars of that period from the University in developing the museum’s exhibits. The municipal government agreed and the project became reality.

I was also interviewed by the youthful editor of the city’‘s Finnish language weekly newspaper for a feature article about me he would publish. I also visited the offices of Carelia, the Finnish language cultural quarterly which during the Soviet period had been known as Punalippu (Red Flag) and represented then the Communist Party line. Now it was a scholarly liberal non-sectarian quarterly which did not hesitate to criticize the politics of its earlier existence. I also had tea one evening with Raisa Kasinkina, a leading Karelian folk dancer, with puppet-maker Boris Kudratsev as interpreter, about the possibility of her folk music ensemble performing in the United States. I really had no clout in bringing that about but promised to do my best. Although I had nothing to do in realizing it, her Karelian Folk Music Ensemble was featured in the extremely popular Christmas Revels variety program in Oakland, CA in December, 1999, in which I performed as an actor myself. This community effort draws an audience of 10,000 over ten performances a year at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Oakland.

Dr. Irina Takala

With the assistance of Mayme Sevander, I also had an interview with University of Petroskoi history professor Dr. Irina Takala whose specialty was the North American Diaspora to Soviet Karelia and Viktor Paaso, an activist in the Memorial movement of Stalin’s victims incarcerated in Karelia during the Great Terror.

But one of my most interesting ventures was to attend the inaugural script-reading by a cast from the historic Finnish language National Theatre of Petroskoi as an invited guest as a Finnish-American actor. It was a traditional Finnish play that had engaged a director from Finland to craft its eventual run. I had lunch with the cast and sat through their introductory script-reading. A familiar practice for me but it was in Petroskoi in Finnish not in San Francisco in English. My final meeting before leaving for the airport for my Helsinki flight was with Russian-Ingrian poet Armas Hiiri or Mashin in the lobby at the Hotel Karelia. I had read his moving but economically worded poetry in Carelia magazine in Finnish about the Gulag period and asked him for permission to translate it into English, which he cheerfully granted. (Liz Boutang published the poems later in the Finnish-American Reporter in a beautiful layout.) While I was talking to Armas, Tanya Agureyeva dashed in on her way to work and gave me a hug and peck on the cheek and ran off in tears, realizing this might be the last time she’d ever see me. It was, but it was a tender farewell for my final visit to Petroskoi. But her sweet memory still lingers in my heart in my advanced years!

End of Installment 33