Family Histories of Soviet Exile and Terror : the case of an Ingrian Finnish memory culture

In this article, I explore the memory and great transformation of Ingrian Finnish families originally from Ingria (a historical area around Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union during deportations, Stalinist terror, and clashes of ideologies and practice. In an Ingrian Finnish memory culture, families were an important source and carrier of memories of exile and repression from one generation to another. I used the family archival material of letters, life histories and family narratives, poetry, family trees, and photographs as research material and analyzed the social genealogy of repressed Ingrian Finnish families. The case study of an extended family included several nuclear families, and 33 members and three generations in the 1930s. The family histories demonstrated the great transformation and social collapse of the Ingrian Finnish family members in the 1930s and early 1940s from independent peasants to poor deportees, forced labourers, refugees and prisoners in the Gulag. Members of the extended family were repressed during Stalin’s time, with some managing to take refuge in Finland and Sweden. Two out of three family members were deported in the 1930s and one in three during the Second World War. Half of those deported in the 1930s escaped. Several family members experienced many repressions during their life span; some women were deported several times and most men were deported, arrested, and died at an early age. At least five men were killed in the political violence, four of them were executed in the Stalinist terror in 1938. The nuclear families studied were violently broken up, leaving them without a father. I found a range of family mobilities from escape to education. Based on my analyses, I argue that family histories of repressions were a meeting point with life histories and the minority/national history of Ingrian Finns. Family histories of repressed families build a bridge over the personal and collective memories in the context of Ingrian Finnish memory culture.Peer reviewe