Nature, nationalism and revolutionary regionalism: constructing Soviet Karelia, 1920–1923

Russian Karelia was for the first time in its history united into a single administrative unit on 7 June 1920. The lack of precise directives as to the new region's purpose, administrative status and territory was a measure of the contradictions, conflicting aspirations and countervailing tensions of ideology and exigency inherent in Soviet state-building. On the basis of extensive archival research, this paper considers the ideas and motivations which resulted in the establishment of Soviet Karelia and the subsequent struggles to delineate its regional borders. It aims to elucidate how different actors at the centre and in the locality envisioned the construction of regional space. Underlying the political conflicts surrounding the drawing of Karelia's borders, and giving shape to the diverse prescriptions for regional territorial structure, were differing assumptions and beliefs about post-revolutionary spatial transformation, dissonant conceptions of ‘nature’ and ‘nation’, and divergent understandings of the role and locus of social agency in historical change. By addressing these themes, the paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of early Soviet history and geography, and to the comparative and theoretical study of nationalism, regionalism and the spatial dimensions of political ideology and practice.