Your Ideal European Borders?

[DrakonFin]

I fully agree that we can't allow such big claims to stand. And since you're making the claims, you should provide the sources.

Do you have sources for any of these claims? It's not even the question of political motivation, I've never seen such claims made even by Finnish sources. They're completely incompatible with the population of Eastern Karelia. Eastern Karelia had a total population of about 270 thousand in 1926, of which certainly not all were Karelians. The population increased to 470 thousand by 1939 but this was largely due to large scale Russian immigration. So unless Russia was hiding another 250 to 350 thousand Karelians somewhere, these numbers don't add up. Furthermore, the vast majority of the population in Eastern Karelia was evacuated during WWII, leaving just about 36 thousand Karelians, according to Finnish sources. So how could half a million escape to Finland?

It wouldn't be exactly an exclave. Here's a map (from а Finnish source) to help if you ever want to make that big map. The non-white areas are inhabited by ethnic minorities - the top three different Finnish dialects, the bottom two Izhorians and Votes. It's from 1800, but it at least shows the approximate areas they were settled in.

I am a bit sceptical of Skallagrim's numbers as well, but as to the general question, the population division of Karelia, in 1900-1920, say, it would be possible to delineate a part of OTL Russian Karelia with a Finnic majority to join it with the OTL Finnish Grand Duchy to create a viable Finnic state.

Generally speaking, we can say that at the turn of the 20th century, the western part of Karelia was majority Finnic while the eastern part was majority Russian. Here is a 1930 map I have referred to earlier, showing that at that time, the line between ethnic Finnic and Russian majorities ran roughly along the Murmansk railway:

In 1920 when the "Karelian Workers' Commune" was created, it was 60% Finnic. When it was in 1923 restructured into the Karelian ASSR, majority Russian areas were added in an effort of ethnic gerrymandering to bring up the comparative number of ethnic Russians. This is what created the numbers we see in the 1926 census.

After that, of course, it was downhill for the ethnic Karelians and Finns in the KASSR, with the double whammy of Stalinist policies (purges and relocations) and the events of WWII making it sure that Finnic ethnicies become in a few decades endangered in Karelia.

So - without digging any further for sources, we could IMHO realistically say that circa 1900-1920, one could create a majority Finnic province out of the western parts of Russian Karelia, with the eastern border running from the Karelian isthmus to Lake Ladoga, onwards to Lake Onega and from there to the White Sea, and thereon towards the Arctic Sea to include some of Kola (which prior to the building of the Murmansk Railway was quite sparsely inhabited), to be then included into the Finnish Grand Duchy to create a joint pan-Finnic nation or a "Greater Finland" if you will.

(This of course disregards the question of the Ingrians, the Veps and other, even smaller Finnic minorities in Russia, for whom creating a contiguous connection into this Greater Finland would not be realistic.)

 

[Dementor]

I am a bit sceptical of Skallagrim's numbers as well, but as to the general question, the population division of Karelia, in 1900-1920, say, it would be possible to delineate a part of OTL Russian Karelia with a Finnic majority to join it with the OTL Finnish Grand Duchy to create a viable Finnic state.

I don't disagree here. I'm arguing about the numbers because I don't see how they could be that many Karelians. And I haven't seen it claimed anywhere that half a million Karelians fled from Russia to Finland during or after the war. Have you?

After that, of course, it was downhill for the ethnic Karelians and Finns in the KASSR, with the double whammy of Stalinist policies (purges and relocations) and the events of WWII making it sure that Finnic ethnicies become in a few decades endangered in Karelia.

There was also the fact that a lot of Russians and other peoples emigrated to Karelia, diluting the Karelian population.

 

[DrakonFin]

I don't disagree here. I'm arguing about the numbers because I don't see how they could be that many Karelians. And I haven't seen it claimed anywhere that half a million Karelians fled from Russia to Finland during or after the war. Have you?

Like I said above, I am sceptical about the number and I would be happy if @Skallagrim could provide a source for it, including a breakdown.

From the top of my head, and from a few readily accessible pages online, we can say that in addition to the 420 000 Karelians who were evacuated from the areas lost in 1940 (280 000 of whom returned to Karelia during the Continuation War and then were again evacuated in 1944), during 1941-44 Finland received 63 000 Ingrians (etc), 7000 Estonians and 3000 East Karelians as refugees. Most of these Ingrian, Estonian and East Karelian refugees were then handed over to the USSR after 1944, though some continued due west. There would have been other Finnish civilians moving to Karelia for various work, needing to be evacuated in 1944, but that number couldn't be higher than, say, 50 000.

I find it hard to see how we could get the WWII number up to million, even if we would add other wartime evacuations where Finland was involved, like taking 100 000 people from Lapland to Sweden to escape the fighting of the War of Lapland in 44-45, or the 80 000 Finnish "war children" evacuated to mainly Sweden during the war.

One answer is that the Finnish military and its auxiliaries (like the Lotta Svärd) are included in the reckoning - if we put together every civilian and soldier who had to leave Karelia for the 1940 borders in 1944, we would get pretty close to million, I guess. But then the great majority of these people would not be East Karelians, but people who prewar lived within the 1920 borders.

 

[Skallagrim]

As I said, I'm not particularly happy to enter into debate on this, but I can easily provide some sources and figures. It is an interesting subject, after all. I hope, @Dementor and @DrakonFin, that you don't mind if I do put it all beneath a spoiler cut for reasons of keeping the thread uncluttered.

Spoiler

Do you have sources for any of these claims? It's not even the question of political motivation, I've never seen such claims made even by Finnish sources.

Sure. In fact, I've seen the number referenced repeatedly. Now, as I said, I am not ruling out that every time it's mentioned it's based on the same false information/assumption, but in general, the estimation of a lot more displaced Finnic people ending up in Finland than the Russion census figure can account for doesn't strike me as nonsense. As also said, I'm more than willing to grant some leeway there, but the numbers from other areas of origin for these migrants are clear. At which point my question becomes: if they didn't come from Eastern Karelia, then where did they come from? Which ties into:

And I haven't seen it claimed anywhere that half a million Karelians fled from Russia to Finland during or after the war.

The claim is more that there were circa one million Finnic people from the USSR who ended up displaced into Finland. The numbers for other Finnic regions have been determined mostly beyond dispute. Which leaves about 500,000... and I just can't think of any place other than Karelia they could have come from. If there is some other pocket of Finnic peoples in the pre-war USSR that ended up being emptied into Finland due to persecution or something, that can play a role here-- but I'm not aware of any such thing.

Anyway.

Russian Karelia in Search of a New Role (1994), a rather conciliatory work edited by Heikki Eskelinen (which explicitly rejects modern-day irridentism) cites an estimated million ultimately displaced people arriving in Finland from Russia between the East Karelian uprising of 1921 and the aftermath of World War II. This is based on census information from the Finnish government, which—speaking no Finnish—I cannot read in depth. Perhaps worthy of note is that Eskelinen and his co-editors refer to 420.000 displaced people from the USSR-annexed parts of Finnish Karelia, rather than 410.000, which is a number I have more commonly seen. Likewise, they estimate 60,000 or so displaced migrants from Ingria, rather than the 50,000 also cited elsewhere. That would be 20.000 who wouldn't have to come from Eastern Karelia, I suppose— although I cannot judge whether Eskelinen and his co-editors are better-informed or worse-informed than others.

Borders and Border Politics in a Globalizing World (2004), edited by David E. Lorey, cites one million as the total number of displaced Finnic people from the USSR who ended up in Finland as well.

Victims and Survivors of Karelia (2011), edited by Sari Autio-Sarasmo and others, and published in the Journal of Finnish Studies, likewise cites this number. (The work is actually about Finnish-Americans who migrated to Soviet Karelia when Stalin made false promises, and relates how the thing ended in disaster, but the fact that Karelia was underpopulated due to the mass exodus of Finnic inhabitants to Finland is expounded on to explain the Soviet motivations for the whole mad scheme.)

...those are just a few works. I can probably keep up listing till I'm blue in the face. That doesn't mean, incidentally, that the claim has to be taken at face value. As I said: Finland, too, has (or at least had) a stake in making pre-war Karelia seem to be as Finnic as possible— just as Russia had a stake in representing the area as being as Russian as possible. My point is that considering what we know, the Finnish claims are more believable than the Russian ones. I'm not sure about the Tsarist census, but the USSR ones are notorious for being political documents. For instance, it's well known that about 1,5 million Russians were just invented on the spot when population figures didn't meet growth expectations in the 1939 census. When it's Finnish census claims versus Soviet ones, I'll be more inclined to believe the Finnish ones until compelling evidence to the contrary is presented. Simply because the USSR is known to have cooked the books when the census didn't fit the political narrative, while Finland isn't know for that at all.

They're completely incompatible with the population of Eastern Karelia. Eastern Karelia had a total population of about 270 thousand in 1926, of which certainly not all were Karelians. The population increased to 470 thousand by 1939 but this was largely due to large scale Russian immigration. So unless Russia was hiding another 250 to 350 thousand Karelians somewhere, these numbers don't add up. Furthermore, the vast majority of the population in Eastern Karelia was evacuated during WWII, leaving just about 36 thousand Karelians, according to Finnish sources. So how could half a million escape to Finland?

In my view, the best explanation remains that pre-war Russian census figures undercount Karelians in the region (and quite possibly overcount Russians, by registering Karelians or anyone of uncertain origin as Russians).

It's true that the vast majority of the population was evacuated during WWII, leaving behind some 85,000 inhabitants, of whom just under half (c. 42,000 -- not 36,000) were Finnic. (Source: Finland in the Second World War: between Germany and Russia (2002), by Olli Vehviläinen) A major problem is that no actual new census was published in the USSR until 1959. By then, the displacement had all happened. The 1959 census may, as far as I'm aware, be considered accurate. It lists 85,473 ethnic Karelians in Eastern Karelia, and 81,827 elsewhere in the USSR. (There were Karelians elsewhere before the war, too, and these were not displaced: that population does not consist of displaced people from Eastern Karelia.) So that's the post-war situation, and I think we can take that as a given.

The Soviet line is that most Karelians removed from Eastern Karelia returned after the war, and that a small number moved to Finland. (Based on the Soviet figures, that number would be about 23,000 or so.) I think it's far more likely that the pre-war number of Karelians was simply a lot higher than the pre-war Soviet numbers indicate. As I said, I'm more than willing to treat the number of 'one million in total' as a nicely rounded-up figure, but that estimate leaves about 500,000 displaced people moving into Finland from the USSR who had to come from somewhere. Even if the claim of one million is inflated, the difference between c. 23,000 and 500,000 is just huge. Even if the 'one million' cited by Finnish sources is an inflated number based in myth-making and the inherent attractiveness of a nice rounded-up number, I just can't imagine them blithely turning (460.000+23,000=) c. 483.000 into one million.

Known-to-have-been-manipulated pre-war Soviet census figures being wrong just seems like the more plausible explanation for the larger part of the discrepancy. I'm not discounting the possibility that the 'one million' figure is a myth that got to lead its own life. Yet even if that's the case, and even if that whole migration occurred in waves between '21 and '45, it still seems pretty clear to me that a lot more Karelians ended up moving to Finland than should have been able to given pre-war Soviet figures.

On the other hand, this idea--

One answer is that the Finnish military and its auxiliaries (like the Lotta Svärd) are included in the reckoning - if we put together every civilian and soldier who had to leave Karelia for the 1940 borders in 1944, we would get pretty close to million, I guess. But then the great majority of these people would not be East Karelians, but people who prewar lived within the 1920 borders.

--doesn't strike me as a very strange explanation, which might go a long way to explaining certain possibly conflated numbers. It's a hypothesis, but it's worth considering as a possible factor, and I frankly admit I hadn't done so yet.

It's also possible that both explanations for the discrepancy are true at the same time: pre-war Russian figures undercounted Karelians, and post-war Finnish figures overcounted (by counting basically everyone coming into Finland from the area).

It wouldn't be exactly an exclave. Here's a map (from а Finnish source) to help if you ever want to make that big map. The non-white areas are inhabited by ethnic minorities - the top three different Finnish dialects, the bottom two Izhorians and Votes. It's from 1800, but it at least shows the approximate areas they were settled in.

That's very helpful, thank you.



Anyway, to conclude: if we assume (as Eskelinen and his co-editors, among others, clearly do) that the expulsion/fleeing of ethnic Karelians to Finland started as of the 1921-'22 conflict, and if we likewise assume that russification was aggressive, then regardless of other discussion about population figures, I can see @DrakonFin's 1930 map as quite realistic. Because regardless of how many Karelians were around exactly, I'm quite willing to believe that by 1930, the Russians simply formed a majority in those eastern areas, and the Karelian people had essentially been driven further west.

Of course, there's still a big difference between 1890 or so and 1930. I remain convinced that no such Russian majority existed in any significant part of Karelia around 1890, and thus of the opinion that a split-up along ethnic/cultural/linguistic lines in the late 19th century would see virtually all of Karelia secede from Russia.

 

[DrakonFin]

As I said, I'm not particularly happy to enter into debate on this, but I can easily provide some sources and figures. It is an interesting subject, after all. I hope, @Dementor and @DrakonFin, that you don't mind if I do put it all beneath a spoiler cut for reasons of keeping the thread uncluttered.

[snip]

Anyway, to conclude: if we assume (as Eskelinen and his co-editors, among others, clearly do) that the expulsion/fleeing of ethnic Karelians to Finland started as of the 1921-'22 conflict, and if we likewise assume that russification was aggressive, then regardless of other discussion about population figures, I can see @DrakonFin's 1930 map as quite realistic. Because regardless of how many Karelians were around exactly, I'm quite willing to believe that by 1930, the Russians simply formed a majority in those eastern areas, and the Karelian people had essentially been driven further west.

Of course, there's still a big difference between 1890 or so and 1930. I remain convinced that no such Russian majority existed in any significant part of Karelia around 1890, and thus of the opinion that a split-up along ethnic/cultural/linguistic lines in the late 19th century would see virtually all of Karelia secede from Russia.

I have no time or energy right now to go much deeper into this, but to me it seems that between 1918 and 1939, nowhere near 500 000 Karelians moved to Finland from the Soviet areas. If there was an influx of people of that size, very significant in comparison to the Finnish national population at the time, there would be a lot more talk about it in the Finnish historical discourse - as much as about the Winter War evacuees. According to demographic stats, the Finnish population increased in 1920-1940 by 550 000 (from c. 3,15 million to c. 3,7 million). This means that if Finland at the same time received 500 000 Karelians, in 20 years the population would not have seen any natural increase at all, even though if it was natural population growth instead of mass immigration, it would have been entirely in line with the general growth trend between 1890 and 1960. There is also the cultural aspect of adding half a million speakers of Karelian dialects in more western Finnish provinces, not at all a small change. Not to speak of the effects on local and national politics - something we would be talking about as much if not more than about the Finnish Prohibition if it indeed was part of the interwar Finnish reality.

So to me it appears that if that number of people was displaced from Karelia, these are not people who settled in Finland but the great majority of them must have gone somewhere else. One possibility of course is that the figure of one million is a composite number adding together the Karelian evacuations of 1939 and 1944 - adding up incidents of population displacement, as it were, instead of actual people (as in that case at least about 300 000 people who returned to Karelia after 1941 would have been counted twice).

There is yet one possibility, and for me it seems like the likeliest one: this million displaced people refers to Karelians not in the sense of an ethnic Karelian, but as in people living in the general area called Karelia irrespective of their ethnicity or nationality. If we add the Russian Karelians evacuated and displaced to other parts of the USSR (temporarily or permanently) in and after 1941 to the Finnish Karelians evacuated in 1939 and to the Ingrian refugees during the war, and refugees during the Russian Civil War as well, we easily get to "one million Karelians displaced from Karelia".

But it is late in the day for me, maybe I'll look into this in more detail tomorrow.

 

[Emperor Joker]

Hahaha, sorry, unlike everyone else my ideal boundaries aren't about self-determination for minorities, it's about balance of power to keep wars from getting out of control because of rivalries and disputes. Every single group having their own nation is not only impractical but ridiculous.

Isn't that pretty much what diplomats and statesman had been trying to do OTL since 1815? Didn't really work out for them.

 

[Napoleonrules]

Isn't that pretty much what diplomats and statesman had been trying to do OTL since 1815? Didn't really work out for them.

No, diplomats and statesmen only did that from the Vienna Congress until the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles was not about balance of power, it was based on Wilson's nancy pancy feel-good let everyone have a nation state crap. Given that the Concert of Europe system was awesome for 100 years but Wilson's "let the minorities have their nation-states" held for only like less than 20 years; the post-WWII system, also based on balance of power and NOT minorities getting their way- this led to 50 plus years and once it collapsed and minorities got to start going their own way, what do we have? Wars! I'd say the balance of power system works better.

 

[Emperor Joker]

No, diplomats and statesmen only did that from the Vienna Congress until the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles was not about balance of power, it was based on Wilson's nancy pancy feel-good let everyone have a nation state crap. Given that the Concert of Europe system was awesome for 100 years but Wilson's "let the minorities have their nation-states" held for only like less than 20 years; the post-WWII system, also based on balance of power and NOT minorities getting their way- this led to 50 plus years and once it collapsed and minorities got to start going their own way, what do we have? Wars! I'd say the balance of power system works better.

I mean, the Vienna Congress system was never very stable to begin with, considering all those nationalist rebellions that had to be put down over the decades.

 

[manitobot]

A European Federation.

 

[DrakonFin]

No, diplomats and statesmen only did that from the Vienna Congress until the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles was not about balance of power, it was based on Wilson's nancy pancy feel-good let everyone have a nation state crap. Given that the Concert of Europe system was awesome for 100 years but Wilson's "let the minorities have their nation-states" held for only like less than 20 years; the post-WWII system, also based on balance of power and NOT minorities getting their way- this led to 50 plus years and once it collapsed and minorities got to start going their own way, what do we have? Wars! I'd say the balance of power system works better.

The Concert of Europe system was awesome for minority nationalities (under, especially, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires) if what they wanted was stable, dependable marginalization and oppression. It very much seems to me that you are blaming the smaller peoples of Europe, wanting freedom and self-determination for themselves, for the two world wars that were both kicked off due to the overarching interests and decisions of the major European powers, and which led to great suffering for many smaller nations to boot. And even many of the civil wars we have seen post-world wars and post-Cold War were really due to major powers clamping down on problems instead of trying to solve them when they had all the power to do so, with the shit hitting the fan when that control was reduced. Often they were problems they had created with their own policies and decisions in the first place. What with the Soviet Union and its minorities, we can even say that we dodged a few bullets and avoided civil wars that might have well happened after the Soviet system fell, due to Moscow's high-handed treatment of smaller peoples.

"Balance of power" could be all well and good, if it could be maintained responsibly with equitable outcomes for all or at least most nations and peoples, unfortunately it is the major powers themselves who can't seem to uphold it. Don't blame the smaller peoples for the shortcomings of their "betters". Letting the big nations rule over the smaller ones in the interest of "balance and stability" is not a panacea, because the major powers are also ruled by mere human beings able to make mistakes and wrong decisions just like the leaders of smaller nations. And of course when a major power makes a bad mistake, the fallout will be that much worse than with a small nation committing a similar snafu.

 

[kuzux]

* To fix the Balkan mess; Ottoman Empire controls Balkans up to their 1699 frontiers (plus maybe Cyprus).
* An independent Republic of Turkey exists in Anatolia, though.
* Independent Eastern Prussia exists (similar to 1939 shape of it).
* Rest of Europe continues to exist, as is the European Union.
* UK is dragged out into the middle of the Atlantic.

 

[Skallagrim]

* To fix the Balkan mess; Ottoman Empire controls Balkans up to their 1699 frontiers (plus maybe Cyprus).
* An independent Republic of Turkey exists in Anatolia, though.

I seriously doubt that's going to fix the Balkan mess (since most everybody there resented Ottoman rule, and without Turkey as a power base, Ottoman rule will last about three minutes). On the other hand, the very idea of the Ottoman Empire existing, but not controlling Turkey, is very original. Maybe if the POD is that the Ottomans somehow convert most everyone in the Balkan region to islam, it can work out perfectly. Then Turkish nationalist, feeling that the Ottomans are no longer Turkish enough, secede, while the Ottomans remain highly popular in the (muslim, in this TL) Balkan countries, and presto.

But as long as the Balkans remain pretty much as in OTL, this is going to be a short-lived affair.

 

[kuzux]

I seriously doubt that's going to fix the Balkan mess (since most everybody there resented Ottoman rule, and without Turkey as a power base, Ottoman rule will last about three minutes). On the other hand, the very idea of the Ottoman Empire existing, but not controlling Turkey, is very original. Maybe if the POD is that the Ottomans somehow convert most everyone in the Balkan region to islam, it can work out perfectly. Then Turkish nationalist, feeling that the Ottomans are no longer Turkish enough, secede, while the Ottomans remain highly popular in the (muslim, in this TL) Balkan countries, and presto.

But as long as the Balkans remain pretty much as in OTL, this is going to be a short-lived affair.

Well, the Ottoman-controlled Balkans isn't meant to be a final solution (By the way, it's not like Turks would be a really small minority in that union, European Turkey's population is comparable to the entirety of Greece) It's more or less "Balkans fucked up bigtime OTL" and giving them a blank slate to reshape the whole area. You can replace the Balkans-only Ottoman empire with any political entity that covers the entire Balkans. Ottoman restoration seemed a bit better to me than a Byzantine one to me. Or better than a mega-Yugoslavia.

 

[123456789blaaa]

I seriously doubt that's going to fix the Balkan mess (since most everybody there resented Ottoman rule, and without Turkey as a power base, Ottoman rule will last about three minutes). On the other hand, the very idea of the Ottoman Empire existing, but not controlling Turkey, is very original. Maybe if the POD is that the Ottomans somehow convert most everyone in the Balkan region to islam, it can work out perfectly. Then Turkish nationalist, feeling that the Ottomans are no longer Turkish enough, secede, while the Ottomans remain highly popular in the (muslim, in this TL) Balkan countries, and presto.

But as long as the Balkans remain pretty much as in OTL, this is going to be a short-lived affair.

The Balkans were the Ottomans power-base. Timur basically destroyed Ottoman power in Anatolia and the Ottomans were able to recover because their most productive provinces in the Balkans were left intact-and that was without Constantinople. Tons of 19th c Ottoman reformers came from the Balkan provinces...I could go on. The idea that Anatolia (which I assume is what you mean by "Turkey") was the Ottomans power-base is a misconception. Besides the western coast, it was actually once of the poorest and most backwards parts of the Empire. Ankara for example was an irrelevant provincial town before the central government moved there.

Turkish nationalism barely existed before the 1877-78 war and had to be painfully constructed afterwards. A PoD in which the OE converts most of the Balkans to Islam will render later nationalism quite different.

In terms of "fixing the Balkan mess", the entire notion that kuzux presents is so odd and unlikely that it's very difficult to pronounce judgement on it without actually seeing specific details. Do the Serbs still revolt in the name of the Emperor like they did in OTL? Is the central government at the time strong enough to support them against the rebelling Janissaries and ayans? Has the central government even weakened enough to allow local elites to oppress the Christians that much? Does this OE create a parliament that disproportionately represents Christians and Jews like the one in OTL did? Talking about how everyone in the Balkans resented Ottoman rule and that's why OE rule can't fix things isn't really correct. Christian (and Muslim) dislike of the central OE government was a changing and multi-faceted thing. There are a myriad of possibilities which didn't happen in OTL.

 

[Pokemon Master]

Is it too late to post a map?

 

[Wendell]

That Ukraine would not be a viable country.

 

[CaliGuy]

Is it too late to post a map?

No Belarus?

 

[123456789blaaa]

I don't understand why so many people are splitting up the Balkans and severing Anatolia. Even if you hate the Ottomans, why would a state like the Byzantines be worse than a bunch of split states?

 

[longsword14]

Is it too late to post a map?

WTF happened to Sweden ?

 

[Wendell]

WTF happened to Sweden ?

Sapmiwank I think.