Post-doctoral researcher Okabe Takehiro

The Soviet Union and Transformation of Finnic and Finno-Ugric Interactions and Ideology from the Second World War to Détente

Tieteellinen tutkimus / siihen pohjautuva työ | Nelivuotinen

My postdoctoral research addresses how the Soviet victory in the Second World War and the Cold War transformed the pre-WWII Finnic and Finno-Ugric interactions which had sought the cultural, sometimes political, unity of the Finnic and Finno-Ugric peoples. How did these Finnic and Finno-Ugric anti-Soviet, nationalistic interactions and ideology experience the Second World War and then accommodate themselves to the Soviet, socialist friendship ideology? This research argues on the hypothesis that the Soviet Union not only repressed these ideology and interactions, but also took advantage of them to maintain its imperial rule over Finno-Ugric nations and nationalities under its imperial rule or influence. Utilizing Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, German, and Japanese sources, this study analyzes emotional discourse about the Finnic and Finno-Ugric interactions used by Soviet (including Estonian), Finnish, Hungarian political and intellectual elites and students from the Second World War to the 1960s. Main attention goes to major anniversaries such as the 1949 Kalevala centenary jubilee and the Kalevipoeg centenary jubilees and to historic events such as the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. This methodology is to understand how the prewar and wartime anti-Soviet Finno-Ugric community was integrated into the Soviet socialist affective community after the war. This approach makes it possible to comprehend the imperial formation of an affective community in the Soviet Union and in the socialist bloc after the war and, at the same time, to explain beginning of gradual process of the end of the Soviet imperial rule.