large number of left-wing Finnish refugees fled for the Karelian ASSR. These Finns—an urbanized, educated, and Bolshevik elite—tended to monopolize leadership positions within the new republic. The "Finnishness" of the area was enhanced by some migration of Ingrian Finns, and by the Great Depression. Gylling encouraged Finns in North America to flee to the Karelian ASSR, which was held up as a beacon of enlightened Soviet national policy and economic development. Even by 1926, 96.6% of the population of the Karelian ASSR spoke Karelian as their mother tongue. No unified Karelian literary language existed, and the prospect of creating one was considered problematic because of the language's many dialects. The local Finnish leadership had a dim view of the potential of Karelian as a literary language and did not try to develop it. Gylling and the Red Finns may have considered Karelian to be a mere dialect of Finnish. They may also have hoped that, through the adoption of Finnish, they could unify Karelians and Finns into one Finnic people. All education of Karelians was conducted in Finnish, and all publications became Finnish (with the exception of some in Russian). By contrast, the Karelians of Tver Oblast, who had gained a measure of political autonomy independent of Finnish influence, were able by 1931 to develop a literary Karelian based on the Latin alphabet. These Tver Karelians became hostile to what they saw as Finnish dominance of Karelia, as did some of the small, local Karelian intelligentsia. Reactions to the use of Finnish among the Karelians themselves were diverse. Some had difficulty understanding written Finnish. There was outright resistance to the language from residents of Olonets Karelia, while White Karelians had a more positive attitude toward it. In the summer of 1930, "Finnification politics" became politically sensitive. The Leningrad party apparatus (the powerful southern neighbor of the Karelian Red Finns) began to protest Finnish chauvinism toward the Karelians in concert with the Tver Karelians. This coincided with increasing centralization under Joseph Stalin and the concurrent decline in power of many local minority elites. Gylling and Kustaa Rovio tried to expand the usage of Karelian in certain spheres, but this process was hardly begun before they were deposed. The academic Dmitri Bubrikh then developed a literary Karelian based on the Cyrillic alphabet, borrowing heavily from Russian. The Central Committee of the Council of Nationalities and the Soviet Academy of Sciences protested the