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Title: The stuff epic movies are made of
Review: What an account. Sevander's father was among the leaders of a movement of idealistic Finnish-Americans (from the US and Canada) committed to creating a socialist community in Soviet Karelia. Instead, he and hundreds of others fell victim to Stalin's ruthless paranoia in the purges of the late 1930s.Sevander spent part of her childhood in a gulag before finding her place in Soviet society in World War II. The final irony (actually, it opens the book): During the Glasnost era, the onetime Karelian pioneer town of Petrozavodsk establishes a sister-city relationship with Duluth, Minn., twin city to Sevander's childhood hometown of Superior, Wis. When Duluth sends a citizen's delegation, she's at the railway station to welcome her onetime neighbors.I read no particular propaganda here, just a first-person recitation of empirical fact. In fact, Sevander concludes by reaffirming her socialism, even after returning to the United States to live out her final days.
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