so wtf is my ethnicity? i tell the answer



i consider myself livvi-karelian and finnish because that's what i actually am, both in my blood and in my culture.

i have family roots from ladoga karelia (suistamo) and eastern finland (all over the eastern finland).

my cultural background is mainly karelian and secondly finnish. this was because the finnish members of our family were not particularly balanced and well-liked. in a way, this is why i personally alienated finnish culture, because in our family it was associated with people we didn't want to have anything to do with anyway. however, no matter what the culture at home is, you absorb influences from outside the home, including finnish culture. of course, when you live in finland, you have something finnish about you, obviously.

i always notice the finnish side of myself when i hang out with karelians who live in russia, because they, in turn, have that russian side that shines through.

so what has karelian culture meant to me in practice? how did i realize that i was karelian? initially, sometime in my childhood, i wondered how my grandmother referred to me and many other family members as karelians, even though we had never set foot in the karelian region of lake ladoga. i remember being in the karelian association (karjalan seura) guest rooms listening to my grandma and other people speaking livvi-karelian and at first i thought it was just an interesting codeswitching between finnish and russian and not its own language. the most confusing thing, however, was that this language was written in the suistamo heritage association magazine (suistamon perinneseura), so it wasn't some oral finno-russian code switching thing that our karelian buabos were speaking. i thought it was code switching because along with livvi-karelian, our family spoke finnish and russian.

my native language is finnish but i have always understood livvi-karelian so it's my second language. if you give me any text written in livvi-karelian, i can translate it. i have internalized it passively through contextualization, and through the fact that i have heard so much finnish and russian in my life that i know what it says in livvi-karelian.

in practice, what it felt like to be a karelian was that i didn't realize that we were karelian even though my grandmother said it a million times that we were karelian, so there was a concrete feeling that, oh, so we are some kind of group that is finnish-russian, right? for example, i remember that in the city where i was born, kotka has a vibe that has a lot of both finnish and russian influences in the city. it is a finnish city but there are many historical buildings such as the tsar's fishing cottage, an orthodox church and numerous fortresses such as fort yekaterina, fort slava and fort yelizaveta and castle of kymi. kotka has a little bit of st. petersburg vibe, which is historically understandable, because kotka was specifically a buffer zone for st. petersburg and it is still easy to get to st. petersburg from there. i also remember watching the movie "anastasia" when i was little, and i completely identified with the homeliness of that movie.

my whole life was fucking weird because finns generally hate russians blindly and then in a way, yes, in my family we always hated russians mainly because they love communism, imperialism and took our home, but at the same time it felt so strange that ok, if we hate russians, then why do i feel like i'm more "russian" than the average finn? and the strangest thing was that i'm not even russian, i don't speak russian as mother tongue (i learned it later), and no russian-speaking relative identifies as russian but as somewhat finno-ugric. like ok, we have orthodox christians and lutherans, we have finnish-speakers and russian-speakers along with "people who codeswitches both languages" (livvi-karelian speakers) without accent, we follow both finnish and russian media, like, i know that not many finnish families have this kind of background. who the fuck we are? and why does my relative work in the army and, on top of that, why do people like me work in the defense forces in such a general way compared to the average finn? why do we even have our own military oath for orthodox christians? why are we significantly more conservative, more communal and more extroverted than the average finn? why are finns bad at social skills and we are not so bad, why do we communicate well? why does our group resemble russians or americans more on a social level than reserved finns? speaking of americans and russians, why do we, like them, work in the military, like guns, hunting, and fishing? why do i get along with "russians" in finland, and why is it that almost every time i meet a "russian" in finland, their entire family speaks perfect native-level finnish, from children to grandparents?

i also remember when we went to school trip to a place called "ugrin paikka" where there were udmurts talking about their culture. i identified with the udmurts more than i have ever identified with the average finn. when i went to the karelian museum in lappeenranta, it was full of my culture. why do i identify with this and not with the average stuff that exists in finnish culture?

well, i found answers to every question i just presented. karelians are ethnic group with endangered language, karelian (which has a lot of dialects and our family's dialect is livvi). both finns and russians have historically sought to assimilate karelians into either finns or russians after world war ii and we can thank the father sunshine a.k.a funny georgian mustache man a.k.a stalin for this because he drove the karelians out of their homes and those who stayed in karelia were killed. my family left suistamo because they were devout orthodox christians and hated communism. because of this, many karelians speak finnish or russian and are strongly mixed with finns and russians, which brings a feeling of the mixing of two cultures and their in-betweenness. finns are viewed in two ways, we are grateful to them for allowing us to live in finland and not be in putin's russia, but at the same time, they have traditionally been annoyed by the hypocrisy of finns. finnish nationalism traditionally includes a karelian aesthetics, although at the same time there were attempts to assimilate karelians by calling them by slurs like ryssä (slur for russians) and making them abandon the orthodox religion and language. finns have always taken things from karelian culture, removed the russian influences from them, and claimed them as finnish.

they don't hate finns or any other ethnicity directly, but they hate people called ruočči in karelian language. ruočči is like, non-karelian or highly-assimilated self-hating "karelian" person who hates karelians and especially in the way that they hate the russian-influenced aspects of our culture. ruočči literally means "swedish" and is traditionally used as slur of lutherans / protestants, but the fact that you are swedish or lutheran / protestant does not in itself make you a ruočči. i can give a pertinent example, i remember when the member founder family of helsingin sanomat, eljas erkko said "mannerheim was always a ryssä and never recovered from that disease". mannerheim was lutheran and finnish swedish, so you might say in traditional sense, that he would be ruočči but nah. eljas erkko is ruočči. despite being lutheran and swedish, mannerheim never despised russian culture, but eljas despised. ruočči are people who absolutely hate like, orthodox church, russian influences, anything that doesn't fit in finnish nationalist narrative, ruočči wants to think that every single finno-ugric group would be purified if they just leave orthodox faith and give up their russian influences and change all of that to protestantism and finnishness even though ruoččis don't understand that not everything revolves around finns and lutherans are religious minority in the scale of every single finno-ugric group. every single finno-ugric group is orthodox christian and only finns and estonians are protestants. and that loyalty to the ruočči culture is strange, because the swedes destroyed your culture because it was not suitable for catholics or lutherans, so you had to culturally adopt things from the orthodox finno-ugric people because the orthodox have always been more favorable in preserving culture. i even remember my orthodox religion teacher asking why finns like swedes more than russians? yeah, the winter war, the continuation war, communism, but the russians did more for the birth of the finnish state than the swedes, by giving them their own currency, finnish-language education, much more influence over their own affairs compared to the swedes, and so on. and yes, the russians ended up almost russifying all finns, but were the swedes any different? no. so why do finns fanboy the swedes? the swedes, like the russians, also considered the finns inferior.

so why the religious conversation to protestantism is the problem among karelians? well, if i am being completely honest, it's because that orthodox christian values are just much better than protestant values, period. historically, even when karelians converted to protestantism, they necessarly didn't convert to finnish lutheran church but instead, to pentecostal churches or any other conservative protestant church. it's not suprising that many times when some karelian tells me that they are protestant or lutheran, they almost never are mainline finnish lutherans but belong into much conservative protestant congregation. i remember the time when finnish orthodox church had it's scandal when orthodox christians offered spaces to luther foundation finland, which is "schismatic" lutheran group that finnish lutheran church hates, just because they are basically just christian conservatives who actually follows the bible. they don't have female priests, they don't have gay marriages, they have much traditional approach like orthodox do even when we don't agree of everything theogically.

my own personal hatred towards protestants is related to the fact that even orthodoxy itself has nothing to praise in sense of cultural influence (dictatorships, lack of scholasticism, no enlightment era values), protestants still have a lot of things that have made the world a shittier place and that are foreign to karelian culture. protestantism created a culture where nothing is sacred and where you no longer distinguish the heavenly from the earthly. they have no roots, no sense of ancient identity. of course, i am proud to belong to the finno-ugric group that was the first to adopt christianity from the east, directly from byzantium via valaam almost thousand years ago, while finnish protestants are spitting out 20,000 new congregations per second because they fight so much about identity politics and bullshit and have no roots. the orthodox church does not schism because they live according to christian values, they do not fight so violently that they slam the doors and abandon the church. for protestants, religion is consumable, it's disposable, you can just throw it away. and when you think about it, if your attitude towards religion, the such thing that should be extremely sacred, is like this, how can a group like that ever hold any other aspect of their lives sacred? so now you can probably see what's wrong with ruoččis and their attitude. they see everything disposable. ruoččis don't have a soul, they are dead inside. that's why they are reserved, that's why they don't have a community, and that's why they are lonely. what annoys them in the orthodox world is not that we are conservative, even though they claim otherwise, but that we have a community with healthy values. ruočči culture is so atomized that they don't even have a concrete, unified god to turn to. that's why many ruočči countries are sick, even though they are rich. i would rather be poor and happy than rich and unhappy.