Territorial phantom pains: Third-generation postmemories of territorial changes

Abstract

Forced border changes and population transfers have affected many nation-states. However, memories of these events are usually described as part of a “unique” national memory of cartographic violence, “lost” territories, and victimhood. In popular representations, often reinforced by the personal memories of the wartime resettled, the territories ceded from Poland (Kresy) and Finland (Karelia) to the Soviet Union after World War II are remembered and imagined as “timeless” places which preserve and encapsulate “Polishness” and “Finnishness.” “Territorial phantom pains” is a central framing idea for us. We understand phantom pains as a social emotion related to memories and postmemories that tells members of a community that the body of their nation is not complete without the detached territories. Phantom pains are nostalgic, romanticizing, but also exclusive keeping memories of the territorial loss as not (only) memories of personal loss of home and heimat, but of a national loss.

Borders crossing memories, memories crossing borders

One way to understand the post-WWII (World War II) history of Europe is to see it as marked by resettlements and border changes. Dramatic, rapid changes to a nation-state’s borders can result in a situation where the remembered, imagined, and/or wished for borders of the nation-state, deeply rooted in the cultural memory, no longer coincide with its geographic borderlines in Cartesian space. This, consequently, leads to nostalgic longing for territories that were abruptly lost, based on memories of the greatness of a formerly existing past formation or shape of the state (Kolosov, 2020). This longing is reinforced when the lost territory played a vital role in the national identity. These processes have been noted in many different geographic contexts globally (see Billé, 2014; Kolosov, 2020; Nelson, 2016). In our work, we refer to these processes as territorial phantom pains. We understand these “pains” as a social emotion telling members of a community that the body of the(ir) nation is not complete. In this article, we aim to show that phantom pains are not only a medical term, but a social phenomenon—present within countries that witnessed mass population transfers—and influence discourses about the past by reinforcing sentimental, nationalist, and nostalgic voices.

The territories of Karelia and Kresy have been conceptualized as central to national identity for Finland and Poland (Kolbuszewski, 1995; Laine and Van Der Velde, 2017: 67) and so their loss, we argue, therefore caused territorial phantom pains experienced beyond the personal level. Though neither Karelia nor Kresy are geopolitically part of the Finnish or Polish nation-states, they remain “attached” to the nations’ collective memories. Memory of the loss of these territories has endured down the generations and is expressed in different media and by various actors, such as politicians, local activists, and memory leaders (Głowacka-Grajper, 2015: 164–182; Laine and Van Der Velde, 2017: 69–71).

With our comparison, we aim to show that phantom pains are a transnational and transcultural phenomenon; that they are part of a post-war European history marked by mass resettlements and border changes and, subsequently, situated in a broader discourse of territorial longing. We understand the idea of transnational memory as

directed towards mnemonic processes unfolding across and beyond cultures. It means transcending the borders of traditional “cultural memory studies” by looking beyond established research assumptions, objects and methodologies. (Erll, 2011: 9)

With our conclusions, we aim at showing possible future avenues for exploring this topic in countries that experienced territorial losses and forced migrations. We address a gap in knowledge by examining what meanings the third generation after the “loss” of Karelia and Kresy associate with these territories and how they interpret and express the ideas around these territories they have inherited from older generations of their own families, and which surround them in their upbringing and education within the nation-states of Finland and Poland in the post-Soviet era. The contribution of our work is found in its comparative nature, which strives to overcome methodological nationalism, and in its focus on third-generation postmemory.

Karelia is a transnational territory spanning the Finnish–Russian border. The Republic of Karelia (Rus. Респу́блика Каре́лия) is a federal subject of Russia, while the regions of North Karelia and South Karelia, created post-WWII, are in Finland. The Karelian Isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland is today part of the Leningrad Oblast. Pre-WWII this area, along with the south-western part of the Republic of Karelia, was part of Finland. In Finnish understandings, “Karelia” usually refers to the territory Finland was forced to cede to the Soviet Union when the Finnish–Soviet border was redrawn (Browning and Joenniemi, 2014: 2). Due to the border change, c. 407 000 Finnish Karelians (c. 10% of Finland’s wartime population) were evacuated from the ceded area and resettled in the Finnish interior (Savolainen, 2017: 170). The newly gained Soviet territory was re-populated by people from across the Soviet Union. In Finland, the word “Karelia” is loaded with various meanings. Ideas and images of Karelia, whether reality or fantasy, “are central to the myth-making and national-territorial understandings which constantly (re)create the idea of ‘Finland’ as a distinct nation-state” (Wells, 2020: 36; see Laine and Van Der Velde, 2017; Wells, 2020: 35–41 for more).

The term “Kresy” (Eng. the Borderlands) nowadays refers to territory annexed by the Soviet Union after WWII and left behind the Curzon line, which marks the eastern border of Poland. It also has a more metaphorical meaning. Kresy refer not only to the borderlands, but also to an end: of a country or of a familiar world. Before the war, local communities inhabiting Kresy were diverse in terms of religion (Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish), ethnic and national identities (Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians) and included many minorities. The territories called “Kresy” before 1939 today form parts of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Due to the post-WWII border change, which was part of diplomatic negotiations and was sanctioned by the Allied powers, c. 1.7 million people from Kresy were resettled in and to Poland. The most traumatic resettlements were the forced expulsions from what was supposed to be Soviet Union from 1944 toward western areas of Poland in their post-war shape. This resulted in broken identities and an inability to “take root” in a new place (Wylegała, 2015: 484). The later phases of resettlements, ending in 1956, were not coerced, but the politics of Sovietization and will to rejoin family again resulted in mass migrations. Today, c. 15% of Poles state they have ancestors from Kresy (Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej (CBOS), 2012). Post-1989, “Kresy gradually came to develop mythical status, and they relatively quickly became part of cultural memory in Poland” (Stokłosa, 2019, 273).

The reason for many idealized images in both cultural and personal memory is often the impossibility to articulate memories and process them through cultural dynamics. Thus, they remain “preserved in amber,” with growing, unresolved nostalgic feelings attached. Poland’s political situation and the influence of the Soviet Union after 1945 resulted in the suppressing and silencing of memories of resettlement from Kresy. Since around 1.7 million people had to leave their homes, it was not possible to silence this event completely but the official narrative focused on voluntary migration, ignoring the experience of forced resettlement. Because of this, the only way to preserve the memory of people and things lost during and after the war was through communicative memory, especially the memory of witnesses (see Jakimowicz, 2014). Post-WWII Finland had to ensure friendly relations with the Soviet Union—a balancing act which led to the coining of the term “Finlandization” to describe an ostensibly independent country whose foreign policy stance was determined by a powerful neighbor—and discussion of the possibility of returning Karelia to Finland was officially avoided. Especially, in the post-Soviet era, however, the traumatic experiences of the displaced Karelians have been freely recounted and published (see, for example, Savolainen, 2017), and opinions and feelings around Karelia and returning the area to Finland freely expressed, for example, in the Finnish press (see Laine and Van Der Velde, 2017) which had self-censored during the Cold War era.

We compare the Finnish and Polish cases to highlight methodological nationalism while trying to avoid it ourselves. Because methodological nationalism confines the narrative within state borders, it obscures transborder and transnational phenomena (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002: 308) and reinforces borders of all types. Methodological nationalism arises from an assumption that a nation is the natural political and social form and thus each nation has its own framework of understanding, as opposed to acknowledging transnational phenomena (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002). As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2009) have written,

The social sciences [. . .] are still more or less in thrall to “methodological nationalism,” unable to see border crossing interactions, interconnectedness and intercommunication [. . .] This paradigm shift from a nation state frame to a cosmopolitan one—which has still to be developed methodologically—is necessary, in order to satisfy sociology’s scholarly claim to engage with reality. (p. 26)

Recently, the use of methodological nationalism and national frames in memory studies has become less taken-for-granted and it has been argued that a more “global consciousness,” especially around WWII and its consequences, might be possible (Assmann and Conrad, 2010; Sundholm, 2011: 2). This idea has also been criticized (see De Cesari and Rigney, 2014: 11). We argue here that by comparing the similar framing of the postmemories of younger generations from countries which were on different sides of the “Iron Curtain” before 1989, a less nationalist understanding of phantom pains, of the cartographic violence done to the bordered outline of a nation-state, is possible. By doing this, we go beyond the idea of a common milieux de mémoire for Eastern Europe or post-socialist countries.

We can see the similarities in the way these two lost territories are still seen as in some sense “ours” from the Polish and Finnish national perspectives. The memory of a “lost” borderland, within a frame of methodological nationalism, is not a memory of foreign conquest and occupation, but the memory of a nationally important territory, an “amputated limb,” that the nation-state that used to “own” this territory tries to establish cultural dominance over. Therefore, nationally framed memories and postmemories of borderlands such as Karelia and Kresy may be heavily idealized, sentimentalized, and ethnocentric. Both Kresy and Karelia are imagined as bucolic, timeless places where “the old ways” were preserved (Savolainen, 2017: 179; Sawaniewska-Mochowa and Zielińska, 2007: 168–172; Wells and Łukianow, 2019). Remembering these “lost” borderlands in this way can be classed as an “inhabited” memory which connects a given group to its past, and moreover, attributes a past to a given group (Assmann, 2011). From the Finnish and Polish national perspectives, Karelia and Kresy seem to be “preserved in amber” rather than understood in terms of the reality that they have existed and evolved for over three-quarters of a century as parts of other nation-states. This aspect matches the definition of cultural memory given by Assmann (2011) which also has no time frame or horizon: images from the past are recalled as present “ever since.”

The framing of postmemories of Karelia and Kresy

To theorize and implement in our analyses the concept of territorial phantom pains, we use three main concepts: postmemory, to show that such pains travel beyond biographical experience; nostalgia, to put special attention on romanticized memories and their rebellious nature; and borderlands, to highlight the transnational character of the discussed territories and the role of center–periphery relations.

The pain caused by past territorial “amputations” may continue into the present and be passed on to the present generation via postmemory, a form of intragenerational and transgenerational memory transmission through which individuals and “we” groups who never experienced them can still feel a past event or place to be meaningful and emotionally significant (Hirsch, 2012, 2019). We use the concept of postmemory as the main theoretical frame of our analysis in order to stress that phantom pains are experienced not only by those directly affected by the territorial change, but also by members of communities (national and local) that were not direct witnesses of border changes and subjects of mass resettlements. We understand postmemory as the vehicle through which people in Finland and Poland today can be socialized to emotional responses to the lost territories of Karelia and Kresy. Postmemory is also about developing a relationship to past traumas, and affective storytelling and emotional stories play a key role in understanding how the postmemories of descendants are shaped.

The notion of being haunted by a past which is not personally one’s own was earlier observed in work on the inherited traumas of Holocaust survivors (on which Hirsch also develops her argument). As Hirsch (2019) writes,

To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. (p. 172)

Other authors defining the concept of postmemory point out that postmemory, among other mechanisms, creates a connection between the past and the present and brings societies closer to the(ir) distant past (Oksman, 2020). This notion is especially interesting for us in this article as it helps to explain why territorial phantom pains enable the present members of a national group to feel the presence of the lost territories today. As the “generations after” attempt to understand and “deal with” past events and places which they never experienced, they must “fill in the gaps” “by combining second-hand narratives with their own individual (but socially influenced and shared) experiences, imaginings, and positionality . . . to create new, postmemorial ‘fragments’” (Wells, 2020: 56). Postmemories can and do spread beyond the direct descendants of individuals who experienced an event or place; they spread horizontally among those sharing a “we” group (e.g. those with the same national belonging) via affiliative or socially shared postmemory (Hirsch, 2012: 36, 2019: 173). Here, we examine our interview data for examples and traces of affiliative postmemory: “a ‘fragmented’ or incomplete type of memory which . . . highlights a lost connection to the knowledge, experiences, personal memories and ways of memorialising of previous generations” (Wells, 2020: 58). Postmemory as a concept “reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture” in the way the “generations after” relate to past events (Hirsch, 2019: 173). We examine our data for such lost connections and ruptures, and for continuities. In both our studies, we viewed our participants as members of a certain memory community—“bearers of the past and bearers of the future,” for whom the past becomes a subject of attribution (Booth, 1999)—and as a social generation who may receive and express affiliative postmemories of Karelia and Kresy “vertically” from older generations and “horizontally” via their upbringing in Finnish and Polish society and via their socialization to a particular national memory culture.

Memory ruptures and continuities grow from romanticized ideas, carried by nostalgic memories and cultural transmissions. Nostalgia is a collective emotion which links individual memories and the “memories” of groups or nations (Boym, 2001: xvi), and so, like postmemory, can draw wider “we” groups into imagining, memorializing, and longing for places they never experienced. The type of nostalgia surrounding memories of Karelia and Kresy is “a subjunctive nostalgia for a future past cut short,” which dwells on what “could have been” (Malek, 2019: 1), had the areas not been ceded. This type of nostalgia, an “imaginative, wishful response . . . enabled by diasporic liminality,” can travel “horizontally” between members of the “post” generations (Malek, 2019: 1–2), which links it closely to the concept of postmemory. Furthermore, as defined by Boym (2001), nostalgia is a form of a rebellion against the present time and a rebellion against the course of the history. Drawing on this idea, of an emotional response, imaginative and rebellious, we claim that nostalgia is vital to understanding how the territorial loss is framed socially, and in further generations.

Central to the framing of the memories of Karelia and Kresy is the fact that they are not only areas located across the borderlines dividing nation-states; they are borderlands. Borderlands usually have long histories of war, conquest, and colonization. In our cases, as a result of numerous conflicts, Kresy became a place that “needed to be protected” (Zarycki, 2014)—in terms of both territory and national identity, and was positioned as the borderland between the East (Russian/Tatar invasions) and the West (see Kolbuszewski, 1995). Similarly, Karelia has long been presented in Finnish historiography as a battleground where the West (Sweden/Finland) met and clashed with the East (Russia) (Katajala, 2014). Complicating these imaginaries is the fact that for significant periods of time both Finland (from 1809 to 1917) and Poland (from 1792 to 1918) were actually part of the Russian Empire. In our article, we use the perspective of a “center” looking toward its lost borderland, but we also claim that losing a borderland, culturally important and diverse, is a particular type of a loss.

Borderlands such as Kresy and Karelia are usually deeply marked by the presence of minorities (which in some areas, especially rural, may constitute majorities) and their heritage. Discourses on Kresy often embrace the idea of multiculturalism and some recent studies have taken a “decolonializing” perspective, part of an exploration of the colonial experience in Russia and its twentieth-century satellite countries which has developed since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Cavanagh, 2004; Holc, 2018; Zarycki, 2014). As Cavanagh (2004) has pointed out, Poland, depending on the period studied, might be viewed as either colonizing or colonized and therefore its assessment within this perspective is highly ambiguous. Even though “Kresy” translates literally as “Borderlands,” Bakuła (2014) has highlighted the following discrepancy: while “borderlands” are multicultural, “Kresy” are inherently Polish. As he says (Bakuła, 2014): “This is also true in phrases such as ‘Polish period,’ ‘our period,’ ‘lost areas’—they belong only to the Polish dominium, even if today it is only a symbolic presence.” In the case of Karelia, a mythologized version of this peripheral and mostly sparsely inhabited area was used from the nineteenth century in Finnish nation-building to represent the cradle or “core” of “Finnishness,” despite this borderland’s mixed population. This led to “an ambiguous situation where Karelia and Karelians have been viewed at the same time as essentially Finnish and as alien” (Häyrynen, 2004: 23). Today, ceded Karelia may still be understood by some in Finland as Finnish, both in the past and in the present, if not territorially then culturally or spiritually (Laine and Van Der Velde, 2017).

Methodologies

The direct motivation for writing this text were the results obtained in our two separate research projects. The question we asked ourselves was: What is the process behind the fact that when independently researching different areas with different methods, similar results were obtained, referring to corresponding cultural phenomena? Our data were collected and analyzed as part of two separate projects, which utilized different methodologies, and were compared retrospectively with the aim of demonstrating that, regardless of the specificities of topic and methodology, what emerges from our collected narratives about two distinct lost territories are similarly felt “territorial phantom pains,” and the symbolic presence of a national group as key to understanding these “severed” territories within nationalistic frames. In both our projects, we conducted interviews with young people, which were qualitatively analyzed using similar tools: thematic content analysis (see Braun and Clarke, 2006) and a generational transmission analysis inspired by the work of Welzer et al. (2002).

Our interviews were conducted in different settings. In Poland, the conversations could be direct and intimate since the researcher was already working with a given family and was not a stranger. In Finland, the group interviews (focus groups) were conducted in a school setting by someone who was a stranger to the participants. Such a situation entails a less personal relationship and perhaps less immediate openness on the part of the participants. The group dynamics made possible by the focus group method was, however, key to the Finnish study as it allowed observation of how this particular social group framed the(ir) meanings and memories of Karelia (see Wells, 2020: 65–66).

A critical survey of our methodologies shows that the focuses of our studies were different. The Finnish study looked at how meanings and memories related to “lost Karelia” are socially constructed and contested within “we” groups, and utilized focus group interviews with Finnish high school students. The Polish study focused on family memories and how major memory reevaluations are reflected in personal narratives, and employed family interviews. Regardless of differences in the employed methodologies, however, the results show striking similarities. One interesting finding from our comparison was the extent of the “banal nationalism” in reference to Karelia and Kresy. In both cases, “everyday’ associations and meanings also sometimes prompted “deeper’ reactions linked to ideas of loss and “return’ (see below and also Wells and Łukianow, 2019).

The data from Finland come from 38 focus groups with a total of 325 high school students (aged 16–19, born 1998–2001), some but by no means all of whom had a family link to Karelia. Participants are the “third (social) generation” in terms of their relationship to the memory of Karelia. The “first generation” are those with personal memories of ceded Karelia as part of Finland, some of whom also have memories of living in and leaving the area, and the “second generation” are the children of the resettled and other Finns born after WWII, who lived through the Cold War era when the Finnish–Russian border was part of the “Iron Curtain.’ The data from Poland are part of a case study of a family memory. The main research material was 90 interviews—30 separate family cases consisting of interviews with the oldest generation (i.e. those who personally experienced resettlement or departure); the middle generation, raised in socialism, who have lived most of their lives in the Polish People’s Republic; and the younger or “third” generation, raised in the Third Polish Republic. The material presented here comes from 29 interviews with either grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the resettled, born after 1989, and six cases of memory leaders who come from the generation born into the Third Polish Republic (i.e. after 1989). In both our cases, the main differentiation between our generational groupings is based on the current state regime, which is parallel to the memory regime in which a given person was brought up.

In the Finnish study, focus group interviews were conducted in Finnish high schools during 2017 on the topic of Vyborg, the main city of ceded Karelia (see Wells, 2020). Participants did not know the topic beforehand. During the focus groups, the author also asked participants about Karelia. Participants were asked: What do you know about Karelia? What comes to mind if you hear the word “Karelia”? Where is Karelia? The results presented here come from an analysis of the answers participants gave, and also an analysis of anonymous written summaries which participants wrote at the end of their group. The focus group transcripts and the accompanying written data were analyzed using thematic content analysis (see Braun and Clarke, 2006 for details of this method). The end goal was to “theorize the significance of the [themes in the data] and their broader meanings and implications” (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 79).

In the Polish study, interviews were conducted in Western and Northern Poland during fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. Participants were selected on the basis of the theoretical saturation concept (see Oppong, 2013: 203). The interviews had a free form similar to narrative interviews but the most important questions asked concerned broadly understood ideas related to Kresy and what role they play in a family’s history: Is Kresy the mythical place that grandma talked about? Or has the interviewee personally visited and experienced Kresy? While constructing research tools and—at a later stage—analyzing the research material, the method, and conceptual apparatus from the work of Welzer et al. (2002) was applied. They precisely conceptualize the elements of transmission, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of a certain “typology” of transmitted content, or recurring patterns of speaking together (“message types”).

How the “third generation after” remember Karelia and Kresy

In this section, we present the results from our Finnish study and from our Polish study, grouped thematically. The results from Finland are based on the question of what meanings and memories young people in Finland today, understood as the “third generation after” its loss, associate with “Karelia” (see also Wells, 2019, 2020; Wells and Łukianow, 2019). The results from Poland are based around addressing the issue of the memory of forced resettlement as it is passed down the generations. Regardless of their family history, how do younger people re-evaluate and re-interpret certain elements from the past? How do postmemories affect local memory policies? Which elements are re-evaluated and which are pushed into non-memory?

The national “we” in the postmemories

Quotes from the focus group participants in Finland showed examples of nationalist thinking and demonstrated a sense of Finnish “ownership” of Karelia as expressed by the use of “our” and “we”: “Karelia had been, like, a really important area for Finland for the whole of Finnish and Swedish history and there’s a lot of our, like, ancient history there,” “[Karelia] was originally a part of Finland but then we sort of had to give it away to the Russians.” Karelia’s (historical) significance was understood via a Finnish national frame: participants felt part of the national “we” group for whom Karelia is important, and the national group who “own/ed” Karelia. One participant commented, to the group’s agreement, that “it would be weird if you’re a Finn and you haven’t heard of Karelia.” This comment points to the continuing significance of “Karelia” for a sense of Finnish national identity.

Today’s young people in Finland, the “third generation after” Karelia was ceded to the Soviet Union, imagine themselves as part of the national “we” who experienced its loss. During the focus groups, they freely and humorously mixed references to the presence of “Karelia” in the background of their everyday lives, with a more serious awareness of the significance of a lost territory that was “in Finland first” and discussion of its “return.” By mixing these various meanings of “Karelia,” participants demonstrated that they are able to engage with, and create their own understandings of, circulating national(istic) memory discourses and thereby participate in these (see also Habashi, 2013: 424, 426).

In the Polish study, developing a nostalgic, “preserved in amber” attitude had several causes other than only direct memory transmission. First, there is the felt need for (and an actual lack of) recognition and the lack of inclusion of the Kresy experience into national-level historical policy. Second is the way stories are being told and what is being omitted: most often pre-war conflicts, violence, and the role of Others, especially Jews and Ukrainians in local communities and local cultures (see Wylegała, 2015). Third is the fact that those remembering events from the 1920s and early 1930s are passing away and the memories of younger witnesses are childhood memories. Hence, in many popular memories, Kresy—even though it was detached over 70 years ago—is still considered to be part of Poland, if not factually, then spiritually:

Kresy is for me this most beautiful part of Poland [our emphasis]. For me, for my ancestors. There it was necessary to testify each day that you belong to some national group, that there are some common values, that we want to live in our own country, because if our country, our army is missing, we are slaves at best, and most often victims of genocide.

Everyday presence and romanticism

The “presence” of the two lost territories has different edges in Poland and Finland: whereas phantom pains related to Karelia tend to be linked to more “banal” aspects such as food and pop culture, those in Poland are related more to specifically understood “patriotic” undertones and the role of personal memories.

In the Finnish data, there was the theme of “presence,” the ways “Karelia” can exist as a background to participants’ everyday lives (see also Wells, 2016; Wells and Łukianow, 2019). Participants associated Karelia with certain foods, with the Finnish beer Karjala, and with Finnish pop songs about “getting Karelia back.” Some participants even started singing these songs, unprompted, during the groups. There is a kitsch element to these banal associations (especially with the pop songs) but such references to Karelia as an everyday presence should not be ignored, as these are one of the main ways young people “encounter the idea of ‘Karelia’ and start to understand its significance (or not) for them and for the wider culture in which they are growing up” (Wells and Łukianow, 2019: np; see Malek, 2019 for another example of the descendants of a diaspora “coming to terms with” the(ir) lost home in a similarly kitsch way).

Those who cherish the memory of the lost territories in Poland—regardless of whether members of their own families were actually resettled or not—are very much aware of the role of personal memories, witnesses, and the transmission of memory within families. This memory is often actively “practiced”: talked about, reminded, treasured. However, the distortions that are observable in the narratives of younger generations are linked to the characteristics of memory transmission, such as overemphasizing the role and heritage of one’s own group in a multicultural setting. In the conversations, the narrators often talked about the inherently “Polish” landscape of the territories of, for example, Galicia, often linking it with catholic churches and other religious heritage. On the other hand, the need to publicize the family’s historical experience remains even after the collapse of the political regime that prevented the memories of former Kresy inhabitants from being made public. As mentioned by one interviewee, the topic is only present where it was a part of the family history:

In my opinion, those whose families were displaced from the East know about it. Those who have been told about it, yes, they know. But if it was knowledge told at school or something, then no. You don’t hear about that. I don’t know who they want to offend there, but it’s not a topic that should be in the media or anything.

Loss and significance

The third theme in the Finnish data was “loss and return.” While participants acknowledged the difficult emotions which may surround memories of Karelia—“the loss of Karelia [. . .] is still a bitter issue for Finns,” “It was important to note that Vyborg and Karelia are still connected with a lot of memories and also longing”—participants also seemed to reject the emotion of loss as one they themselves feel about Karelia. Linked to loss is the idea of “return.” Some participants repeated the slogan “return Karelia,” often as an immediate response to the word “Karelia.” Participants did not, however, appear to actually want the Karelian territory “returned” to Finland. Even if “when the Russians got [Karelia] it rose to become such a national symbol for Finland” and “many Finns think [Karelia] should belong to Finland [. . . and] we [Finns] would like to have it back” participants acknowledged that “we probably never will.” There was an awareness that “the Karelia thing” was “kinda a nationalistic thing, it belongs to Finns’ culture” and there were references to (not) being a “return Karelia type of person” showing that participants had an awareness that “certain types of people” advocate for a return of Karelia to Finland. Participants gave reasons why such people want Karelia back: “It was a bit of a kinda humiliating experience when [Karelia] had to be given away,” “No one ever wants to lose part of their nation.” This second comment echoes the “territorial phantom pains” still caused for some by the loss of Karelia.

In Polish families, memories of loss—lost territories, but first and foremost lost homelands and households—are present in a variety of ways. Only a few people have visited Kresy; however, an image is present through the transmission of memory. In some of the analyzed cases of family memory, we can observe the phenomenon of socialization to a family memory: young people are being surrounded by memories of the past, and seeing it from a narrow, heavily centralized perspective. In one case, the grandmother’s memory of the war (and pre-war) eclipses any other memory in the family and becomes the center of the family’s identity. As told by the granddaughter,

It began with how my mother taught history in high school and gave private lessons. And whole classes came to our home, talking above all with Grandma. And Grandma went to this large room, and they talked about the war, about Kresy and [deportations to] Siberia.

Some participants in Finland also appreciated discussing Karelia, as it had personal significance for them: “the Karelia area is [. . .] a strong part of my identity and it was nice to hear more about it and that it also interested others [in the group] so much.”

Suppressed memories

Much as we try to highlight here similarities between the social (national) experience of territorial loss, we must also underline certain specific features that arise from regional and historical differences. Polish governments after 1989 failed to introduce the topic of Kresy into their political agenda and idea of memory policy. The right to compensation for property and land left outside the Polish state was voted for only in 2005; however, symbolic recognition of the traumatic experience of forced resettlement is even more needed (and verbalized) than financial recognition. Many interviewees thought that Kresy is not written and spoken about enough. In one interview, a 26-year-old male, who is very involved in commemorative events around the fate of those resettled from Kresy, argued,

If this truth [about post-war forced resettlements] was present in public life, then perhaps we would not have been needed in this area [of commemoration]. But it still does not exist and if it was not put into prison in the 1990s, it does not mean that the truth in public life was already present.

What is particular about the interviews with family members whose ancestors came from Kresy (and even more so with the witnesses themselves) is the sense of suppression and not being able to fully articulate the historical experience. However, saying that all families are well aware of their past obscures an important dimension of the communicative memory. Dramatic stories from the past are silenced within families in order to “protect” younger members. This demonstrates another mechanism of transmission, which is well-described and natural to human memory, but now we can note the consequences of it: selective stories, distortions, simplifications:

There were basically no conversations on this topic, but it was simply my own initiative to talk about family history. My cousin was also a bit interested in our family history and he is actually a bit more in it, but such conversations were nonexistent.

Most often, it is heavily sentimental stories which form the backbone of family histories:

These years of youth were very important to them and they were idealized. Presented sensationally. There was an anger that they had to be here [in the place they were resettled to], not there, so I heard it many times. Kresy, this may make me curious too, and I would definitely like to go there.

When new “heroes” are introduced to the Polish pantheon, such as the so-called “cursed soldiers” (partisans of the anti-communist underground after 1945; see Kończal, 2019), members of Kresy families, especially families whose ancestors were deported to Siberia and fought in various armies during the war, often reject this because they feel their own “heroes” have not yet been recognized:

You know, this Day of Cursed Soldiers is celebrated, right? Well, my grandmother belongs to this group, of such “cursed soldiers,” right? There has never been such a thing, ever [to acknowledge their struggle]. And whenever I tell people that my grandmother belonged to those accursed soldiers, it is such a surprise, and they ask: how is it possible?

In Finland, this sense of “suppressed memory” was less pronounced. Some participants, however, thought that Karelia is “talked about too little” and that “it was interesting to hear about Karelia because it’s rare to meet people who talk about it,” pointing to an idea that Karelia’s significance should be better acknowledged.

Discussion

Though there were differences in our research aims, methodologies, and framings, both data sets show how the third generation after the loss of Karelia and Kresy still attach significance to these areas as a lost part of the(ir) nation. The idea expressed in the interviews from Poland that scholars, journalists, and politicians don’t talk enough about Kresy, and the theme of Karelia’s significance in the Finnish data is related to the idea of “competitive victimhood” (Noor et al., 2012: 351). This competition might be regarded in several ways. First is in the internal dimension as a competition between Poles or Finns, acting as a majority in Kresy or Karelia, and minorities living in those areas before and during the war. Second, victimhood might play a role in shaping the discourse of suffering, incomparable to other nations. In Poland, this is especially visible in the way local memory leaders and institutions develop the narrative of Kresy in local communities. They often use the “sacralizing” function of memory to implement political and social ideas, often linked to conservative, nationalist, and religious attitudes (Łukianow and Maciejewski, 2017: 31).

Another similarity we noted was that, in both cases, people from Kresy and Karelia often frame themselves, and are framed in wider discourses, as a “special status” victim group who suffered a loss which has not been properly acknowledged and which cannot be compared to the experience of other displaced peoples, such as modern-day refugees (Saarela, 2017; Savolainen, 2017: 182; Misztal, 2009. We remind the reader here that our research took place before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In Finland, at least, today’s refugees from Ukraine are seen as comparable to Karelian evacuees). This may be a hangover from the Soviet era when their sense of loss and sacrifice could not be freely and fully expressed, and the result of a still felt need to safely “preserve” memories of territorial loss and forced resettlement.

In both data sets, our participants discussed the themes of “loss and return” in relation to Karelia and Kresy, even if “return” was not thought likely or even desirable. This mirrors the results of Habashi’s (2013) research with descendants of displaced people: she also found that “the hope that the previous generation had to go home was not there” among young people (Habashi, 2014: 422). In the post-Soviet era, public calls for the “return” of Kresy and Karelia via altering the post-WWII borders are no longer taboo. Especially, in Poland, the fall of Communism has caused revisionism to appear in narratives of the past, as a response to the need to tell a story “from scratch” (Stobiecki, 2015: 22). Negative attitudes toward Russia and a lingering sense of loss regarding Karelia and Kresy are, however, in both cases, often suppressed by the realization that revanchism is most often expressed by ultra-nationalist groups and individuals, and most of our young interviewees would like to separate themselves from “these types of people.” The “third generation” in Finland and Poland do not seem to be interested in “return” in terms of geopolitical changes and actually moving the borderline. Doing so will not relieve the “territorial phantom pains” being handed down to them by previous generations and by society in general. These “pains” are in response to a sentimentalized and nostalgic vision of a lost past—the memory of the “lost limb” when it was still “attached”—and are not the result of a longing for present-day Karelia and Kresy. What is more important to the third generation is the issue of to which nation Kresy and Karelia “belong” culturally or spiritually, both in the past and in the present, and how to deal with the legacy of a “future past cut short” (Malek, 2019: 1) by the amputation of these territories after WWII. The difference we noticed, that we believe comes from different political regimes in the past, is the persisting sense of suppressing memory even today in Poland.

Our results demonstrate that it is not a given that individuals or groups will have the emotional response to loss of territory prescribed by the national culture in which they live. Our results also show that the meanings and memories attached to “lost” places change over time—as the “scars” of cartographic violence begin to fade—and with the change of both political regime and generation. One of the main findings of our comparison is that postmemories of lost territories, regardless of the country, are framed within national(ist) contexts, revealing mostly ethnocentric conceptions of the past of the areas. Furthermore, idealizing “our” national heritage and influence in and over Kresy and Karelia, and by the same token idealizing the pasts of these lost territories, results in negative opinions about the current shape of the areas. As expressed by third-generation interviewees in both Poland and Finland, back in the days when “we” (the/ir nation) possessed Kresy and Karelia, these areas were a source of pride and rich history for the nation. A heavy sentimentalization of pre-war times, linked to ideas about the beauty of the landscape and the harmonious life lived within it can contribute to the idealization of, and a futile longing for, these “lost” territories (see also Wells and Łukianow, 2019).

Conclusion

The question we wanted to answer by comparing our two research projects was: What similarities are there in the way people in Finland and Poland understand and remember the(ir) “lost territories” of Karelia and Kresy? Overall, we found that an awareness of the territorial and symbolic loss of Karelia and Kresy is still present and among young people in Finland and Poland. It is also interesting to note whether and how this memory becomes a “territorial phantom pain” also felt by those who do not have family links to Karelia or Kresy. We note certain areas that remain understudied, however. A broader, nation-wide study regarding the postmemory of Kresy in Poland is still missing, for example. Such a study would not only create a direct parallel to the Finnish study, but also present these memories in supra-local character. So far, the major study remains the work of Głowacka-Grajper (2015) regarding memory leaders. The conclusion we can put forward is the need for more comparative studies on cases that are positioned as specific to one country only. As De Cesari and Rigney (2014: 9) have pointed out, the real or imagined shared past contributes to a common understanding of the future. However, the national(ist) framing of the historical experience of Finland and Poland, and of the many other countries which have endured border changes and forced population resettlements—for example, Italy (Ballinger, 2011; Corni, 2011) and Germany (Niven, 2014; Urban, 2007)—does not contribute to a wider perspective on a shared post-war history of border changes and resettlements.

By comparing two different data sets, we have highlighted that the sentimentalization of territorial losses is in fact a transnational phenomena, and not exclusive to a specific country. We therefore hope we have contributed to a widening of post-WWII memory discourses about cartographic violence and nationally felt “territorial phantom pains.” We are aware that the issue of forced border change and forced resettlements is an important part of the history of other nations and states, such as Italy (see Ballinger, 2003), Slovenia (Rezoničnik, 2018), and Hungary (Tatarenko, 2019). In our view, the concept of territorial phantom pains is a wider cultural phenomena, emerging as a result of territorial changes and thus is of an atemporal nature.

From a comparison of our two studies into third-generation affiliative postmemory of the “lost territories” of Karelia and Kresy and their legacies, we can conclude that the postmemorial narratives about lost or “amputated” territories from two distinct nation-states reveal the same patterns. The postmemories of territorial “amputated limbs” develop within strictly national frames and national contexts. As a consequence, the past in these inherited memories is idealized as part of “our” (and only our) national history and may be sacrificed to the needs of (banal) nationalism. Losing national territory, as we see in the postmemory discourse, is not only about geography; losing “our” (national) landmark buildings and landscapes, communities and heritage, and the loss of areas positioned as key to “Polishness” and “Finnishness” are losses that are equally hard to overcome. The “amputated limbs” of these countries are still an important “part of” them—culturally or spiritually, even over 75 years later. In the postmemorial discourses revealed in our research data, the persisting significance and “presence” of these territories may be symbolic rather than to do with an active desire to geopolitically “return” present-day Kresy and Karelia to Poland and Finland.

As we worked with young people, our results point the way for the possible “future memory” of Karelia and Kresy in the twenty-first century as this group, the “third generation” are soon to become the main actors in the memorial discourses related to these lost territories as the last witnesses to the events of WWII (born in the 1930s) pass away. A long-term study into the meanings and memories the “third generation” attach to Karelia and Kresy would be of interest to see if and how these change over their lifetimes. Within memory studies, the long-term effects of memory are of particular interest—what “sticks,” and why? What aspects of affiliative postmemory remain a fixture of people’s imaginations across time and through changing political circumstances? A long-term study would, therefore, offer a further contribution to the field.