ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Narrating Migration in Nordic CountriesMauno Koivisto, on 11 April 1990, in which he presented an invitationto Ingrian Finns to re-immigrate to Finland, and they were forthwithcategorised as Finns resident abroad. In the Finnish BroadcastingCompany’s web site Elävä arkisto, Paavo Rytsä describes what happenedas follows:“According to the President, the Ingrians who had been expatriatedduring the time when Finland was under the rule of Sweden wereFinns, and their cultural similarity was apparent, for example, fromthe fact that the vast majority of them were Lutherans.According to Koivisto, the Ingrians satisfied the criteria for reimmigrants,even if their families had lived away from Finland for along time.In the President’s estimation, it was not a matter of any greatmagnitude. In actual fact, thousands of families moved over the Easternborder to Finland in the 1990s.” (Rytsä, 1990)In other words, the Ingrians were made into Finns whose ancestorshad been forced to move away from Finland during the period ofSwedish rule. In actual fact, the migration of the Ingrians from the territoryof Finland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was voluntary;thus no coercion was imposed on the Ingrians before the timeof Soviet rule. The beginning of the re-immigration of the Ingrians inthe 1990s meant that the question of the immigration rights of othergroups living in Russia was shelved (Miettinen, 2006, p. 145).Two interesting sub-groups among the Ingrian re-immigrants arethose who were admitted to Finland under the “debt of honour” criterionon the basis that, being ethnically related, they had fought alongsidethe Finns in the Second World War, and the Ingrian war refugeeswho were repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war. They probablyended up in work camps as the timetables show the trains they weretransported in went beyond Leningrad. In addition to being a significantcriterion of the right to re-immigrate into Finland, the debt ofhonour has come to be regarded as an aspect of the military history ofthe Second World War that requires further investigation. As HelenaMiettinen has written:203