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Karelia, the borderland between Finland and Russia, has been a "land of quarrels" for centuries. The Swedish kingdom, the Novgorod realm, and the Russian Empire, one after another, have colonized the area. In 1812 the southwest part of Karelia, the Karelian Isthmus, was incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Finland. This incorporation was practical: for hundreds of years the area had already been a region of Finnish-speaking people. After Finland's declaration of independence (1917) and civil war (1918) and the birth of Soviet Russia (1917), political tensions sharpened in the Karelian Isthmus. In those days, the borderline between Finnish Terijoki and Russian St. Petersburg became the most important ideological barrier between revolutionary Russia and Finland, where the right-wing Whites had won the civil war and begun an unequalled campaign against the Bolshevist power. In 1939 and again in 1944, Soviet troops occupied the Karelian Isthmus, and the area ever since has been a part of the Soviet Union /Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The national memory is often signified by means of monuments erected in the landscape, while commemorative historical sites always carry a story from the past, and it is not a matter of indifference how this story is told. Karelia, and particularly the areas of the Karelian Isthmus, the shores of Lake Ladoga and the Karelian Borderlands that were ceded to the Soviet Union as a consequence of the Second World War, are places where the commemorative sites have been objects of dispute for the last 60 years. Memories of Finnish Karelia have been erased, transformed and brought to life again: erased and transformed by the post-war masters of the area, for whom it was ideologically most appropriate to replace the Finnish narrative with one telling of victory in the Great Patriotic War and alluding to new sites commemorating the region's Russian history. The more recent revival of Finnish memories has been brought about not only by the Finns but also by Russians who have wished to tell the present-day inhabitants of Karelia about the forgotten and suppressed details of its more recent history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the correlation between the functions of landscape, its dynamics under its human influences and the dominant images of its terrain. A great deal of attention is given to Vyborg Karelia -- the part of the Karelian Isthmus ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union in 1940. The author considers the consequences on the landscape of population exchange and settlement after 1944, alterations in landscape due to increased recreation, forest protection, the abandonment of agricultural lands, bog drainage and open-cut mining. The conclusions reached concerning the landscape imagery of the region are based chiefly on an analysis of texts and pictures from between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the author's observations and research data. Predominantly examined is the perception of the residents of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) as being the widest human cross-section vis-à-vis Vyborg Karelia at the period under examination. The radical changes in its imagery during the post-war period were wrought by: 1) great alterations in landscape functions and land use; 2) the loss of historical recollection of past landscapes in the present population; and 3) the strong ideologization of landscape perception during the Soviet period. An integral image, dominating up to now, embodies the principally "recreational model" of landscape development, one which is not completely adequate to the present state of the landscape. During the post-Soviet period, regional imagery becomes more complex and contradictory in regard to the increased transitional function of the Isthmus as a bridge between Russia and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In historical sources the Karelians appear in the 12th century although archaeological excavations suggest that the amalgamation of groups of Baltic Finns, centered on the Karelian Isthmus, that came together from east and west respectively to form them originated in the late Iron Age and early Viking Age. Accordingly they were from the start recipients of impulses from both east and west, a phenomenon that continued throughout the medieval period and ended with their physical division between what became a politico-religious division of Europe between east and west, lasting until today. The article concentrates on the role played by the landscape, situated on an important passageway of international trade and close to two growing neighbouring powers, Sweden and Novgorod, that profited from this trade route but at the same time became ever more opposed to one another as result of the crusading movement of the Latin Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]