The League of Nations and the “East Karelian Question” in the Early 1920s

The “East Karelian Question,” widely discussed in Russian and international historiography, has usually been examined in connection with the Russian Civil War and Soviet-Finnish relations. This article focuses on its international dimension – the engagement of the League of Nations with the dispute between Finland and Soviet Russia in the early 1920s. Drawing on previously unpublished documents from the League’s LONTAD digital archive, the study reconstructs the process through which the East Karelian issue became part of the League’s agenda. Finland’s territorial claims to Pechenga and Karelia, first raised at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, were dismissed by the Allied powers, but the question resurfaced amid the Åland Islands dispute between Finland and Sweden. After the Tartu Peace Treaty of October 1920, Finnish diplomacy sought to internationalise the matter by alleging Soviet violations of the treaty and by invoking the protection of the Karelian population. Supported by other Baltic states, Finland’s campaign transformed a bilateral disagreement into a recognised item of international concern. By tracing the League’s deliberations, the article shows how the East Karelian Question reflected wider tensions between the principles of national self-determination and state sovereignty in post-war Europe, and how smaller states used the League as an instrument of political leverage in the early interwar international system.

Karelia, Finland, Soviet Russia, League of Nations, diplomacy, international relations, Tartu Peace Treaty, self-determination, interwar Europe