Formation of tertiary education in Karelia in the 1930s

This article analyzes the organizational, educational, and scientific activities of the Karelian State Pedagogical Institute and the Karelian-Finnish State University during the Stalinist modernization of the 1930s. Using Karelian regional material, the article demonstrates the change of priorities in higher education organization - the transition from the accelerated development of industry-specific institutions to the university model of education. The article investigates the sources of formation, number, and composition of such new social groups of the Karelian urban population as university lecturers and students. It supplements the biographical database of Karelian higher education workers with information retrieved from archival documents. The article shows that the university activities in Karelia significantly increased the availability of higher education for rural youth and the Finno-Ugric peoples in the 1930s. The authorities of the Republic of Karelia, with its border location, tried to use universities as instruments of socialist influence in Finland while at the same time strengthening political control over them. Accusations of concealing social origin, suspicions of loyalty to bourgeois ideology or nationalism, the fact of arriving in Karelia from Western countries became the reasons for dismissals, arrests, and unjust trials. The article uses the genetic, problem-based, and biographical methods, as well as the contextual and systemic approaches.