Reviews Lake Ladoga. A transnational history

Lake Ladoga: The Coastal History of the Greatest Lake in Europe. Maria Lähteenmäki and Isaac Land, eds.,(Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2023). Studia Fennica Historica vol. 27, 233 pages.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2024: 1-2. pages 131-134
Published on balticworlds.com on April 23, 2024

Histories of great bodies of water — maritime histories, histories of river basins — have been the object of scholars’ interest for quite some time, while similar approaches to lakes have been less common. Not to look too far, the Baltic Sea has had its share of histories throughout the 20th century, written with various agendas in mind, depending on the changing times and the changing geopolitical contexts. Maria Lähteenmäki, one of the editors of the book under review, calls the Baltic Sea “Ladoga’s ‘big sister’” in the first chapter (p. 12), thus connecting the two on the level of scholarship, as well as on the level of the environment and lived experience, into one system — the lake becoming, in a way, the sea’s extension to the east. Lake Ladoga, Lähteenmäki seems to be saying, deserves as much attention as the big sister.
The volume under review aims to do just that, to present a transnational history of the lake, and more precisely its coasts. The editors and authors emphasize the concept of “new coastal history” introduced in 2007 by Isaac Land (the other of the volume’s editors), as one of the guiding concepts behind the book: The focus is on the coast alongside the water (p. 18—19). By writing about Lake Ladoga, they hope to expand this approach to cover not only oceanic and maritime history writing, but also that about lakes, and to develop a “lakefront history approach” (p. 20). The editors underline that their aim was to concentrate on the lake, its shores, the interaction between human society and economy, and the natural environment. They also want to put the lake into the global context in terms of the environment, as belonging to “a global family of great lakes” (p. 45): a chain of lakes in Northern Europe, the great lakes of the northern hemisphere in general, and their impact on climate.

The book is divided into four parts, followed by a Postscript. In the first part, three chapters outline the theoretical bases and the place that the volume intends to occupy at the intersection of transnational history, environmental history, and coastal history. It is also a call to “take lakes seriously”, as the title of the chapter by Isaac Land suggests: a call to look beyond seas and oceans, and to extend scholarly reflection and scrutiny to those great reservoirs of fresh water, their impact on societies and the environment, and how these are inseparably intertwined.
The second part of the book consists of two chapters dealing with the earliest history of human settlement on Ladoga’s shores, as testified by archaeological findings, linguistic evidence, and medieval written sources. The image painted in these two chapters shows the lake — since the beginnings of human presence on its shores — as a borderland between the Slavic, Finnic and Scandinavian worlds, a place of flows and exchange, on the route from Viking settlements, through Rus’, into the East. It also shows — on the example of the so-called “Normanist controversy” in Thomas Rosén’s chapter — how history continues to have relevance for, and to be instrumentalized in, present day nationalistic politics.
Part three jumps ahead in time from the early Middle Ages to the industrialization era. These three chapters deal with this and its consequences for Lake Ladoga. The first two focus on case studies — the river Jänisjoki and the village of Pitkäranta — showing the importance of the lake’s drainage basin as one ecological and socio-economic system, the non-linear processes of industrial development, and their dependency on geographical location and the multicultural borderland environment. The final chapter in this part, by Alfred Colpaert and Augustine-Moses Gbagir, with its focus on the ecological state of Ladoga’s waters examined using satellite images, is rather an odd one out in the anthology. While it is an interesting addition to the discussion on the consequences of industrialization, in its approach and methodology it veers away from the historical and social sciences approaches that govern the rest of the book. Interestingly, the authors decided to add QR codes to link to the colored versions of the illustrations that could only be printed in black and white in the book. It is a good way to overcome technical limitations and to better visualize the data. Unfortunately, though, the link on p. 145 does not work.
Part four of the volume consists of three chapters focusing on the lived experiences on the lake’s coasts and islands. It examines the intimate, sensory histories of living on and close to the lake, the changing experience with the shifting state borders in the aftermath of the Second World War, the tensions between the leisure life of vacationers and tourists on one hand, and permanent inhabitants making their living off the resources of the lake and its coasts on the other hand, some of which come to the fore in the long lasting disputes over the establishment of the Ladoga Skerries National Park.

Finally, the last part consists of just one chapter penned by both editors. The title of this part, Postcript, suggests something added as an afterthought, after the whole volume had been completed, but it serves rather to reiterate and to sum up the points made throughout the book, especially those about the interdependency between the human societies and the environment.
The book’s ambition is to be innovative in several different ways, starting with the fact of taking the lake as its central theme, and looking at it from the point of view of its socio-cultural life and its relationship with the environment, rather than “big” politics, the focus of more traditional histories. Even though Lake Ladoga was situated on the frontlines of both the Second World War and the Cold War, the focus in the book is elsewhere: on the lived experiences, the interactions between the people and the environment through tourism, economy, and environmental protection. The major political events and shifting borders feature only insofar as they influenced the former. The book thus presents a novel view on history of Europe and in Europe: its hitherto understudied regions and borderlands, determined more by geography and its interplay with human societies than by nation states, their policies, and the confines of their borders. Rather than a place divided by a clear-cut national border or the Iron Curtain, Lake Ladoga is shown as “the lake of the northern borderland” (p. 13) in more than one sense: It lies on Europe’s northern periphery, and on the shifting border between the Finnic and the Slavic worlds, between Finland and Russia/the USSR. The editors’ focus on coastal history, furthermore, underlines its nature as a borderland between land and water, and the specific conditions — environmental, socio-cultural, economic — which this kind of borderland engenders.
At the same time, the book leaves the reader with a sense that there is still much to explore in this transnational history of Lake Ladoga, especially because timewise the volume only covers the early Middle Ages and the period since industrialization, while the centuries in between are absent. This makes the volume slightly lose its focus: If it is indeed the history of the greatest lake in Europe, as the title promises, it is a history that misses a few chapters, and if it is supposed to be contemporary history, then it has a few chapters too many. The absence of big politics has its shortcomings, too. The book ends with an optimistic conclusion about “relinquishing the national gaze” and Lake Ladoga as “our cultural heritage, containing values that we all share” (p. 225). However, in face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (which is not mentioned in the book at all), and the processes which it triggered — among others the Russian Federation’s isolation in Europe and Finnish NATO membership — the reader is left wondering who and what “we” and these “values that we all share” are. It could perhaps be interesting to address the issue if, and how, the current war influences and will influence the Lake Ladoga as “a shared natural heritage site, for which we humans in general — not just citizens of individual countries — are responsible” (p. 226). Can we indeed hope that this sense of the shared responsibility for the environment will be enough to overcome big power politics, major military and political conflicts, and nationalistic feelings, as the editors seem to postulate?
Even with these reservations in mind, though, it can be said that the book fulfils the aims which its authors and editors set for themselves, and is an interesting addition to understanding Europe’s past and present. One can hope that it will inspire others to follow in its footsteps and to fill in the still missing chapters in the history of Europe’s greatest lake.≈

References

1. For example: Władysław Konopczyński, Kwestia bałtycka do XX w. [The Baltic question until the 20th century] Prace Naukowo-Informacyjne. Seria Sprawy Morskie [Scientific and Information Works. Naval Affairs Series] (Gdańsk, Bydgoszcz, Szczecin: Instytut Bałtycki, 1947); David Kirby, Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World 1492—1772 (London: Longman, 1990); David Kirby, The Baltic World 1772­—1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change (London: Longman, 1995); Kristian Gerner, Klas-Göran Karlsson, and Anders Hammarlund, Nordens Medelhav: Östersjöområdet som historia, myt och projekt [The Nordic Mediterranean: The Baltic Sea area as history, myth and project] (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2002).
2. I. Land, “Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History’, Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (1 March 2007): 731—43, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0051.

Marta Grzechnik