Karelia (New Union)

The Republic of Karelia (: Karjalan tasavalta; : Karjalan Tazavalda; : Республика Карелия, Respublika Kareliya; : Karjalan Tazovaldkund), commonly referred to as Karelia (Karjala; Карелия, Kareliya), is a of the. The republic is one of the most recent additions of the Soviet Union, becoming a republic as part of the. Karelia is one of the fastest growing republics in the USSR, and one of the most open in the Union. Despite being named after the, the Karelians are calculated to make up less than 35% the entire population.

The republic has a very mixed history. Between 1940 until 1956, the region was its own republic within the Soviet Union. It gained republican status during the period when the Soviet Union was in conflict with neighboring.

Karelo-Finnish SSR
The was set up on March 31, 1940 by merging the Karelian ASSR with the  The entire Karelian population of the ceded areas, about 422,000 people, was evacuated to Finland, and the territories were settled by people from other parts of the Soviet Union.

In the ensuing Continuation War, in 1941 Finland reannexed the territory that it had lost in 1940; and occupied most of the Karelian lands that had been within the USSR prior to 1940, including the capital Petrozavodsk (Petroskoi).[3] In 1944 the Soviet Union recaptured the area, which was recognized by Finland in the Moscow Armistice and Paris Peace Treaty. The Finnish Karelians were evacuated to Finland again.

In September 1944, the Karelian Isthmus with Vyborg (Viipuri) was transferred from the Karelo-Finnish SSR to the Leningrad Oblast of the RSFSR, but Ladoga Karelia remained a part of the republic.

On July 16, 1956, the republic was incorporated into the Russian SFSR as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This move can perhaps be explained in the context of the general post-war improvement of Finno-Soviet relations, which also included such steps as the Soviets' return of the Porkkala Naval Base leased territory to full Finnish sovereignty (January 1956), and leasing Maly Vysotsky Island and the Soviet section of the Saimaa Canal (conquered by the USSR in 1940 and 1944) back to Finland (1963).