When the young Finnish woman left her home country in the 1930s, she was headed for Stalin's Soviet Russia, lured by the dream of living in a worker's paradise.
But that dream turned into a nine-year nightmare, one which she recorded in her diary.
When that diary was published in 1942, under the pseudonym Kirsti Huurre for safety, it became one of Finland's most banned books, second only to Hitler's autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf.
Now, 90 years later, Huurre's great-granddaughter Anna Hyrske has translated the memoir, Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer, into English.
"The Soviet Union has such cultural influence in Finland that a book critical of the Soviet Union was banned," Hyrske tells ABC Radio National’s Sunday Extra.
Hyrske, who was born in Finland and is now a senior financial officer at the World Bank, based in Washington DC, remembers learning about her great-grandmother's book as a teenager.
"Even then, I felt that there was something compelling about her story that deserved to be heard by a wider audience," she says.
Hyrske was motivated to translate her great-grandmother's diary as she could see parallels with the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine
"[I thought] if I'm not going to translate the book now, when will I ever translate it?" she says.
"Hearing stories about Russia's plan for Ukraine, including the taking over of Kyiv in three days … I realised that these elements are exactly the same as [my great-grandmother] mentioned in this book."
Fleeing Finland
Before Huurre's decision to leave Finland in the early 1930s for the Soviet Union, she led a "perfectly normal life", says Hyrske.
"In the book, she tries to explain it to herself and to the readers, that she had a good life in Helsinki … She wasn't running away from her parents at all.
"But yet, there was something that was really drawing her into the Soviet Union and I will never be fully able to understand why that is."
While it's impossible to know Huurre's exact motivation for leaving Finland for Russia, the 1918 Finnish civil war may have had something to do with it, Hyrske says.
The war began a year after Finland became independent from Russia. The six-month conflict between the socialist Reds and the conservative Whites resulted in a White victory.
"You had two sides, and she actually had friends on both sides," Hyrske says.
Hyrske says it may have been Huurre's friends on the side of the Reds that "led to her being interested in what life in the Soviet Union could be".
The Soviet Union also conducted propaganda and information campaigns. Some of these said that "joining the Soviet family means that there is ample work, and there are beautiful apartments, and it's a society that treats everyone equally."
Hyrske says her great-grandmother must've felt that, as a young mother, the move was a good decision for her and her family.
And it seems Huurre was hopeful that once she was settled in Russia, her young son would join her.
"It's very difficult for me to understand why anyone would feel so strongly … that you move to another country and leave your children behind … She must have felt quite torn about it but also felt extremely strongly about what she was doing would be a good choice," Hyrske says
Reality hits
Shortly after arriving in the Soviet Union, Huurre met a man of Finnish descent who was a Red Army officer.
They fell in love, got married, and they had a daughter.
Then ethnic cleansing began in the Soviet Union.
From 1930 through to the 1950s, Stalin ordered the deportation of "anti-Soviet" people. Those that were of different ethnic backgrounds were imprisoned and investigated, most often on espionage charges.
"That was the easy solution for these cleansings [by] claiming that people were actually spying for foreign nations, even though there was no proof of that ever happening," Hyrske says.
After nine years in the Soviet Union, Huurre managed to escape back to Finland in 1941.
But her homecoming was far from straightforward, as she returned to a country at war.
The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland had begun in 1939, following a Soviet invasion of Finland and just three months after the outbreak of World War II. This Winter War was followed by the Continuation War, a conflict between Finland and Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.
When Huure returned, she found that the Finnish state police were suspicious that she was a Soviet spy or that she had strong feelings towards the Soviet Union.
"She was extensively interviewed or interrogated by the army [and] the police on what she had done in Soviet Russia, who she had been discussing or living with and associated herself with," Hyrske says.
The book
Huurre wrote her account of life in Stalin's oppressive Soviet Union around this time. The Continuation War was still raging, but when it became clear that the Soviets would triumph, she fled to Sweden.
"She could not risk staying in Finland and then, most likely, be deported to the Soviet Union by the Allied Commission for being a Soviet citizen," Hyrske says of Huurre.
She believes the reason her great-grandmother wrote the book was because "she wanted to share her experiences … as a counter-message to the other types of messages that had been blasted in Finland about the Soviet Union being a workers' paradise".
Her memoir, Private Diaries from 1930s Soviet Russia, was first published in 1942.
"I've actually seen a copy of this book that had been gifted to a [Finnish] Army soldier for good performance in a sports tournament, so I feel that it was definitely also being used as propaganda by the Finnish military," Hyrske says.
However, Hyrske says she is not surprised that the memoir became so controversial.
"[The book] was her experiences, the way she saw her life over those nine years in Soviet Russia," she says.
Translated, the author's preface reads: "My intention in writing this isn't as propaganda to warn any Finns who might still be entertaining dreams about the sledgehammer and the sickle. I simply want to provide an honest account of what my friends and I had to live through under the 'Stalinist sun'."
In the book, Huurre describes the killing of her husband in the Soviet Union, and how she was then considered a widow of a spy.
"[She did] not have a proper job, she had difficulties in finding housing [and] providing for her daughter, so obviously, her experiences were extremely negative, and she made it very clear in the book on how she felt about the Soviet society of that particular time," says her great-granddaughter.
The Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union ended in 1944 and the Moscow Armistice was signed in September 1944. A Soviet-led Allied Controlled Commission was then established in Helsinki to ensure that Finland adhered to the elements of the peace treaty.
Hyrske says the commission sent a list of books that were not allowed to be sold to all bookstores and publishers. It also demanded that Finnish libraries not hold any literature deemed "damaging to the brotherly relations of Finland and Soviet Union".
Her great-grandmother's book was on the list.
"The librarians in Finland felt that this [book] was so dangerous to the relationship, because it was a negative depiction of life in the Soviet Union," says her great-granddaughter.
Huurre spent the rest of her life in Sweden, until she passed away in 1991.
With hindsight, Hyrske says it's easy to describe her great-grandmother's decision to leave Finland for Soviet Russia in the 1930s as "stupid", but ultimately "she was a young woman [and] she still wanted to have experiences".
