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Cambridge Concise Histories
A Concise History of Finland
Few countries in Europe have undergone such rapid social, political and economic changes as Finland has during the last fifty years. David Kirby here sets out the fascinating history of this northern country, for centuries on the east-west divide of Europe, a country not blessed by nature, most of whose inhabitants still earned a living from farming fifty years ago, but which today is one of the most prosperous members of the European Union. He shows how this small country was able not only to survive in peace and war but also to preserve and develop its own highly distinctive identity, neither Scandinavian nor Eastern European. He traces the evolution of the idea of a Finnish national state, from the long centuries as part of the Swedish realm, through self-government within the Russian Empire, and into the stormy and tragic birth of the independent state in the twentieth century.
364 pages, Paperback
First published July 13, 2006
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August 27, 2012
A Concise History of Finland , David Kirby (2006)
I read this on the plane to Finland this summer, which was rather like cramming for one’s exam the night before. It was pretty much what it says on the tin, giving me a useful framework and some helpful details. As my Finnish hosts brought up this or that remark in explaining what they were showing me, I was at least able to say, “Oh, I just read something about that!” and not, “Huh?”
After briefly covering the prehistoric and pre-literate era, the book became mostly a political history. One learned which 20th C. parties won which elections, but little social or technological history -- not one word about how, say, Finland acquired electrification, something absolutely basic to a modern country. (To be fair, telegraphs, telephones, and roads got a brief mention, but who made them happen is not recorded. Technology appears to generate spontaneously.) This is partly a defect of the book’s genre tunnel vision, partly an unavoidable consequence of sticking to its mandate as “concise”. The writing was lucid and seemed balanced; the plates and maps were very welcome. I would have liked to have more of these, though I suspect there were strict financial limits on how many the author was allowed to put in.
Recommended for its purpose of taking one from general ignorance about the country to having a good basis for acquiring more detailed information.
(And if you ever get to Helsinki, by all means follow it up with a day at the National Museum of Finland, http://www.nba.fi/en/nationalmuseum .)
I read this on the plane to Finland this summer, which was rather like cramming for one’s exam the night before. It was pretty much what it says on the tin, giving me a useful framework and some helpful details. As my Finnish hosts brought up this or that remark in explaining what they were showing me, I was at least able to say, “Oh, I just read something about that!” and not, “Huh?”
After briefly covering the prehistoric and pre-literate era, the book became mostly a political history. One learned which 20th C. parties won which elections, but little social or technological history -- not one word about how, say, Finland acquired electrification, something absolutely basic to a modern country. (To be fair, telegraphs, telephones, and roads got a brief mention, but who made them happen is not recorded. Technology appears to generate spontaneously.) This is partly a defect of the book’s genre tunnel vision, partly an unavoidable consequence of sticking to its mandate as “concise”. The writing was lucid and seemed balanced; the plates and maps were very welcome. I would have liked to have more of these, though I suspect there were strict financial limits on how many the author was allowed to put in.
Recommended for its purpose of taking one from general ignorance about the country to having a good basis for acquiring more detailed information.
(And if you ever get to Helsinki, by all means follow it up with a day at the National Museum of Finland, http://www.nba.fi/en/nationalmuseum .)
July 28, 2015
One day I realized that I knew nothing about Finland, so I picked this book up. This was quite a heavy book to read for me, even though it's called "concise". The author assumes I know more about Scandinavian history than I actually do. I did learn a lot, this book is full of great information. Even has a few maps that are helpful. However, there are so many different political parties in Finland that I found myself confused when the history got to the 20th century. I wish there had been an appendix that explained what each party believed - I don't know the difference between the Finnish Social Democratic Party, The Finnish People's Democratic Union, the Finnish Communist Party, The Agrarian Union, the Swedish People's Party, The National Progressive Party, and well, you get the picture.
The more I read this book, the more I realized I don't know. I read a few passages several times, realizing that I needed another history book to explain to me what was going on in THIS history book.
Good book, though. I can't fault the author for my own lack of knowledge of European history.
The more I read this book, the more I realized I don't know. I read a few passages several times, realizing that I needed another history book to explain to me what was going on in THIS history book.
Good book, though. I can't fault the author for my own lack of knowledge of European history.
October 1, 2020
Who thinks much about Finland? During the Cold War, because of its buffer position, it was occasionally in the news. More recently, Nokia was prominent for a while. But I doubt if most Americans could name one famous Finn. Even expatriate Finns aren’t prominent—Eero Saarinen designed some famous structures, such as the Gateway Arch, and Matt Damon’s great-grandmother was Finnish, but really, what happens in Finland, stays in Finland. However, I read this book as background to my main focus, to come in another piece—the three-month Finnish civil war of early 1918, in which the country saved itself from Communism. To write that, I needed to first learn basic Finnish history, which it turns out, in the manner of most histories, is quite interesting.
The author, David Kirby, wrote a “Concise History,” so mostly what we get is facts, and we get very little about culture. As is probably not generally understood, Finns are not Scandinavian, even if their largest border is with Sweden. Nor are they Russian, their other major border. The Finnish language is not even Indo-European, it’s Uralic (something I know since one of the very few other extant Uralic languages is Hungarian, which I speak, though it is only similar to Finnish in the same way Farsi is to English). True, the Finns also live in the cold, and share certain similarities, but they are culturally different from the Viking types. According to Kirby, in what little he says about their culture, a distinct strain of independent lawlessness still runs through the Finns. In this the Finns seem like the Australians before they lost their stones, back when they lionized Ned Kelly, whom today their ruling classes spit on as a symbol of toxic masculinity, a racist who refused to abase himself before Australia’s real rulers, the Aborigines. But as we will get to, I am quite sure this Finnish trait has now disappeared.
Kirby begins at the end of the last Ice Age, when Finland became inhabitable (the land is still rising today, released from the enormous weight of the ice). First settlement was around 9000 B.C. Kirby, writing in 2006, does not discuss then-unavailable genetic evidence, but interestingly, David Reich, in Who We Are and How We Got Here, mentions that all Finns are descended from just two men who lived around 3000 B.C. Thus, Finns have little genetic diversity, and are subject to a wide range of obscure genetic diseases found only among them. Kirby does mention another possibly genetic trait: that the Finns are tremendous drinkers, consuming large amounts of hard liquor to get falling-down drunk. But that does not seem to have hurt their ability to accomplish a lot with a little, and really, if half my country was inside the Arctic Circle, I’d probably drink heavily too. In any case, the Finnish culture and consciousness was formed over the next five thousand years as a combination of different influences from west and east, producing a distinct, if small, population (today 5.5 million) that has stayed where it started.
People, if they know anything about Finland, mostly know a little about the 1939-40 Winter War, in which the Finns held up the mighty Soviet war machine, forcing a settlement short of conquest. What they don’t know, and I only knew dimly until reading this book, was that Finland was, until the twentieth century, formally always either part of Sweden or part of the Russian Empire. In both cases, Finland, or rather the Finnish parts of Finland, maintained a separate identity through the centuries, not just in rural areas but in its high culture—however, the upper crust was always dominated by those with close ties to rulers elsewhere. Nothing wrong with this; the system worked quite well, and probably benefitted the Finns.
From around A.D. 1200, when Finland began to enter European consciousness (although Tacitus mentions them, or perhaps he meant the Lapps), Sweden was the primary influence, both by conquest and by its leading of conversions to Christianity (frequently forced, in the standard paradigm of Baltic Europe). Finland was a rich source of furs and timber, along with (in some areas) fish. It was still, in Kirby’s accurate words, a marchland, worth dominating, but not worth settling for the Swedes, since cultivation was difficult at best in most of the country. Those same challenges, though, created a strong sense of communality among Finns, who from early on built and shared mills and other cooperative agricultural amenities and mechanisms—creating a unity that further discouraged violent impositions from the outside. Kirby notes that it is “a strong sense of place” that drives Finnish patriotism, not necessarily common language or identical culture in widely-separated areas. This is a crucial point, often forgotten today—patriotism, a sense of national (or sub-national) community, does not depend on homogeneity, though that helps, but more upon a strong common bond to a specific, identifiable place, which is why it is hard to maintain such a feeling as tied to a large area, or among a people that feels little or no tie to where they were born. Globalists cannot be patriots.
Thus, the Swedes and the Finns cooperated, with Finland simply being Sweden’s easternmost province, but one with a good degree of autonomy. Swedish was the language of the elite (to this day, Swedish is widely spoken in Finland’s urban areas). Swedish designs on the Continent, in wars in which the Finnish fought too, led to the creation and expansion of towns in southern Finland, along with efforts to settle and cultivate additional lands. They also provided an outlet for ambitious Finns to satisfy their ambitions, inside and outside of Finland, and the Finnish nobility directly participated in various struggles for rulership in Sweden over the centuries, even if such events had little impact on the average Finn.
The eighteenth century featured several conflicts between Russia and Sweden, resulting in war damage to Finland. As Sweden declined, Russia rose, and in 1809 Russia formally annexed Finland. In practice, though, Finland was still mostly autonomous—they were touchy about it, yet willing to serve the Russians, and Russia had bigger fish to fry, Napoleon and all. The Finns created a partially-fictitious story about a Russian grant of constitutional rights, which the Tsars didn’t agree with but didn’t spend a lot of time arguing about. During the nineteenth century the Finnish upper classes became closely tied to Russia, while, as everywhere in Europe, the literati and the middle-upper classes became very interested in nationalism and national identity—though with the Finns, this meant primarily cultural explorations, not more independence, although there was some whining about the supposed Russian yoke. It was during this time the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, associated with Karelia, viewed as the cradle of Finnish culture, was collected and became central to Finnish cultural consciousness, and debates and disputes around use of the Finnish language among the elite became common. This was almost exclusively a debate among Finns, not one between members of different ethnic groups, despite the prevalence of Swedish and Russian influence.
It was, in other words, during this time that Finland became a state in embryo, with a high degree of ethnic cohesion—not just political, but full of society-strengthening intermediary institutions, such as the “Martha organization” (named after the biblical Martha), focused on home economics, which still exists today. The Lutheran church, the official state religion, was strong and added more cohesion. The economy grew, both its traditional agriculture and, something mostly new, light industry (such as veneer manufacture), concentrated in the south. Finland did not experience mass industrialization or develop widespread heavy industry, with resulting immiseration of factory workers, that characterized other European countries. There were no dark satanic mills in Finland, or very few. But there was a fair bit of poverty (bread made from birch bark was a common food), more than one famine, and plenty of disease. The underclass was landless laborers, who worked on farms during the growing season and worked in the forests during the winter. A hard life, such that some workers became entranced by anarcho-syndicalism, resulting in some left-wing agitation and radicalization, but nothing like that in Russia or in Germany. Finnish radicals of the chattering classes primarily focused on autonomy, or even independence, from Russia, not making a new Communist society.
Over time, the Russian grip tightened, and under the last Tsar, Russification became a focus—not least because of the demands of World War I. Russian attempts to thread the needle with the Finns as to their autonomy, while at the same time addressing concerns about workers’ rights, mostly failed, with strikes becoming more common. Political violence rose—though nowhere near the degree in Russia. Still, the Russian grip was accurately perceived as tighter, in the usual spiral of leftist violence leading to Cossack clampdowns. The main left-wing party, the Social Democrats, supported by industrial workers, leaseholders, and the landless, was decidedly anti-Communist, however, and Finland never had the massive social and economic inequalities that enabled Communist propaganda to make headway in other countries.
All this went off the rails in 1917 and 1918, when the Social Democrats created Communist shock troops, the red guards, and in response a broad range of parties formed their own civil guards. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they were soon persuaded to recognize Finland as independent. In January 1918, the Finnish Left rebelled and attempted to form a Communist satrapy of Soviet Russia, in cooperation with the Bolsheviks (a key fact of Finland’s history is that for most of its history, St. Petersburg was less than a hundred miles from Finland’s border, though now it is 250 miles). The rest of the country, the Whites, with German help, fought back, and crushed the rebellion in a few months. This, the Finnish Civil War, has many lessons, and I will skip it here, since I am writing another entire piece on it. However, for decades, that split colored Finnish politics and social life, unsurprisingly, as well as gave an anti-Russian cast to Finland’s politics, and there were various skirmish-type conflicts with the Russians, mostly in Karelia, over the next several years, the Kinship Wars.
Still, and somewhat surprisingly, politics quickly returned to normal channels. No doubt this is a testament to the close, homogeneous nature of the Finns. In fact, the socialist party was soon elected to lead a government, and in the 1920s and 1930s politics followed what might be characterized as typical for the period, with the “Lapua movement” representing the 1930s semi-radical Right, and the socialists the semi-radical Left—although without the violence found in other places, that already having been gotten out of the way. Again, though, I will cover the post-war period, as well as other reverberations of the Civil War, in my later piece, and for now skip to 1939.
Shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Soviet Union, having failed to overbear the Finns into satellite status in lengthy negotiations, invaded on a wide front. The goal was to install a puppet government composed of what Finnish Communists remained. The Soviets invaded on November 30, not the best time of year, and on a very long front, from the Karelian Isthmus (due west of then-Leningrad), where the Finns had built the defensive Mannerheim Line, to the farther north, Ostrobothnia and Lapland. (The Mannerheim Line was named after its designer, perhaps the most famous Finn of all, and often remembered by the Finns as the greatest Finn ever, the military leader Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.) As is well covered in William Trotter’s Frozen Hell, and used to be well known, the Finns did not defeat the Soviets, but managed to impose tremendous and disproportionate costs, using their experience of the terrain and weather to drive up the bill. (The man who is probably the most successful sniper of all time, Simo Häyhä, “The White Death,” managed more than 500 kills during the war. He used a bolt-action rifle with iron sights, the better to keep his head down and avoid the glint of glass giving his position away. And died in 2002, at the age of ninety-six, having returned to farming for the rest of his life.)
Having signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, and given up the Karelian Isthmus to Russia (in whose possession it remains today), along with other strategically important lands, the Finns naturally joined the Germans when they attacked Stalin. This was the Continuation War, in which the Germans promised the Finns not only regaining of their lost lands, but the addition of Russian Karelia, still regarded as the cradle of Finnish culture. But the Finns lost the Continuation War, too, because the Germans lost the larger war. And, lastly, the Finns fought the Lapland War, where the Russians forced them to attack their former allies, the Germans, who were still in Lapland. The Germans beat a fighting retreat to Norway, and thence home to Germany (until I read this book, I did not realize that Norway and Finland were joined at the top of each).
After the war, Finland was seen in Western eyes as a semi-independent state, part of the Western-aligned Nordic countries in some ways, but under the thumb of the Soviet Union in many ways. Although the Finns shamefully put some of their wartime politicians on trial as demanded by the Soviets, only a few, short prison sentences were handed out. The Soviets did not aggressively support the local Communists, who as a result quickly lost their power within the country. Thus, the Finns avoided terrible fate of the rest of Soviet-dominated Europe. The price for this was ensuring that the Soviets could not regard the Finns as a security threat—made easier by Finland lacking strategic importance, so it was relatively easy to show the country was not a security threat. Finland was, however, allowed to accept American economic assistance, and the Finns, never ones to avoid hard work, quickly not only bounced back, but created a modern economy.
For three decades, until the 1980s, Finnish politics was dominated by . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
The author, David Kirby, wrote a “Concise History,” so mostly what we get is facts, and we get very little about culture. As is probably not generally understood, Finns are not Scandinavian, even if their largest border is with Sweden. Nor are they Russian, their other major border. The Finnish language is not even Indo-European, it’s Uralic (something I know since one of the very few other extant Uralic languages is Hungarian, which I speak, though it is only similar to Finnish in the same way Farsi is to English). True, the Finns also live in the cold, and share certain similarities, but they are culturally different from the Viking types. According to Kirby, in what little he says about their culture, a distinct strain of independent lawlessness still runs through the Finns. In this the Finns seem like the Australians before they lost their stones, back when they lionized Ned Kelly, whom today their ruling classes spit on as a symbol of toxic masculinity, a racist who refused to abase himself before Australia’s real rulers, the Aborigines. But as we will get to, I am quite sure this Finnish trait has now disappeared.
Kirby begins at the end of the last Ice Age, when Finland became inhabitable (the land is still rising today, released from the enormous weight of the ice). First settlement was around 9000 B.C. Kirby, writing in 2006, does not discuss then-unavailable genetic evidence, but interestingly, David Reich, in Who We Are and How We Got Here, mentions that all Finns are descended from just two men who lived around 3000 B.C. Thus, Finns have little genetic diversity, and are subject to a wide range of obscure genetic diseases found only among them. Kirby does mention another possibly genetic trait: that the Finns are tremendous drinkers, consuming large amounts of hard liquor to get falling-down drunk. But that does not seem to have hurt their ability to accomplish a lot with a little, and really, if half my country was inside the Arctic Circle, I’d probably drink heavily too. In any case, the Finnish culture and consciousness was formed over the next five thousand years as a combination of different influences from west and east, producing a distinct, if small, population (today 5.5 million) that has stayed where it started.
People, if they know anything about Finland, mostly know a little about the 1939-40 Winter War, in which the Finns held up the mighty Soviet war machine, forcing a settlement short of conquest. What they don’t know, and I only knew dimly until reading this book, was that Finland was, until the twentieth century, formally always either part of Sweden or part of the Russian Empire. In both cases, Finland, or rather the Finnish parts of Finland, maintained a separate identity through the centuries, not just in rural areas but in its high culture—however, the upper crust was always dominated by those with close ties to rulers elsewhere. Nothing wrong with this; the system worked quite well, and probably benefitted the Finns.
From around A.D. 1200, when Finland began to enter European consciousness (although Tacitus mentions them, or perhaps he meant the Lapps), Sweden was the primary influence, both by conquest and by its leading of conversions to Christianity (frequently forced, in the standard paradigm of Baltic Europe). Finland was a rich source of furs and timber, along with (in some areas) fish. It was still, in Kirby’s accurate words, a marchland, worth dominating, but not worth settling for the Swedes, since cultivation was difficult at best in most of the country. Those same challenges, though, created a strong sense of communality among Finns, who from early on built and shared mills and other cooperative agricultural amenities and mechanisms—creating a unity that further discouraged violent impositions from the outside. Kirby notes that it is “a strong sense of place” that drives Finnish patriotism, not necessarily common language or identical culture in widely-separated areas. This is a crucial point, often forgotten today—patriotism, a sense of national (or sub-national) community, does not depend on homogeneity, though that helps, but more upon a strong common bond to a specific, identifiable place, which is why it is hard to maintain such a feeling as tied to a large area, or among a people that feels little or no tie to where they were born. Globalists cannot be patriots.
Thus, the Swedes and the Finns cooperated, with Finland simply being Sweden’s easternmost province, but one with a good degree of autonomy. Swedish was the language of the elite (to this day, Swedish is widely spoken in Finland’s urban areas). Swedish designs on the Continent, in wars in which the Finnish fought too, led to the creation and expansion of towns in southern Finland, along with efforts to settle and cultivate additional lands. They also provided an outlet for ambitious Finns to satisfy their ambitions, inside and outside of Finland, and the Finnish nobility directly participated in various struggles for rulership in Sweden over the centuries, even if such events had little impact on the average Finn.
The eighteenth century featured several conflicts between Russia and Sweden, resulting in war damage to Finland. As Sweden declined, Russia rose, and in 1809 Russia formally annexed Finland. In practice, though, Finland was still mostly autonomous—they were touchy about it, yet willing to serve the Russians, and Russia had bigger fish to fry, Napoleon and all. The Finns created a partially-fictitious story about a Russian grant of constitutional rights, which the Tsars didn’t agree with but didn’t spend a lot of time arguing about. During the nineteenth century the Finnish upper classes became closely tied to Russia, while, as everywhere in Europe, the literati and the middle-upper classes became very interested in nationalism and national identity—though with the Finns, this meant primarily cultural explorations, not more independence, although there was some whining about the supposed Russian yoke. It was during this time the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, associated with Karelia, viewed as the cradle of Finnish culture, was collected and became central to Finnish cultural consciousness, and debates and disputes around use of the Finnish language among the elite became common. This was almost exclusively a debate among Finns, not one between members of different ethnic groups, despite the prevalence of Swedish and Russian influence.
It was, in other words, during this time that Finland became a state in embryo, with a high degree of ethnic cohesion—not just political, but full of society-strengthening intermediary institutions, such as the “Martha organization” (named after the biblical Martha), focused on home economics, which still exists today. The Lutheran church, the official state religion, was strong and added more cohesion. The economy grew, both its traditional agriculture and, something mostly new, light industry (such as veneer manufacture), concentrated in the south. Finland did not experience mass industrialization or develop widespread heavy industry, with resulting immiseration of factory workers, that characterized other European countries. There were no dark satanic mills in Finland, or very few. But there was a fair bit of poverty (bread made from birch bark was a common food), more than one famine, and plenty of disease. The underclass was landless laborers, who worked on farms during the growing season and worked in the forests during the winter. A hard life, such that some workers became entranced by anarcho-syndicalism, resulting in some left-wing agitation and radicalization, but nothing like that in Russia or in Germany. Finnish radicals of the chattering classes primarily focused on autonomy, or even independence, from Russia, not making a new Communist society.
Over time, the Russian grip tightened, and under the last Tsar, Russification became a focus—not least because of the demands of World War I. Russian attempts to thread the needle with the Finns as to their autonomy, while at the same time addressing concerns about workers’ rights, mostly failed, with strikes becoming more common. Political violence rose—though nowhere near the degree in Russia. Still, the Russian grip was accurately perceived as tighter, in the usual spiral of leftist violence leading to Cossack clampdowns. The main left-wing party, the Social Democrats, supported by industrial workers, leaseholders, and the landless, was decidedly anti-Communist, however, and Finland never had the massive social and economic inequalities that enabled Communist propaganda to make headway in other countries.
All this went off the rails in 1917 and 1918, when the Social Democrats created Communist shock troops, the red guards, and in response a broad range of parties formed their own civil guards. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they were soon persuaded to recognize Finland as independent. In January 1918, the Finnish Left rebelled and attempted to form a Communist satrapy of Soviet Russia, in cooperation with the Bolsheviks (a key fact of Finland’s history is that for most of its history, St. Petersburg was less than a hundred miles from Finland’s border, though now it is 250 miles). The rest of the country, the Whites, with German help, fought back, and crushed the rebellion in a few months. This, the Finnish Civil War, has many lessons, and I will skip it here, since I am writing another entire piece on it. However, for decades, that split colored Finnish politics and social life, unsurprisingly, as well as gave an anti-Russian cast to Finland’s politics, and there were various skirmish-type conflicts with the Russians, mostly in Karelia, over the next several years, the Kinship Wars.
Still, and somewhat surprisingly, politics quickly returned to normal channels. No doubt this is a testament to the close, homogeneous nature of the Finns. In fact, the socialist party was soon elected to lead a government, and in the 1920s and 1930s politics followed what might be characterized as typical for the period, with the “Lapua movement” representing the 1930s semi-radical Right, and the socialists the semi-radical Left—although without the violence found in other places, that already having been gotten out of the way. Again, though, I will cover the post-war period, as well as other reverberations of the Civil War, in my later piece, and for now skip to 1939.
Shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Soviet Union, having failed to overbear the Finns into satellite status in lengthy negotiations, invaded on a wide front. The goal was to install a puppet government composed of what Finnish Communists remained. The Soviets invaded on November 30, not the best time of year, and on a very long front, from the Karelian Isthmus (due west of then-Leningrad), where the Finns had built the defensive Mannerheim Line, to the farther north, Ostrobothnia and Lapland. (The Mannerheim Line was named after its designer, perhaps the most famous Finn of all, and often remembered by the Finns as the greatest Finn ever, the military leader Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.) As is well covered in William Trotter’s Frozen Hell, and used to be well known, the Finns did not defeat the Soviets, but managed to impose tremendous and disproportionate costs, using their experience of the terrain and weather to drive up the bill. (The man who is probably the most successful sniper of all time, Simo Häyhä, “The White Death,” managed more than 500 kills during the war. He used a bolt-action rifle with iron sights, the better to keep his head down and avoid the glint of glass giving his position away. And died in 2002, at the age of ninety-six, having returned to farming for the rest of his life.)
Having signed an armistice with the Soviet Union, and given up the Karelian Isthmus to Russia (in whose possession it remains today), along with other strategically important lands, the Finns naturally joined the Germans when they attacked Stalin. This was the Continuation War, in which the Germans promised the Finns not only regaining of their lost lands, but the addition of Russian Karelia, still regarded as the cradle of Finnish culture. But the Finns lost the Continuation War, too, because the Germans lost the larger war. And, lastly, the Finns fought the Lapland War, where the Russians forced them to attack their former allies, the Germans, who were still in Lapland. The Germans beat a fighting retreat to Norway, and thence home to Germany (until I read this book, I did not realize that Norway and Finland were joined at the top of each).
After the war, Finland was seen in Western eyes as a semi-independent state, part of the Western-aligned Nordic countries in some ways, but under the thumb of the Soviet Union in many ways. Although the Finns shamefully put some of their wartime politicians on trial as demanded by the Soviets, only a few, short prison sentences were handed out. The Soviets did not aggressively support the local Communists, who as a result quickly lost their power within the country. Thus, the Finns avoided terrible fate of the rest of Soviet-dominated Europe. The price for this was ensuring that the Soviets could not regard the Finns as a security threat—made easier by Finland lacking strategic importance, so it was relatively easy to show the country was not a security threat. Finland was, however, allowed to accept American economic assistance, and the Finns, never ones to avoid hard work, quickly not only bounced back, but created a modern economy.
For three decades, until the 1980s, Finnish politics was dominated by . . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
October 3, 2021
This is a well-written history of Finland starting in the 1100s and finishing almost 900 years later, in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. The author is Professor of Modern History at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies of University College London. He’s produced other works on Finland, and I chose this volume on the strength of an essay by him that I read in another book about six months ago. His text is very engaging, but he seems to lose track of Finland in the Great Depression, a time period that he barely mentions, and during some of the more contentious events, his personal politics spill rather obviously into the narrative, spoiling what should be a properly objective account. Otherwise, at just over 300 pages (sans end notes and index), it’s a good, compact read, and recommended as a primer in getting to know the social, political, and cultural aspects of Finland.
This is the fourth book in a personal project in which I attempt to understand Finnish history more deeply.
This is the fourth book in a personal project in which I attempt to understand Finnish history more deeply.
March 22, 2020
Quick and easy to follow overview of Finland. Got a bit better understanding why Finnish have special relationship with Russia, what role does Sweden play in their history. If you want to get a quick overview of Finland's history, this book is for you. Has some graphical material which makes reading it more enjoyable. Books is not lateat (published in 2006), so don't expect it to cover last 15 years.
February 4, 2021
Quite dry and thus hard to finish, but it offers an adequate overview of Finland's political history if you're not particularly interested in the country's culture and don't care about gripping prose.
October 17, 2021
This book is like a meal of mashed potatoes: my stomach feels very full, but I feel like I didn't have a real meal.
Kirby's interpretation of "concise" seems to mean not wasting his time on a coherent, clear narrative and instead cramming as many political details as possible into a single page. I do see the value in it - and I learned plenty - but I would have preferred the opposite approach.
At the outset, Kirby is very clear he is focusing specifically on politics, though I don't think the title or blurbs makes this clear ("Concise History of Finnish Politics," maybe?). I definitely want more of a discussion of Finnish culture in a concise survey.
I am informed and found much that was interesting, but I feel unsatisfied. I would say this is great if you really want to understand the decisions and policies that shaped Finland as a nation state, but I would look elsewhere if you want an introduction to the land and people.
Kirby's interpretation of "concise" seems to mean not wasting his time on a coherent, clear narrative and instead cramming as many political details as possible into a single page. I do see the value in it - and I learned plenty - but I would have preferred the opposite approach.
At the outset, Kirby is very clear he is focusing specifically on politics, though I don't think the title or blurbs makes this clear ("Concise History of Finnish Politics," maybe?). I definitely want more of a discussion of Finnish culture in a concise survey.
I am informed and found much that was interesting, but I feel unsatisfied. I would say this is great if you really want to understand the decisions and policies that shaped Finland as a nation state, but I would look elsewhere if you want an introduction to the land and people.
August 11, 2016
"A Concise History of Finland (Cambridge Concise Histories)" by David Gordon Kirby is a very well researched and informative guide to Finland's history. I found it most useful and feel I learned a lot.
I found some of the writing a little confusing as wider European context of wars and other developments, e.g. background of Scandinavia and its dynasties, seemed to be expected as prior knowledge.
Kirby knows his history and conveys a lot of information.
I found some of the writing a little confusing as wider European context of wars and other developments, e.g. background of Scandinavia and its dynasties, seemed to be expected as prior knowledge.
Kirby knows his history and conveys a lot of information.
August 2, 2020
"The independent state, then represented continuity rather than radical change. It was constituted within an inherited territorial framework (unlike other new states that had to be carved out of the carcasses of empires, such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, with its own infrastructure of functioning institutions, laws, currency, and with a literate, ethnically homogenous population." (168)
"In comparison with their counterparts in other new states of eastern Europe, with their harsh history of serfdom and oppression, Finish peasant farmers had long enjoyed the benefits of free and active institutions, from the peasants' estate down to the local farmers' society, the support and encouragement of the better placed in society, such as the clergy, and, it has been argued, had been drawn into the market economy well before independence." (187-8)
"Since the Soviet Union and the FCMA treaty were swept into the rubbish-bin of history in the early nineties, there has been a great deal of agonised self-examination in the Finnish intellectual circles of the degree to which the elite, or even the Finnish people as a whole might have been complicit in the censorship of free expression. The fact that, with few exceptions, the intellectuals were unwilling to discuss such questions before 1990 adds a whiff of uneasy conscience to the whole debate, which may be construed as a public act of penance or an attempt to seek forgiveness ex post fact so that Finland may be fully accepted into the European club, as one participator in the discussion has observed." (272)
"In comparison with their counterparts in other new states of eastern Europe, with their harsh history of serfdom and oppression, Finish peasant farmers had long enjoyed the benefits of free and active institutions, from the peasants' estate down to the local farmers' society, the support and encouragement of the better placed in society, such as the clergy, and, it has been argued, had been drawn into the market economy well before independence." (187-8)
"Since the Soviet Union and the FCMA treaty were swept into the rubbish-bin of history in the early nineties, there has been a great deal of agonised self-examination in the Finnish intellectual circles of the degree to which the elite, or even the Finnish people as a whole might have been complicit in the censorship of free expression. The fact that, with few exceptions, the intellectuals were unwilling to discuss such questions before 1990 adds a whiff of uneasy conscience to the whole debate, which may be construed as a public act of penance or an attempt to seek forgiveness ex post fact so that Finland may be fully accepted into the European club, as one participator in the discussion has observed." (272)
January 28, 2023
Quite a good intro to history of Finland, at least for someone with minimal knowledge of it.
Certainly it misses much of the prehistorical context, and doesn't even mention any genetic history still for what it is is a good intro.
In summary it says that for most of written history in the area Finland was ruled by Sweden where the Finnish were highly oppressed and not allowed to even write in their own language.
Once oppression got to an extreme level there was a war where Russia Empire liberated Finland from Sweden in early 1800s.
Slowly but surely Finnish people managed to develop their own culture and language in the mid 1800s.
Then Finland more or less was highly independent province of Russia until gaining full independence in 1917. After that Finland had a few wars with the Soviet Union and then walked a tight rope balancing act between the soviet union and western Europe.
Eventually they joined the European Union and were beset by many of the same problems as other European culture nations such as urbanization and the inevitable demographic collapse that results from it is in progress.
Certainly it misses much of the prehistorical context, and doesn't even mention any genetic history still for what it is is a good intro.
In summary it says that for most of written history in the area Finland was ruled by Sweden where the Finnish were highly oppressed and not allowed to even write in their own language.
Once oppression got to an extreme level there was a war where Russia Empire liberated Finland from Sweden in early 1800s.
Slowly but surely Finnish people managed to develop their own culture and language in the mid 1800s.
Then Finland more or less was highly independent province of Russia until gaining full independence in 1917. After that Finland had a few wars with the Soviet Union and then walked a tight rope balancing act between the soviet union and western Europe.
Eventually they joined the European Union and were beset by many of the same problems as other European culture nations such as urbanization and the inevitable demographic collapse that results from it is in progress.
April 7, 2025
Its not bad, but I feel like Kirby does only really focus on the political side of things- the politicians in the Eduskunta especially, in the later chapters. While that is not bad per se, and concise is in the book title, Kirby really really wants me to read about the Kekkonen doctrine. I, for one, was hoping to get more (background) information on the finnish colonisation and conquest of Sami and of the expeditions to Karelia in the early interwar years. I believe the latter does not even get mentioned, which is almost a stain in the otherwise well-written history of (political) Finland.
More maps would be helpfull in the earlier chapters but I guess financial concerns made that impossible
More maps would be helpfull in the earlier chapters but I guess financial concerns made that impossible
January 16, 2018
This is a good rundown of Finaland's political history. The writing is succinct and well organized for those interested in a top-down view of history. I would have liked this title more if cultural traditions and the development of social policies were more closely interwoven with the political narrative. Despite this general absence, Kirby successfully emphasizes the historic role of the Finnish language schools as incubators for the modern Finnish nation, and public education as a source of national pride in the present day. This is worth a read for those with a general interest in the political development of Finland.
April 13, 2020
A genuinely enjoyable read. I originally became interested in Finnish history through WW2 and the Winter War and wanted a quick but in-depth read of the country's past. This book provided just that. Plenty of detail in a comparatively small book but I was surprised that the Winter War itself was discussed in relatively few pages. There are some points at which I felt a topic or event was too quickly abandoned without being necessarily expanded upon and that the author assumed that the reader has some prior knowledge of the region's history. All in all a worthwhile book.
March 29, 2025
I think the book is good in general especially when you could find few books about Finland history. The good part is, logic and timeline are pretty clear and straightforward. the less satisfying part is some contents have been repeated too many times such like politics, and some parts might be interesting such as development of education which is very famous among the world have seldom been mentioned.
September 25, 2014
A little too focused on political figures for my taste. I would have preferred more information on the economic and welfare policies of the nation. How exactly did Finland get from agrarian backwater to a country with one of the highest quality of life ratings in the world? Still, the chapter on Kekkonen and the cold war was an interesting perspective, coming from someone ignorant of modern European (especially Baltic) history.
October 17, 2014
I had to look up 'concise' in the OED, thinking that perhaps the British use of the word is different than ours. But no. Concise: very brief in statement or expression. Not this book, which is a strong argument for the value of editors and the hazards of their lack. Fortunately, I found The History of Finland by Jason Lavery, which does a much better job of providing a concise summary of this subject, with superior maps and useful timelines.
Want to read
January 5, 2012I would like to learn more about Finland's history. (Hell, Scandinavia as a whole too.) I wonder if this would be a good book to do that with?
March 2, 2013
A longer and more critical look at Finnish history than comparable volumes. Brings you up to date with Finland in the 21st century.
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