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Communities that abide: Finland
Monday, October 28, 2013 21:11
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[This week we continue the series with an article on Finland, by Eerik Wissenz. Few people know that before Russia came to exist as a country, and for many centuries after, communities of Finns were widely distributed over what is now Russian Federation territory, surviving mostly by hunting and fishing, and not making much of an impact. The Finnish way of relating to the land, which Eerik describes in this article, is nothing new: it is at least a thousand years old.
I have a strong personal connection to Finland, having grown up in Karelia, on Finnish territory which came to be annexed by the USSR during the winter of 1939-40. Due to a disasterous misreading of the operetta-like Finnish politics of the period, in which self-styled “communists” and “socialists” battled self-styled “fascists” over numerous pints of beer, Stalin had become frightened by the possibility that the real Fascists (i.e., German Nazi) troops would use Finnish territory to put themselves within artillery range of Leningrad (which they later did anyway). The war was a disaster for both sides.
Source: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/10/communities-that-abide-finland.html
