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Finland Forced to Conform Until the end of the 1980s Finland followed the Soviet interpretation in the official representation of its history. For decades this interpretation had accused the Finns of provoking the Winter War and the War of Continuation. The opinion of the majority of the population stood in complete opposition to this interpretation, however. They cultivated the memory of the wars by erecting military graves and monuments, celebrating memorial days, and producing artworks and memoirs. They placed the struggle for national independence in the centre of their collective remembrance. The Winter War and the War of Continuation were both wars in which the Finns sought to preserve their national independence, no matter who their allies were. All political turning points in the 20 th century had served, in their remembrance, their national self-assertion. |
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The soldier and statesman Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim is the national icon of the Finns per se. They see in him the preserver of their independence. In Mannerheim's memory they named one of the main streets in Helsinki after him, already in the 1940s. An equestrian statue of the Marshal by Aimo Tukiainen, for which funds were collected in the entire country, was unveiled on the edge of that street on 4 June 1960. Seven years later, on the anniversary of Mannerheim's hundredth birthday, a postage stamp with the motif of the monument was issued. |
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One of the greatest provocations against the Soviet Union with regard to the perception of the War of Continuation was the novel "The Unknown Soldier" by Väinö Linna, published in 1954. It bolstered Finnish patriotism and described the War of Continuation as the legitimate defensive action of a small country. The novel rose to the ranks of a national epic. More than a million copies were sold in Finnish alone. In 1955 the book was made into a film by the director Edvin Laine. This film still leads the list of the most popular Finnish feature films. Finnish television broadcasts "The Unknown Soldier" regularly on Finnish Independence Day. In the wake of the film, the story was staged in the Pyynikki open air theatre in Tampere in 1961 and 1969; Kekkonen himself had to attend one of the performances. The theatre poster from 1964 cites the first scene of the film in which the soldiers bury their dead comrade. |
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