Pilke, Helena. Korsu-Uutisia! Rintamalehtien Jatkosota (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 567 would be a better version of Tsarism: a geopolitical stable empire that was orderly, modern, law respecting, ethnically tolerant, and nonarbitrary in its manner of rule’ (p. 185). Jeremy Smith makes very modest claims of providing a ‘starting-point’ (p. xiv) for the student and general reader interested in a broad overview of the nationalities experience in the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Indeed this is an excellent summary of mainly English-language research. The guiding policies of the period and how they played out amongst the nationalities are described and analysed with clarity and brevity. It is an achievement to capture complexity and to render it understandable. Teachers and students will be most grateful. The author is clear about issues that remain unsettled in his own mind and this gives a sense of the topic as a lived experience for the researcher as well as in the past. This is most evident in the discussion of the complex and much debated Ukrainian famine (pp. xv, 107–11). Above all, we gain a clear appreciation of the contradictions between and within certain periods that contained massive hurt as well as some gains. Inevitably, in a work that applies a ‘broad brush’ there will be disagreements with the text or frustration that more historiographical information was not provided. I would have appreciated, for example, a little more on how historians have dissected the Terror and explained its various aspects (p. 119, n 30). In the light of recent events, I wanted to know more about ‘strains with the Russian population’ when Crimea was incorporated into Ukraine (p. 161). Later, Smith puts this initiative down to the RSFSR Council of Ministers over which Khrushchev had ‘little influence’ (p. 194), but surely a change of such magnitude had to have some input from the First Secretary? These are, however, minor quibbles. Starting from very different methodologies, one sociological and theoretical, the other historical and narrative, both these books inform and challenge our appreciation of what makes our area of study so difficult: to incorporate the nationalities and the national dimension. School of English and History Ian D. Thatcher University of Ulster, Coleraine Pilke, Helena. Korsu-Uutisia! Rintamalehtien Jatkosota. Historiallisia Tutkimuksia, 260. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, Helsinki, 2012. 357 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Appendices. Index. €39.00. During the Second World War, the Finns, in what they call the Winter War (30 November 1939–13 March 1940), lost the Karelian Isthmus and a bit more territory up north. The Russians took these lands. In what the Finns call the SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 568 Continuation War (25 June 1941–4 September 1944), they tried to get the lost lands back — and a lot more. They didn’t succeed. After this, they lived for decades on the good graces of the Russians, enforced till 1992 by a treaty. Helena Pilke’s text is mainly concerned with the spirit of the Finnish armed forces in the Continuation War. This she finds expressed in a study of the changing moods of the troops as reflected in the front-line gazettes. There were over ten of these journals. One, entitled Tappara (‘Battle-Axe’), ran to a print of 15,000. This was topped by Karjalan Viesti, which had a print-run of 30,000. In short, these news-sheets were popular and some of them even recounted the battles in Asia. After all, it was a world war that was going on. The people who ran these presses belonged to an outfit known as the TK (tiedotuskomppania) which was headed by Kalle Lehmus, a Social Democrat who was accountable to Mannerheim. Some of the members of the TK were distinguished intellectuals — men like Olavi Paavolainen and Yrjö Jylhä. But those who have previously written about the outfit — and now Helena Pilke — have noted that the TK were not regarded with much esteem by the front-liners. Perhaps this was because, as Pilke suggests, the TK-men were not exactly fighters. But they were good organizers. Lehmus had spent two months in Germany to learn his craft. Reading the extracts from the front-line press takes one back to a strange world. The talk is that of...