372 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 such as Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn.Indeed it ison these that she focuses,with three of the eight chapters dedicated exclusively to them. Here she convincingly explores the ways in which the de-humanizing, dislocating experience of the Gulag is embodied in the structureof the text, and through a harmony between content and form achieves artisticmerit. Return fromtheArchipelago is a hugely wide-ranging work, covering almost a century of diverse writing. Its scale is both its strength and weakness; the rigorousanalysisof lesser-knowntexts might at times seem likehardwork,but by revealing the magnitude of the Gulag corpus, this book raises many important,and difficult,questions:about our abilityand our duty to explore a past so horrificallyalien to our own experience, the kind of truth we seek in such an endeavour, and the ways in which literature both enlightens and impedes us. School ofSlavonic andEastern European Studies MIRIAM DOBSON University College London Smolander,Jyrki. Suomalainen oikeisto ja 'kansankoti'. Bibliotheca Historica, 63. Suomalaisen KirjallisuudenSeura, Helsinki, 2000. 342 pp. Illustrations. Notes.Bibliography. Index.FIM140.00. KANSANKOTI is a Finnish translation of the Swedish term Folkhemmet, the 'people's home', a kind and loving word for the welfare state. This is a study, running from the ending of the Continuation War up to 1975, of the attitude of the Finnish Conservative Party, the National Coalition Party,towards the idea of buildinga welfarestatein Finland. Jyrki Smolander's text is a masterlypresentation. It shows the workingsof Conservative politics and the tensions thereby arising in terms very different from those of the oft-mentioned story of the relegation of the National Coalition Party due to Finlandization. This is a story of consensual politics that goes beyond the ins-and-outsof the formationof governments. It is a tale told about the influence of one party's outlook upon another, all the more strikingsince, as the authoremphasizes,the FinnishSocial Democrats and the FinnishConservativesstartedout fromprinciplesof socialpolicy derivedfrom different planets. Consensuality has also been apparent in the influence of other countries upon Finland in this question. At its clearest this has meant the impact of Sweden, but also Britain,seen in particularthroughthe attitude of the British Conservatives, played a certain role too. In Western and Northern Europe there was a general trend in this period towards the formation of welfarestates. It wasn't easy for all Conservatives to adapt to this. In the Finnish case, Smolanderclearlyrevealsthe painful,hesitant,and oftenback-trackingnature of this adaptation. The adaptationwas aided by the fact that the middle class in Finland, who were there as in so many countries the great beneficiariesof the welfare state, frequently voted, to the vexation of the Conservatives, for smaller professedly liberal-type parties and had to be convinced, by a Conservativeacceptance of welfarepolicies, that the National Coalition Party REVIEWS 373 was something more than a combination of big capital and the priest in cassockand steel helmet portrayedin Kari'scartoons. I like the fact that Smolander, in his analysisof strainsthat were constantly tending to emerge in Finnish Conservatism,employs my favouriteloan word in the Finnish language, namely dilemma. To cap the Social Democrats, who argued that the welfare state was a condition of economic growth, the Conservatives reversed the scenario and saw powerful economic growth as the condition for the creation of the welfarestate. So farso good. But then the dilemma emerged. Voices on the sideline like Tuure Junnila's were for long pointing out that the taxation for the welfare state would recoil negatively upon economic growth. Even the youthful Conservatism of Juha Rihtniemi began to feel alarmed. Raimo Ilaskivi found a way out by insisting upon a wage policy that rewardedindustriousnessand training.In his argumentation,the welfarestate was not a means for producing the dreaded economic equality all Conservatives feared. It was, on the contrary,the best means of holding off Socialismby preventing larger-scale reconstructionsof society and the economy through state action. Ilaskivi saw a compromise being engendered between a Conservatism that accepted the welfare state and a Social Democracy that accepted the market economy. This has come to be, though I should myself fiercely argue that the compromise has left certain key aspects of the welfare state in Finland definitelyin the lurch, as...