Finnish War Research Articles

A History of Cold War Industrialisation: Finnish Shipbuilding between East and West by Saara Matala

Reviewed by: A History of Cold War Industrialisation: Finnish Shipbuilding between East and West by Saara Matala René Taudal Poulsen (bio) A History of Cold War Industrialisation: Finnish Shipbuilding between East and West By Saara Matala. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 233. For over four decades, Cold War politics shaped technology and business developments in European and North American military-industrial businesses. Historians of technology, business, and politics continue to debate the nature of these dynamics and their societal implications, and Saara Matala brings a fresh perspective to these discussions with her novel study of Cold War Finnish shipbuilding. She argues that Cold War politics had a decisive influence on Finnish shipbuilders, despite the fact that they specialized in icebreakers and passenger ships—not naval vessels. She also finds that shipbuilding played a central role in Finland's transformation from a fragile, low-cost, agrarian economy in Europe's periphery into a high-cost but competitive European industrial economy with high social stability. After World War II, Finland, a young, capitalist democracy, had to come to terms with the USSR, which had just won the war and demanded Finnish war reparations, including substantial numbers of merchant ships. Finns had to sugarcoat communication with their powerful neighbor. Some observers have scornfully labeled this process "Finlandization" and suggested that Finland could and should have acted differently. However, Matala shows how Finnish businesses navigated Cold War politics to their advantage and gained substantial leverage. After the last war reparations in 1952, Finnish yards continued to supply the USSR with merchant ships. From 1945 to 1970, the majority of deliveries went there, and although domestic and Western European markets increased in importance after 1970, the USSR remained the single most important market in Finland until 1990. For shipbuilding scholars, it is not surprising to learn that shipbuilding was heavily embedded in politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Governments in shipbuilding nations have regularly employed a wide variety of support schemes to counteract the negative employment effects of depressed shipbuilding markets and the rise of Asian shipbuilders. In the long run, however, the center of gravity in shipbuilding moved to South Korea and Japan. In studying the political economy of shipbuilding, historians have focused on the United Kingdom and tended to neglect other countries. Matala's study is a refreshing contribution to this literature, and she gives nuance to the ways in which shipbuilders could gain competitiveness. As Finland balanced between East and West, Finnish shipbuilders secured high-paying Soviet orders with favorable payment terms and partly insulated themselves from the market downturn of the 1970s and 1980s. With the help [End Page 280] of Finnish politicians, including President Urho Kekkonen, they engaged in long, drawn-out Soviet contract negotiations—which differed considerably from normal yard contracting—and Finnish-Soviet technological cooperation. The USSR paid for ships via a special clearing mechanism, effectively paying for them with raw materials, including oil. Finnish shipbuilders had a strong niche focus on highly complex vessel types. Although Matala does not provide any quantitative estimates of price differentials for "newbuilding" prices for the Soviet and Western ship markets, she convincingly shows how Soviet ship demand enabled Finns to build up technological strongholds in niches: even a poor Soviet Union was rich enough to buy sophisticated, Finnish icebreakers. In the late 1980s, the Finns turned to Europe in response to the disintegration of the USSR. Although Finnish politicians claimed not to subsidize shipbuilders, Matala shows how the Finnish government provided strong support, including attractive ship-finance schemes, direct market interventions to secure ferry orders, and reconstruction support in connection with the major Wärtsilä shipyard bankruptcy in 1989. Eventually, Finland harmonized shipbuilding subsidy policies with the EU as it joined the union in 1994 and became "a normal European country" (p. 191). Matala has undertaken comprehensive archival studies in Finnish shipyards, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the presidential archives, supplemented with interviews with former yard managers and U.S. archival material. She did not consult Russian archives but points out their relevance for future research. My only main critique concerns the theoretical framework. Matala applies the lens of a techno-economic system, but she never explicitly...

Mining Emotions from the Finnish War Letter Collection, 1939– 1944

Our paper analyses emotional language used by Finnish soldiers and civilians in their private communication during World War II. The dataset consists of 7,000 handwritten letters converted into a machine-readable corpus with rich metadata. The dataset offers a unique opportunity to make a statistical analysis of people’s emotional responses to the war. We engage in key questions of the cultural history of war, such as the connection between soldiers’ emotional language and violence: did soldiers’ emotional language become more laconic in the course of the war? While computational approaches to mining emotions have been common in fields like computer science and linguistics, they have not gained wider popularity in historical research. Pioneering attempts have been based on individual emotion words carefully chosen by an historian, or on readily available, more generic emotion lexicons. Compared to machine-learning solutions, lexicon-based approaches require less computational effort and are more transparent to interpret. Our methodology combines the ready-made word list FEIL with contextual knowledge of historians. FEIL gives around 7,000 Finnish words an emotion category and intensity ratings. First, the emotion lexicon was filtered based on high intensity. Then the domain expert manually removed words not particularly emotionally intensive in the context of war letters. The expert also annotated the list of the most frequent words in the war letter collection and handpicked emotionally intensive words not included in FEIL. Our final list covered 298 emotion words. We quantified changes in their use over time. In contrast to earlier research, our analysis indicates that soldiers’ and civilians’ emotionality did not significantly differ during World War II. Soldiers’ use of emotion words saw a decline in the last stages of the war, but overall their letters were almost as emotional as the civilians’ letters. We did indeed identify some changes in the individual emotion words used by the soldiers in their letters: patriotic words in particular decreased in the course of the war. In addition to empirical findings, our paper sheds light on the problem of universal emotion lexicons in historical research: linguistic, cultural and temporal differences between present-day lexicons and historical datasets can lead to biased interpretations. Thus, our paper contributes not only to the history of emotions but also to emotion mining, which is historically sensitive.

Political upheaval, external influences and domestic traditions: The emergence of the nineteenth-century Ålandic yacht

This article examines the emergence of the nineteenth-century Ålandic peasant yacht within the larger political, economic and social context of the central and northern Baltic Sea region. Through an analysis of the region's fluctuating and changing trading environment following the Finnish War of 1808–1809, it is demonstrated that the increasing uncertainty, as well as decreasing profitability, of previously stable trading relations provided the necessary impetus to change the traditional vessel design. Avenues for both foreign and domestic innovations are examined. In addition to exogenous influences, wherein the role of the Ålandic peasant sailors’ involvement in the Swedish navy is accentuated, the effects of the increasing smuggling activities of the archipelago's inhabitants and the competitive sailing environment that emerged during trading journeys are considered as factors that possibly affected shipbuilding. The results highlight the complex networks and processes through which innovations are generated, transmitted and adopted.

To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories

To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories

Machine Learning Based Analysis of Finnish World War II Photographers

In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of using state-of-the-art machine learning methods in the analysis of historical photo archives. Specifically, we analyze prominent Finnish World War II photographers, who have captured high numbers of photographs in the publicly available Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, which contains 160,000 photographs from Finnish Winter, Continuation, and Lapland Wars captures in 1939-1945. We were able to find some special characteristics for different photographers in terms of their typical photo content and framing (e.g., close-ups vs. overall shots, number of people). Furthermore, we managed to train a neural network that can successfully recognize the photographer from some of the photos, which shows that such photos are indeed characteristic for certain photographers. We further analyzed the similarities and differences between the photographers using the features extracted from the photographer classifier network. We make our annotations and analysis pipeline publicly available, in an effort to introduce this new research problem to the machine learning and computer vision communities and facilitate future research in historical and societal studies over the photo archives.

Crimes of Desperation: Poverty-Related Filicides 1810–1860

Abstract Using Finnish upper court records as a source, this article is concerned with parental child homicides, newborn infanticides excluded, committed in Finland in the period 1810 to 1860. It focuses on the development in the rate and geographical distribution of these crimes, as well as the social and gendered distribution of the perpetrators. This information forms the basis for analyzing the connection between the motivation for the crime and the pauperization that culminated in these decades as a result of a rapid population growth, which manifested itself in an increase in the landless agrarian proletariat. Dire economic distress over subsistence was a motive for over a half of all filicides. Such crimes of desperation took place especially in periods of crisis: in the years following the Finnish War (1808–09) and after crop failures in the 1830s and the late 1850s. Filicides where the victim was older than a newborn child were, however, as an object of the authorities' concern, overshadowed in the public debate by neonaticides and other major contemporary social problems.

Retelling the Past: Distance, Voice, and Time in the Narrative Shaping of History in Finland-Swedish Legends of the Finnish War

This article examines how narrators of four historical legends construct their relation to the past through the use of particular narrative strategies. They do this by manipulating patterns of speech representation, allowing themselves to merge with history; and by focusing on memories embedded in the landscape and material traces of the past in the present.

Unveiling the War Child Syndrome: Finnish War Children's Experiences of the Evacuation to Sweden During WWII from a Lifetime Perspective

ABSTRACTDuring World War II, a total of 48,628 Finnish children were evacuated to Sweden and placed into temporary foster care. We studied the long-term effects of early separation among aging evacuees using a mixed-methods approach. The purpose was to understand how the evacuees experienced the evacuation event from a lifetime perspective and to determine the features of a possible war child syndrome. The evacuees expressed problems related to loss of confidence, detachment or rootlessness, and unworthiness or rejection. Feelings of rejection and unworthiness provoked shame in many of the reports. Our results suggest that support interventions should focus on processing these painful experiences.

Havet som förbinder och skiljer åt

United and Divided by the Baltic Sea: Framed Silence in the Depiction of Finnish War Children during the Second World War
 Set in the 1940s, during the Second World War, Ulf Stark and Stina Wirsén’s picturebook Systern från havet (The Sister from the Sea, 2015) uses the Baltic Sea as a central referent in the story of a Finnish girl evacuee sent off to Sweden. Drawing on Lydia Kokkola’s theory of ”framed silence” in the narration of traumatic war memories for children, this article investigates how the wordless depiction of the Baltic Sea functions as a metonym for a child’s war experience. Wirsén’s reductive visual style makes use of contour, negative space and space in order to frame the silent parts of the narration considered too traumatic to reiterate to a young audience.
 The concept of ”framed silence” traces absences and reductions in the narration, and seeks to discover the meaning of what is left out or told via metonymy. In this article, I argue that Stark and Wirsén’s picturebook encapsulates an implied story about the most extensive evacuation of children during wartime in European history. The war-child genre is contextualized within the framework of this historical picturebook, but the narrative also alludes to contemporary issues, such as European migration and refugee crises.

Coping with Separation in Childhood - Finnish War Children's Recollections about Swedish Foster Families

This paper reports findings from a study on the recollections of two Finnish siblings who were children during the Second World War; they were separated from their families and were transported to live with Swedish families. The data were collected in the form of open autobiographical interviews with these two participants. They offer an oral history that provides insight into a traumatic historical era of Finnish history. Special attention is paid to these siblings’ individual experiences of multiple separations and living in a foreign country with a new family. The results indicate that the participants’ childhood recollections differed from each other, despite their similar situations during childhood. This highlights the fact that during traumatic events, personal experiences need to be identified rather than stereotyped.

Self-reported walking difficulty predicts late-life mortality in Finnish war veterans: results from the Veteran 1992 Project Survey.

To determine risk factors and their combinations that predict late-life mortality. Postal questionnaire. Veteran 1992 Project Survey. Finnish Second World War veterans living in Finland (177,989 men, 48,745 women), with a participation rate of 93%. Main outcomes were total, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and accident and violence (AAV) mortality. Absolute 10-year mortality risks for total mortality with combinations of different risk factors were calculated. The strongest predictor of total mortality was self-reported walking difficulty (hazard ratio (HR) = 1.74, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.71-1.76 in men without disability, HR = 1.62, 95% CI = 1.58-1.67 in men with disability, HR = 1.61, 95% CI = 1.57-1.65 in women). The highest HRs of CVD mortality were for self-reported walking difficulty among men without disability (HR = 1.98, 95% CI = 1.95-2.02) and among men with disability (HR = 1.88, 95% CI = 1.82-1.94). In women, the highest HR for CVD mortality was for multimorbidity (HR = 1.87, 95% CI = 1.79-1.96). For AAV mortality, the highest HRs were for falls in men and age in women. A combination of walking difficulty and multimorbidity had the highest absolute 10-year mortality risk for total mortality (0.730 in men without disability, 0.729 in men with disability, 0.487 in women). Self-reported walking difficulty was the most important predictor of total mortality in all veteran groups and for CVD mortality in men. The study demonstrates the importance of self-reported walking difficulty and multimorbidity as markers of high mortality risk in Finnish war veterans.

The Unknown Soldiers

This article deals with the Finnish war novel Tuntematon sotilas/The Unknown Soldier (1954), by Väinö Linna (1920-1992), and the two film adaptations that premiered in 1955 and 1985, directed by Edvin Laine (1905-1989) and Rauni Mollberg (1931-2007), respectively. A third point of comparison is the theatre performance directed by Kristian Smeds (b. 1970) for the National Theatre in Helsinki (2007). Discussion focuses on the general unifying and differing features of the novel and the film adaptations. The basic argument is that the novel, the film adaptations and the theatre performance share a particular 'cinematic world-view' that recreates modernist ways of telling and showing. This is established through an analysis of the aesthetics of the landscape in the novel and the film adaptations, as well as through a comparison with the western genre, in particular the films of Anthony Mann, whose films of the1950s differ stylistically from the 'classical western' in the same ways The Unknown Soldier diverges from more traditional war stories.

Between Defeat and Victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War

The article focuses on five essential phenomena in the Finnish memory culture relating to the three Finnish wars fought in 1939–1945, namely, (1) the memory of the fallen; (2) the influential work by author Väinö Linna; (3) the contested memory politics and veteran cultures in the 1960s and 1970s; (4) Germany and the Holocaust in the Finnish memory culture; and (5) the ‘neo-patriotic’ turn in the commemoration of the wars from the end of the 1980s onwards. The Finnish memory culture of 1939–1945 presents an interesting case of how the de facto lost wars against the Soviet Union have been shaped into cornerstones of national history and identity that continue to play a significant role even today. Using the growing research literature on the various aspects of the Finnish war memories and memory politics, the article aims, first, at outlining a synthesis of the memory culture's central features and, second, at challenging the common contemporary conception, according to which the Finnish war veterans would have been forgotten, neglected and even disgraced during the post-war decades, to be ‘rehabilitated’ only from the end of the 1980s onwards.

Transnational everyday life in the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda

This article concentrates on everyday life in the twin-city of Tornio-Haparanda, which is situated in the cross-border region of the Tornio River Valley between Finland and Sweden. The Tornio River Valley was divided after the Finnish War of 1809 and, until then, people spoke the same language and shared the same culture and religion. Today, the Tornio River Valley area is a frontier district where the political — or national — boundaries do not coincide with the cultural and linguistic boundaries. The multiethnic border zone of the Tornio River Valley is vital area for the hybridisation of cultures as well as for the study of power relations and everyday activities. The towns have many forms of co-operation in different sectors. In my ongoing research I am more interested in the everyday transnationalism which is experienced by the town dwellers.

Post-traumatic stress symptoms linked to hidden Holocaust trauma among adult Finnish evacuees separated from their parents as children in World War II, 1939–1945: a case-control study

The aim of this study was to identify long-term effects of diagnostic criteria on the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL-C) for a test group of Finnish evacuees from World War II and compare the outcome effect with a control group of children who lived in Finland during the war in 1939-1945. 152 participants were recruited by the local leader of the Finnish War Child Association in Sweden and Finland. The selected group answered questions on the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL-C) and the EMBU (Swedish acronym for "Own Memories of Parental Rearing"). Evidence suggests a link between childhood parental separation and termination of the internalized attachment hierarchy of origin in a detachment process among Finnish evacuees. Based on the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Total (PCL-C) diagnosis an extreme traumatization for 36.7% of the test group subjects was identified, including a hidden Holocaust trauma in the population of Finnish evacuees. The study met the criteria for satisfying global evidence value. Sixty-five years after the end of World War II and in line with other studies on war children, the data show high levels of different trauma exposures from the war with 10.6 higher risk (odds ratio) for the exposed group of Finnish evacuees. Despite some limitations, the data highlight the need for further investigation into different parts of the detachment process among seriously traumatized groups to reveal resilience and other dimensions of importance in professional mental health creation.

Trends in health status and the use of services among the 80-84-year-old Finnish war veterans during 1992 and 2004

The aim of this study was to compare the differences in health state, functional capacity and the use of social and health services among the 80-84-year-old Finnish Second World War veterans in 1992 and 2004 and to describe the possible effects of the improvements made based on the results after 1992. The Veteran Projects were conducted among the veterans using a postal questionnaire. In 1992, the questionnaire was sent to all veterans (n = 242,720) living in Finland, and in 2004 to 5750 veterans who had participated in the study in 1992. The comparable age groups of veterans aged 80-84 years were used. The data were analysed by descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression analysis. Analyses were conducted separately for men with and without disability and for all women. The proportion of men with good self-reported health, painlessness, normal memory and vision and who were able to walk 500 m without difficulties, significantly increased, as did the proportion of women with normal memory and vision. The prevalence of many diseases increased, but diseases appeared to be less disabling in 2004 than 1992. The need for hospital care decreased and the use of rehabilitation services increased, but the increased use of rehabilitation services was not indicative of the ability to walk 500 m. Self-rated health and functional capacity improved and the need for hospital care decreased among veterans, although the prevalence of many diseases increased during the follow-up. Rehabilitation was not associated with the ability to walk 500 m without difficulties.

Catching up in Europe: Finland's Convergence with Sweden and the EU151

Finland is an obvious case of economic convergence in the 20th century. Is this due to the fact that the Finnish industrialisation phase started late compared with Sweden and the EU15 average? In this article the Finnish post-World War II catch up process is traced by analysing the major – i.e., primary, secondary and tertiary-industries. First we explore whether the Finnish catch up can be explained only by late industrialisation. Then we delineate the phases of structural change, and finally, we show how primary, secondary and tertiary production and labour productivity growth have contributed to aggregate development and catch-up. Our analysis brings new results on timing and locating convergence. Secondary production had its biggest impact on Finnish GDP growth later than in Sweden. However, it was not solely the advantages of secondary production growth that caused Finland's catch-up. The labour productivity growth contribution from services was essential for Finland's catch up especially in 1965–80.

From reindeer nomadism to extreme experiences: economic transitions in Finnish Lapland in the 19th and 20th centuries

Finnish Lapland emerged in 1809 when Sweden lost its eastern part of Lapland to Russia after the Finnish War. The area ceded was integrated into the Grand Duchy of Finland, an autonomous area in the Russian Empire. Finnish Lapland had about 39,700 inhabitants in the 1880s, of whom 960 (2%) were Sami. In 2003, the total population of the district of Lapland was 187,000, of whom 6000 (3%) were Sami. This paper deals with the transition periods in the Lappish economy over a long period. The transitions were associated with the border arrangements made in the 19th century on the one hand and the subsidies policy pursued by the government as well as more general socio-economic structural changes on the other. I will consider the economic transitions from the viewpoint of the current economic situation. Did the Lappish economy work better in the past, and in what conditions did it work on the whole?

The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940

Slavic Review - In short, this is a first-rate acount of the Finnish War, a readable and well-iillustrated book with many good maps and photos. I highly recommend this work to anyone interested in the history of the Soviet armed forces. The Journal of Military History - reviewed by Jacob W Kipp - Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas ...the significant contribution that Van Dyke has made to the literature on the Winter War...Carl Van Dykes new study of the Russian campaign of 1939-40 makes several important contributions to the study of the Soviet side of the Winter War. Military Review - reviewed by LTC Jeff Leser International History Review- March 99 RUSI- Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40 is an inspiring adventure even for a Finnish reader... we do hope that some publisher will be enthusiastic enough to publish it in a Finnish translation, too Intelligence and National Security, Vol 14, No 2, Summer 99 Overall this is an excellent addition to the study of the Winter War and the evolution of Soviet doctrine. An impressive book...a very good book that should appeal to a broad range of readership interested in the Russo-Finnish war in particular, and military issues in general. - Journal of Strategic Studies

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)