Tuomas Tepora

Why read a work about an event that almost no one outside of Finland cares about? Well, back in the day, I was as willing as the next person to buy into the myth of the Winter War of 1939 when plucky Finland stood up to Stalin; good Cold War stuff. Flash forward more than a few decades and I was reading a work about the Wehrmacht's fight above the Arctic Circle in World War II that made passing reference to Finnish politicians plotting as to whether they could get away with creating "Great Finland;" what is this "Great Finland" of which you speak? Even before that I was aware of the Finnish war film "Ambush" which made pointed reference to some Finnish internal conflicts.

So, this work is a collection of essays dealing with the short and nasty Finnish domestic fight of 1918, which for center-right opinion was a war of "liberation" from Russia and for lower-class folks was a failed effort to get the respect that the common man deserved from upper-class authorities (not to mention little things like food). The bottom line though is that some 30,000 people died in this fight; a third of whom perished in "White" POW camps after the three months of the war. The meaning of it all is still being argued to this day, though now more in a spirit of sadness than of triumphalism or spite. While I got a lot out of this work it certainly is historian's history, particularly since about half the essays deal with how memory is created and events are commemorated. It also would have been helpful to know more about 19th-century Finland than I do.… (mais)