Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Suomi
From medieval times to 1809, Finland was part of Sweden. City fires have left
little standing from this period, but Finland still has a sizeable Swedish-speak-
ing minority, bilingual street signs, and close cultural ties to Sweden.
In 1809, Sweden lost Finland to Russia. Under the next century of relatively
benign Russian rule, Finland began to industrialize, and Helsinki grew into a
fine and elegant city. Still, at the beginning of the 1900s, the rest of Finland
was mostly dirt-poor and agricultural, and its people were eagerly emigrating
to northern Minnesota. (Read Toivo Pekkanen's
My Childhood
to learn about
the life of a Finnish peasant in the early 1900s.)
In 1917, Finland and the Baltic states won their independence from Russia,
fought brief but vicious civil wars, and then enjoyed two decades of prosper-
ity...until the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 assigned them to the
Soviet sphere of influence. When Russia invaded, only Finland resisted suc-
cessfully, its white-camouflaged ski troops winning the Winter War against the
Soviet Union in 1939-1940 and holding off the Russians in the Continuation
War from 1941 to 1944.
