Rick Steves Snapshot St. Petersburg, Helsinki & Tallinn by Rick Steves

Author:Rick Steves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avalon Publishing
Published: 2018-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

FINLAND

FINLAND

Suomi

Finland is a fun, fascinating, sadly overlooked corner of Europe. Its small population fills a sprawling, rocky, forested land that shares a long border with Russia. The Finns have often been overshadowed by their powerful neighbors, the Swedes and the Russians. And yet, they’ve persevered magnificently, with good humor, a zest for architecture and design, a deep love of saunas, and an understandable pride in things that are uniquely Finnish.

For much of their history, the Finns embraced a simple agrarian and fishing lifestyle. They built not cities, but villages—easy pickings for their more ambitious neighbors. From medieval times to 1809, Finland was part of Sweden, and Finland today still has a sizeable Swedish-speaking 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, the “Grand Duchy of 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.)

Finland and the Baltic States won their independence from Russia in 1917, then fought brief but vicious civil wars against their pro-Russian domestic factions. Finland then enjoyed two decades of prosperity...until the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 assigned it to the Soviet sphere of influence. When the Red Army invaded, white-camouflaged Finnish ski troops won the Winter War against the Soviet Union (1939-1940). They then held off the Soviets in what’s called the Continuation War from 1941 until 1944, when the exhausted and outgunned Finns agreed to a ceasefire.

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