Thoughts of the Professor: Heikki Ylikangas

Showing posts with label Heikki Ylikangas. Show all posts

12 December 2025

The Outbreak of the Continuation War Between Finland and the Soviet Union

In recent days, Finland has been engaged in a discussion about the outbreak of the Continuation War between Finland and Russia as part of the Second World War. The debate began when Finland’s largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (HS), published an article with a headline claiming that “Elina Valtonen forgot the Continuation War on television.”

It claimed that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, at the beginning of the Continuation War. This stirred up a lot of debate—and perhaps even some lipstick-splashing—because it is an indisputable fact that the Soviet Union initiated the hostilities of the Continuation War.

* * *

The Finnish-language Wikipedia states the matter—immediately under the subheading “The war begins”—as follows:
“The Soviet Union’s attacks against Finland began on 22 June 1941 at 6:05 a.m., when the Soviet Union opened artillery fire from the Hanko base at Finnish targets in the archipelago and on the mainland, and launched air raids against Finnish ships at sea. On the same day, the Soviet Union carried out several artillery strikes on the eastern border.

According to the same source, ‘after this, on the same day Finland participated in the mining of the southern Gulf of Finland. Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa at 3:00 a.m., and German aircraft that had conducted mine-laying flights from East Prussia to the Leningrad region landed at the Utti airfield on their return journey to refuel. The Soviet Union continued its air and artillery strikes against Finnish military targets in Finland. Finland refrained from returning fire and attempted to assert its neutrality in the new war.’”

And again, quoting Wikipedia:
“On 25 June 1941, the Soviet Air Force bombed Helsinki, Turku, Heinola, and Porvoo as well as a dozen other localities with about 500 aircraft, of which 27 were shot down over Finnish territory. Based on these bombings and previous events, in a communication submitted to Parliament the government concluded that the country had entered a state of war. Parliament accepted this position. Later that same day, 25 June, Prime Minister Jukka Rangell stated on the radio that Finland was once again at war with the Soviet Union…. War was declared on 26 June 1941. The Finnish Army and German troops stationed in Finland began the land offensive.”

* * *

HS has later attempted to correct its mistake with an addition stating that “Finland declared a state of war only after the Soviet Union had bombed Finland, but Finland had already before this made extensive offensive preparations to join the war alongside Germany. Finland’s objective was to occupy large areas of the Soviet Union beyond those that had been lost in the Winter War.”

This correction is indeed in the right direction, but it is still misleading. It was the Soviet Union that unambiguously initiated the Continuation War. And, incidentally, it committed what would today be considered a serious crime against humanity, since terror bombings—even against countries allegedly preparing for war—aimed at civilian populations are indisputably such acts.

The Red Army Air Force bombings of 25 June were unquestionably exactly that—state terrorism. And it is equally indisputable that Finland began its own offensive operations only after those attacks.

For the first three days of the war, all Finnish military operations had been defensive. And that’s not all: as can be seen even from the Wikipedia excerpts I cited above, Finland had refrained even from some defensive actions.

* * *

It must of course be acknowledged that German soldiers had arrived in Finland. It is also well known that many of Finland’s political leaders at the time wished to avenge the defeat of the Winter War.

I personally find Heikki Ylikangas’s view quite plausible—that this idea had been adopted, as a result of Hermann Göring’s persuasion, already at the end of the Winter War.

However, this does not change the truth that Finland was not the aggressor in the Continuation War; it was Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is also a fact that since history is not an experimental science, we cannot turn back time and see whether Finland would have attacked the Soviet Union without the war initiated by Stalin.

Furthermore, one should understand about the nature of the Continuation War that although Finland’s offensive into the Soviet Union—beginning several days after the Red Army’s military actions—was undeniably a war of conquest, it was not an existential threat to the communist state. This is because Commander-in-Chief Carl Gustaf Mannerheim refused to launch an active offensive against Leningrad and did not order the continuation of the conquest beyond the three isthmuses stretching from the Gulf of Finland through Lakes Ladoga and Onega to Lake Seesjärvi. Yet conditions would have been favorable for such an advance at the time.

* * *

Based on all this, I must deeply wonder why HS, even while correcting its article, failed to present an accurate picture of the events of June 1941. Instead, it gave support to the false propaganda spread across social media in recent times by Putin’s Russia and its trolls (example), claiming that Finland was a Nazi state that attacked the innocent Soviet Union. The fact is that Finland never had a Nazi party in its Parliament; the only far-right party represented there, the Patriotic People’s Movement, was relatively small and not a Nazi party.

* * *

At the same time, it is necessary to correct the notion—indeed, an urban legend—that the Soviet Army was not prepared for Germany’s attack. In fact, its forces had been massively strengthened after the Winter War, so that in the summer of 1941 it was—at least on paper—much stronger than the German armed forces. And Hitler’s intelligence had failed to discover this fact.

I even consider it possible that this very fact—the presumed strength of the Soviet Army—explains the Red Army’s attack on Finland immediately after the start of Barbarossa. It is, after all, irrational that Stalin opened a new front—against a new enemy—after being forced into a defensive war against the Germans.

I justify this by arguing that Stalin may have imagined his unprecedentedly strong Red Army capable of stopping and destroying the attacking German forces, unlike the French the previous year. And as we know, that is ultimately what it did—although only after years, and with the support of massive American aid packages.

The Finnish Army, on the other hand, Stalin failed to defeat, and Helsinki remained unconquered. And therefore our history does not include a 50-year period of misery under communist dictatorship.

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
Why Did Finland Remain an Independent Democracy After World War II?
Bless Ukrainian Soldiers With the Spirit That Once Defined the Celebrated Finnish Veterans
History of Finland XIV: The end of the first Finnish Republic

20 August 2023

History of Finland XVI: Through rise and fall to a new kind of future

This is the sixteenth - and last - part of a blog post series where I go through the most significant periods of Finnish history. In the fifteenth post, I described how Finland managed to navigate towards the Western world after World War II, under the shadow of the so-called Paasikivi-Kekkonen line of Finlandization policy. At the same time, the education level of the youth increased significantly, but it also gave rise to an extreme leftist student movement, which lost its momentum due to the rise in living standards and emigration.

In the next phase, 1980s Finland headed towards an unprecedented economic boom. The driving force behind it was the liberalization of monetary policy, which allowed banks to trade foreign currencies and grant foreign currency loans to companies that did not have income billed in foreign currencies. However, the Finnish mark was still politically regulated, meaning its value was not left to the market forces to decide.

This contradiction laid the groundwork for the exceptional depth of the 1990s recession in Finland. As a result of the liberalization of foreign currency loans, money flooded into the markets, mainly directed towards the domestic market. At the same time, the policy of strong mark choked export companies, and expectations of a politically-forbidden devaluation raised domestic interest rates.

Therefore, the Finnish mark was pegged to the euro's predecessor, the ECU, at an excessively high rate. Eventually, the entire structure collapsed, many banks went bankrupt, and particularly domestic market companies collapsed under their excessively expensive foreign currency loans after forced devaluation, the state debt exploded, the competitiveness of export companies decreased, unemployment rates skyrocketed, and indebted people lost their future by going bankrupt.

As a result of all this, the mark was eventually allowed to float, which led to a rapid improvement in the competitiveness of export companies. As a result, the Finnish economy became dominated by large companies and subcontractors of extremely successful Nokia. At the same time, Finnish large companies began to internationalize rapidly.

The depth of the recession was also influenced by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the same time, which led to the collapse of trade with the East. As a result, Finnish politicians missed the opportunity to join the Western military alliance, NATO, like the former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states that had broken away from the Soviet Union, because it would have confirmed the suspicions of Finland's decades-long Finlandization. However, Finland did join the European Union in 1995, even though it was considered a completely unrealistic goal in 1991.

After the Great Depression, the Finnish economy became more neoliberal, as evidenced by the blurring of the relationship between employers and employees through option arrangements linked to company profits. This weakened the relative position of wage earners, and high unemployment did not allow for active action by workers to eliminate it.

This concludes the series of articles based mostly on Professor Heikki Ylikangas's work, where the destruction of Nokia, Finland's defense policy orientation toward the West, and the events that followed were left unaddressed. However, I wish to make few comments related to them.

* * *

One of the most significant measures during the recession was investing in Finnish education. This led to unprecedented expertise in the country, which enabled Nokia mobile phones to rise to a unique position in Finnish economic history. At its best, it was the world's clear market leader in its field, with about 40 percent market share and an even greater share of the profits, but it made two disastrous mistakes.

Firstly, Nokia lost its innovativeness, probably as a result of flawed personnel policies. This was caused by the company's product development based on internal competition, which resulted in an unhealthy competition within the company that directed people's attention to thwarting the product development of competing groups.

Secondly, the company's almost dominant position in the market led to maximizing profits by minimizing costs. As a result, Nokia's products were manufactured in low-wage countries, from which they eventually recruited product development labor without realizing that the difference in living standards between developed and developing countries is also based on factual reasons.

With Nokia's downfall, the flagship of Finnish economy was lost, and large corporations based on "green gold" (i.e. forestry) returned to be the backbone of the economy. However, Nokia's skilled workforce did not disappear, but rather dispersed to benefit multiple Finnish companies.

At the same time, Finland has lost some of its independence to Brussels through the EU integration process, and has had to finance less productive countries in times of crisis. On the other hand, the development of information technology has led to a decline in paper consumption, which has revitalized the product development of the forest industry companies.

At this point, the harsh truth is that the Finnish economy has not yet regained the international position it had during Nokia's heyday. Moreover, the EU's restrictions on the use of forests for economic purposes may not be conducive to its future, if implemented.

In terms of foreign policy, Russia's attack on Ukraine exposed the hollowness of neutrality policy, and Finland quickly became part of the Western defense alliance NATO. This decision will ensure the country's military security well into the future, but may also lead to more frequent entanglements in international conflicts and damage relations with its large eastern neighbor.

Perhaps the biggest change in Finnish society, however, has occurred as a result of the international migration wave from developing countries to western countries. As a result of this and the declining birth rate of the native population, the quality of Finland's population base will change significantly from what it was before - and not all of the consequences of this fundamental change can be anticipated at this point. In any case, it is already clear that a poorly integratable population group has emerged in the country, which, growing faster than the native population, will change the basic structure of Finnish society as a whole.

Finally, in recent years, Finland has had a left-wing government, during which the state budget has been patched with debt to create permanent fixed expenses. As a result, Finland's public finances appear to be aligning with Southern European weak and indebted countries in the coming years, rather than the traditional Nordic benchmark. At the same time, the population has become increasingly divided between political right and left, so the near-future prospects for the country's economy seem quite challenging at this moment.

Throughout their history, however, Finns have demonstrated significant resilience in being able to set aside their internal disagreements and work together in a way that has allowed them to address and resolve issues that have arisen. For that reason, the future of Finland is likely brighter than one could deduce from the current situation.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Nousun ja tuhon kautta uudenlaiseen tulevaisuuteen

29 July 2023

History of Finland XII: Bloody civil war

This is the twelfth part of a blog series where I go through the significant events of Finnish history. In the eleventh entry, I described how Finland became a democracy, ensuring equal political participation for all citizens, as a result of the oppressive measures taken by Russia in the country.

As such, Finland gained independence in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. However, led by the Social Democratic Party, then including also communists, the Finnish Civil War began. According to Professor Ylikangas, the war resulted in the deaths of as many as 36 640 people - more than in the similarly-lengthy Winter War, and in proportion to the population, more than in the three-year Continuation War.

As we know, the war was ultimately won by the Whites, led by Mannerheim, although they initially struggled to recruit even in South Ostrobothnia, where the war was being fought against fellow countrymen. This situation changed when Mannerheim managed to disarm 7 500 Russian soldiers with a small group of men in Ostrobothnia. Thereafter, recruitment was marketed with the need to remove the Russians from the country, which solved previous problems.

The parties of the war were initially quite equal in terms of their skills, but the outcome was decided by the Jäger troops - Finnish young men who were trained and arrived from Germany - and ultimately by the German military unit that arrived in the country. In reality, the latter alone would have been sufficient to achieve the same outcome even if there had been no Jäger troops.

In the white Finland that emerged as the first outcome of the war, power was taken over by the educated classes, civil servants, owners of estates and factories, as well as farmers. On the other hand, the defeated industrial and agricultural workers and the landless inhabitants of sparsely populated areas were marginalized despite their right to vote.

The second significant outcome of the war was the emergence of a strong far-left party (The Finnish Communist Party) in our country. Its success was fueled by the white media, which highlighted the red terror, but remained silent about all the memories of the white post-war atrocities.

Finland was driven into a civil war primarily due to the power vacuum created by the fall of the Russian Tsar. The well-known social injustices - popularized by Väinö Linna and still cherished by the Left today - were more of a driving force for the war rather than the cause.

Two militant organizations, the Red and White Guards, emerged to fill the power vacuum, and their confrontation was ensured when the Senate, dominated by the political right, declared the Civil Guards as the government's armed forces. The Red Guard leadership could not accept this, and they set out on their ill-fated military campaign.

After the war, there was a multi-stage political struggle over the country's political system and the government structure that reflected it. The result was a democratic structure with a very strong executive power, which was entirely different from the other European states that became independent after the World War I.

Thanks to its strong executive power, Finland remained a democracy while other post-World War I democracies drifted towards right-wing dictatorships. This was despite the fact that communists in Finland were forced underground and the far-right sought to take power through extra-legal means.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Verinen sisällissota

29 May 2023

History of Finland VI: Age of freedom and utility

This is the sixth part of a blog series where I go through the significant stages of Finland's history. In the fifth post, I described how the country transitioned from the rule of the highest nobility to a pre-capitalist society governed by the clerical nobility, where the living conditions of ordinary people also began to gradually improve.

Professor Heikki Ylikangas considers the above-mentioned turning point as the most significant in Finnish history. Equally important, following closely after that, is the subject of this post - the mid-18th century.

At that time - amidst the political strife between the "Caps" and "Hats" factions vying for leadership positions - a number of extremely significant decrees were issued that allowed the division of farms into several parts. Prior to this, it was not possible because the state apparatus feared that the farms would become unable to pay taxes as a result.

Similarly, the establishment of tenant farms or rental farms was permitted for peasants: this right had previously only applied to noble and cavalry estates. And as the icing on the cake, the redistribution of land was decided, meaning that each farm's land was located in larger blocks rather than the narrow strips previously required for communal planting and harvesting. This enabled peasants to develop their own land independently of others.

However, initially the peasants were not at all eager to seize the opportunity. The reason was the common forests, which they did not want to divide among the founders of the new farms but rather keep as a resource for profitable tar production. The situation changed only when the crown announced that the state would no longer interfere in the division of land, even forests, and that it would be left to the responsibility of independent landowners after the land reform.

The fourth reform was population registration, which was needed for drafting soldiers into the army, as many families had previously cheated the authorities, for example by giving multiple sons the same name to avoid being drafted. Especially in the 1600s, this had practically meant a death sentence, not so much because of battles but due to diseases that heavily taxed military units.

However, dividing farms was only allowed if the applicant intended to get married. In other words, the ultimate motive behind the reforms was that the Swedish state wanted to increase its population because there was a chronic shortage of labor in the country - in ironworks, manufactories, and manors. Perhaps increasing the economic opportunities of peasants would help to increase the labor force?

As a result of this expanded private ownership, people became more interested in economic entrepreneurship and profit-seeking. In other words, in the mid-1700s, Sweden and thus Finland entered the age of utility.

Also the university system participated in promoting economic prosperity, as in 1747 the position of professor of poetry at the University of Turku was changed to a professorship in economics - the same fate befell the legal department at Uppsala. One of the inventors of economic liberalism, Antti Chydenius, graduated from the Turku Academy, presenting his theories a decade before Adam Smith wrote similar ideas that would be recorded in the world's economic history.

At the same time, the judicial system began to change and the pressure to lighten punishments increased. Municipal power began to be transferred back to parish meetings from the crown bureaucracy. Even the church began to view different revival movements more favorably.

Thus, the societal trend that began in the 1500s towards growing aristocratic power and an extremely unequal society had irreversibly turned towards raising the standard of living for the entire population and democracy. And through this, the economic foundation was gradually laid that would eventually allow for the creation of the modern Nordic welfare state, although this development was not direct or straightforward.

The original blog post in Finnish: Hyödyn aika

26 April 2023

History of Finland II: From a hinterland of the Union into a modern state

This is the second part of a blog post series where I go through the significant phases of Finland's history. In the first post, I described how Finland (or actually its densely populated southern and western parts) became a part of Sweden, which inevitably connected our country to the development of the Western world.

During the Middle Ages, the Nordic countries formed the Kalmar Union, in which power gradually shifted to the union king - that is, the Danes. For Finland - and at the same time for all Nordic countries - it was crucial that Gustav Vasa's successful rebellion restored Sweden's independence from external forces, as it was important for the future development of the region.

This was accomplished with the support of the free town of Lübeck, which belonged to the Hanseatic League that dominated Baltic Sea trade. Of course, this support had to be repaid, and the only way to do so was by stealing the property of the wealthy Catholic Church that had prospered during the Middle Ages - a justification provided by the Protestant Reformation.

Later, Gustav made Sweden even more independent from Lübeck by severing its umbilical cord with the city through an alliance with Denmark and the Netherlands, and by defeating the free city in a war with their help. As a result, Sweden - and as a part of it, Finland - withdrew from the nearly monopolistic foreign trade advantages previously demanded and obtained by the Hanseatic city.

In order to enable all of these achievements and to increase his power, Gustav Vasa had to develop a functioning central administration in Sweden, complete with tax-collecting bailiffs and written commands. Trade was directed under the control of the central government through the steeple town system, which also enriched the king's personal wealth and the kingdom itself.

Gustav Vasa also changed the justice system so that the law courts shifted towards seeking out and punishing the guilty parties. The previous practice of seeking reconciliation between the warring parties - and their families - was left in the background.

Through these actions, the new taxation and legal practices, as well as the weakening grip of the Church on power, led to the king's strong position. Beneath Gustav Vasa, there were only his servants and loyal subjects. In support of this power, the king also created a standing army, the maintenance of which required taxes e.g. money.

The importance of a monetary economy grew throughout the entire kingdom, which helped to enhance the position of the nobility who cultivated large estates and the merchants who engaged in trade, in relation to the rest of the population. This raised the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie of the cities above the common people.

Overall, as a result of Gustaf Vasa's actions, a modern or at least pre-modern state led by the king was established and strengthened, which was able to steer the entire kingdom in the desired direction. At the same time, the living conditions of ordinary people declined for the next two centuries - this happened both in Sweden and Finland.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Suomen tie unionin takamaasta osaksi modernia valtiota

19 April 2023

History of Finland I: How did Finland become culturally part of the West?

In 2022, I wrote a series of blog posts briefly describing the most important stages in Finland's history, mostly based on the writings of Professor Heikki Ylikangas. Today, I have decided to translate the entire story for my international readers as I assume this topic is not very familiar to almost anyone outside Finland.

In this series you can expect a total of sixteen posts covering ancient history up to the 21st century, which I hope will increase understanding of my homeland in other parts of the world.

Hunter-gatherers populated Finland from various directions immediately after the end of the Ice Age. However, about 3 500 years ago, a strong population flow from Siberia altered the genes of the people living in Finland at that time.

The well-known early medieval Levänluhta people, with one exception, were ancestors of the Sámi people, who had spread over a much wider area than present-day Sápmi. On the other hand, ancient DNA has also been found in two other locations in southern Finland, but there it differs from the DNA of most present-day Finns, but has similarity to DNA of the Volga-Ural region.

The population of present-day Finland is roughly divided into two genetically separate groups along the border of the Treaty of Nöteborg that runs through the country from southeast to the northern west coast. Agriculture arrived in to Finland about 5 000-4 000 years before the beginning of the Common Era, but interestingly, medieval DNA is divided so that the forms associated with hunter-gatherers are common in southwestern and southern Finland, where agriculture has been most common according to the historical records. In the east and north, on the other hand, there are more gene forms associated with agriculture. This suggests that there were significant population movements in Finland during the medieval period - or perhaps the limited medieval samples available do not accurately represent the true relationships of these genes at prehistorical time.

Following Finland's early history, its subjugation to Swedish rule almost 1000 years ago set the course for the country's future and its population. According to Professor Heikki Ylikangas, this happened mostly voluntarily because the organization of Finnish society was not sufficient for military resistance, as in the Baltics, and enemies could be avoided simply by fleeing into endless forests.

An exception to this rule was the more densely populated region of Satakunta, South-Western coast of Finland. There the society was better organized and the prevalence of crop farming forced people to defend their property. As a result, Swedish settlements along the coast were thinner in Satakunta than in other parts of Finland.

With the arrival of the Swedes, Finland received a legal system and Christianity copied from the mother country, which in turn brought with it also the social organization. At this stage, the Catholic Church can be considered the most powerful force in the country, owning as much as 21 percent of the cultivated land in Sweden. In addition to the church, power was in the hands of the king and locally with powerful families.

Thus, Finland had become linked to the Western world. Its future was tied to Sweden's destiny for hundreds of years, for better or for worse.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Suomen liittyminen osaksi läntistä kulttuuria

Most popular posts right now

12 December 2025

20 August 2023

29 July 2023

29 May 2023

26 April 2023

19 April 2023