A Foreign Benefactor and a Domestic Liberator: the cults of Lenin and Mannerheim in Finland

Personality cult has usually been understood as a phenomenon of Caesarian or otherwise totalitarian or semi-totalitarian political cultures. However, there are many basically democratic regimes in which great statesmen, soldiers or artists (e.g. Parnell, Baden-Powell, Shakespeare, The Beatles etc.) have been eulogized or adored. Finland is no exception, where two controversial but interlinked political cult personalities, Lenin and Mannerheim, cropped up. This article examines their emergence, incompatible careers and conditions of politico-cultural use and misuse, ending up with an account of the recent situation in which imagined Lenin has disappeared from the scene and super-Mannerheim is about to rise. Also the ideational content and political messages of the two cults are disentangled in order to contribute to the contemporary history of Finnish ideas.     

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.