The history of Finland

People have lived in Finland since the ice sheets of the last Ice Age melted, around 11,000 years ago, and for most of that time the land was home to Finnic and Sámi hunters, fishers and, later, farmers who left no written records of their own. From the thirteenth century the country was drawn into the kingdom of Sweden, which shaped its law, religion and social order for more than 500 years. In 1809 Russia conquered it and made it an autonomous grand duchy, a status under which a Finnish national identity took shape. Finland declared independence in 1917, survived a bitter civil war and two wars against the Soviet Union, and after 1945 built a Nordic welfare state while carefully balancing between East and West, before joining the European Union in 1995 and NATO in 2023.

As the ice retreated, the land rose slowly out of the sea, a process that still continues along the west coast. Hunter-gatherers followed the edge of the ice northward and had settled much of the country by around 9000 BCE. They lived from elk, seal, fish and wild plants, and the Antrea net, a fishing net of willow bark found in Karelia and dated to around 8300 BCE, is among the oldest fishing nets ever discovered.

By about 5300 BCE people began making pottery decorated with comb-like stamps, and this Comb Ceramic culture spread across Finland and much of northeastern Europe. Despite the pottery, its makers still lived mostly by hunting and fishing, and they produced rock paintings and elk-head carvings that hint at a rich spiritual world. From around 3200 BCE a new group, the Corded Ware or Battle Axe culture, arrived in the southwest, bringing the first traces of cattle-keeping and farming. The two traditions gradually merged.

The question of when Finnic and Sámi languages arrived in the region is still debated by linguists and archaeologists. Most now think that early forms of the Uralic languages spread into the area in the Bronze Age or slightly earlier. In the following millennia the Sámi came to occupy the north and much of the interior, living by hunting and later reindeer herding, while Finnic-speaking farmers concentrated in the south and along the coasts.

The Bronze Age, from about 1500 BCE, brought metal objects through trade with Scandinavia and the lands to the east, and stone burial cairns along the coast. The Iron Age, from around 500 BCE to about 1300 CE, saw the growth of permanent farming settlements in the southwest, in Häme in the interior and in Karelia in the east. By the later Iron Age three main Finnic groups can be distinguished: the Finns proper of the southwest, the Tavastians of Häme and the Karelians, each with their own chiefs, hillforts and trading links.

During the Viking Age the coasts and the Åland Islands lay on the routes between Scandinavia and the river roads to the east, and Finnish furs were traded for silver and weapons. People followed a pre-Christian religion centred on nature spirits, ancestors and gods such as Ukko, the sky god, much of it later preserved in folk poetry. Christian influence arrived from two directions in these centuries: Catholic missionaries from Sweden in the west, and Orthodox Christianity from Novgorod and the lands of Kievan Rus' in the east.

Swedish tradition tells of a first crusade into southwestern Finland in the 1150s, led by King Eric and an English-born bishop named Henry, who was later venerated as the country's patron saint, but the story is largely legend. Firmer evidence shows that the Tavastians were brought under Swedish control around 1249 under Birger Jarl, and that a third expedition in 1293 pushed into Karelia and founded the castle of Vyborg. These campaigns, presented as crusades, were also a contest for land and trade with Novgorod. The Treaty of Nöteborg in 1323 drew the first frontier between the two powers, leaving western Finland to Sweden and eastern Karelia to Novgorod, a division that also separated Catholic from Orthodox Christianity.

Finland was not a colony but an integral part of the Swedish kingdom. The bishopric of Turku, founded in the thirteenth century, made Turku the country's main town, and from 1362 representatives from Finland took part in electing the Swedish king. Swedish law and the Swedish system of estates applied, and Finnish peasants were never serfs, keeping their personal freedom and their own land. Swedish-speaking settlers colonised parts of the coast, and Swedish became the language of administration and the educated classes, while most people spoke Finnish. From 1397 Finland, as part of Sweden, belonged to the Kalmar Union with Denmark and Norway, until Sweden broke away under Gustav Vasa in the 1520s.

Gustav Vasa introduced the Lutheran Reformation in the 1520s and 1530s, confiscating church property for the crown. In Finland its leading figure was Mikael Agricola, a student of Martin Luther in Wittenberg and later bishop of Turku, who wrote a Finnish primer and published the New Testament in Finnish in 1548. These works laid the foundations of written Finnish. In 1550 Gustav Vasa founded Helsinki as a trading town to rival Tallinn across the Gulf, though it remained small for two centuries.

Sweden's wars with Russia were fought largely on Finnish soil. In the Cudgel War of 1596 to 1597 peasants in Ostrobothnia rose against the burden of billeted soldiers and were crushed. In the seventeenth century, under Gustavus Adolphus and his successors, Sweden became a great power in northern Europe, and Finnish soldiers fought in the Thirty Years' War and other campaigns. The Royal Academy of Turku opened in 1640, and the whole Bible appeared in Finnish in 1642. But the country remained poor and thinly peopled, and the great famine of the late 1690s, caused by a run of failed harvests, killed perhaps a quarter to a third of the population.

The Great Northern War of 1700 to 1721 ended Sweden's age as a great power. The armies of Peter the Great occupied Finland from 1714 to 1721, a period remembered as the Greater Wrath, marked by burning, killing and the deportation of civilians. By the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 Sweden ceded Vyborg and southeastern Karelia to Russia, whose new capital, Saint Petersburg, stood close to the border. Another war brought a second occupation, the Lesser Wrath of 1741 to 1743, and the Treaty of Turku in 1743 moved the border further west.

To defend the remaining territory Sweden built the great sea fortress of Sveaborg, today Suomenlinna, off Helsinki from 1748. Finland recovered and its population grew in the later eighteenth century.

The decisive change came during the Napoleonic Wars. After Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I agreed at Tilsit in 1807 to divide Europe into spheres of influence, Russia attacked Sweden in 1808 and overran Finland. At the Diet of Porvoo in March 1809, Alexander I promised to respect the country's laws, religion and estates, and by the Treaty of Fredrikshamn in September 1809 Sweden ceded Finland to the Russian Empire. Finland became an autonomous grand duchy with the tsar as grand duke, keeping its own Senate, laws, civil service and, from 1860, its own currency, the markka. In 1812 the lands lost in the eighteenth century, known as Old Finland, were reunited with it.

The same year Helsinki was made the capital, closer to Saint Petersburg and less tied to Sweden than Turku, and it was rebuilt in a grand neoclassical style. After a fire in Turku the university moved to Helsinki in 1828. During the nineteenth century a national movement grew among the educated, still largely Swedish-speaking, elite. Elias Lönnrot collected folk poetry from Karelia and published the Kalevala in 1835, giving Finns an epic of their own, while the philosopher J. V. Snellman campaigned for Finnish to become the language of culture and government. The Language Decree of 1863 began to put Finnish on an equal footing with Swedish, and in the same year the Diet met again for the first time since 1809.

The century also brought hardship. The famine of 1866 to 1868, one of the last great peacetime famines in western Europe, killed well over a hundred thousand people. Industry based on timber and paper grew, and many Finns emigrated to North America.

From the 1890s the imperial government sought to tie Finland more closely to Russia. The February Manifesto of 1899, issued by Nicholas II, allowed imperial laws to override Finnish ones, and it was followed by measures to impose the Russian language and to merge the Finnish army into the Russian one. Finns organised petitions and passive resistance, and in 1904 the governor-general, Nikolai Bobrikov, was assassinated in Helsinki.

The Russian revolution of 1905 and a general strike in Finland forced the tsar to retreat. In 1906 Finland replaced the four-estate Diet with a single-chamber parliament elected by universal suffrage, and Finnish women became the first in Europe to win the vote and the first in the world to gain the full right to stand for parliament. A second wave of Russification began in 1909 and lasted until the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought down the monarchy.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the Finnish Senate led by Pehr Evind Svinhufvud presented a declaration of independence, which parliament approved on 6 December 1917. Lenin's government recognised it on 4 January 1918. But the country was deeply divided between the bourgeois parties and a radicalised labour movement, and both sides had formed armed militias.

In late January 1918 the Red Guards took power in Helsinki and the industrial south, while the government's White army, commanded by C. G. E. Mannerheim, held the north and centre. Imperial German troops landed in April and helped the Whites take Helsinki. The war ended in May with a White victory. Some 38,000 people died, many of them not in battle but through executions on both sides, the White terror being the larger, and about 12,500 Red prisoners died of hunger and disease in prison camps after the fighting. The war left scars that took decades to heal.

In the autumn of 1918 the parliament elected a German prince, Friedrich Karl of Hesse, as king of Finland, but he renounced the throne after Germany's defeat in the First World War. In 1919 Finland adopted a republican constitution and K. J. Ståhlberg became its first president. The Treaty of Tartu in 1920 settled the border with Soviet Russia and gave Finland the Arctic port of Petsamo, and in 1921 the League of Nations confirmed Finnish sovereignty over the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, which received autonomy. The interwar republic survived the far-right Lapua movement, whose rising at Mäntsälä in 1932 failed.

The secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 placed Finland in the Soviet sphere. When Finland refused Stalin's demands for territory near Leningrad, the Soviet Union attacked on 30 November 1939. In the Winter War the Finns resisted far larger forces in deep snow and won international sympathy, but by March 1940 their lines were breaking. The Moscow Peace Treaty of 13 March 1940 cost Finland about a tenth of its territory, including most of Karelia and Vyborg, and over 400,000 Karelians were evacuated rather than live under Soviet rule. About 26,000 Finnish soldiers died, and Soviet losses were several times higher.

In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Finland joined the attack in what Finns call the Continuation War. Finnish forces retook Karelia and advanced into Soviet East Karelia, where Russian-speaking civilians were held in camps, and they helped maintain the siege of Leningrad from the north, though they did not attack the city itself. Finland remained a parliamentary democracy and its Jewish citizens were protected, but in 1942 the authorities handed eight Jewish refugees to the Gestapo, an act that has since been publicly acknowledged and regretted. A Soviet offensive in the summer of 1944 forced Finland to seek peace.

Under the Moscow Armistice of 19 September 1944 Finland returned to the 1940 borders, ceded Petsamo, leased the Porkkala peninsula near Helsinki to the Soviet Union and agreed to pay heavy reparations. It also had to expel German troops from its soil, which led to the Lapland War of 1944 to 1945, in which retreating German forces burned much of northern Finland, including the town of Rovaniemi. The Continuation War cost about 63,000 Finnish soldiers dead or missing. The Paris Peace Treaty of 1947 confirmed these terms, but Finland, unlike the other states on the losing side, was never occupied.

Postwar Finland lived in the shadow of its eastern neighbour. In 1948 it signed the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which committed Finland to resist any attack on the Soviet Union through its territory but recognised its wish to stay out of great-power conflicts. Presidents J. K. Paasikivi and, from 1956, Urho Kekkonen made good relations with Moscow the foundation of foreign policy. Kekkonen, who held office until 1981, used his personal ties with Soviet leaders to strengthen his own power at home, and critics in the West coined the term Finlandisation for a small country's self-censorship before a powerful neighbour.

At the same time Finland remained a market economy and a democracy that leaned culturally and economically towards the West. The reparations were paid off by 1952, the year Helsinki hosted the Olympic Games, and the Soviet Union returned Porkkala in 1956. Finland joined the United Nations and the Nordic Council in 1955, became associated with the European Free Trade Association in 1961 and hosted the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, whose Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975 during the Cold War. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation transformed a largely rural society, hundreds of thousands of Finns moved to Sweden for work, and a Nordic-style welfare state with free education and healthcare was built from the 1960s onwards.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed a major trading partner and helped trigger a severe recession in the early 1990s, with unemployment approaching a fifth of the workforce. Finland replaced the 1948 treaty with a treaty on good-neighbourly relations with Russia in 1992 and, after a referendum in which 57 percent voted in favour, joined the European Union in 1995. It adopted the euro in 1999, with notes and coins following in 2002. The economy recovered strongly, driven for a time by the mobile phone maker Nokia. A new constitution in 2000 reduced the powers of the president, and the same year Tarja Halonen became the country's first woman president. Her predecessor, Martti Ahtisaari, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his work as a mediator.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 transformed Finnish opinion on military alliances. Within weeks a large majority supported joining NATO, parliament voted for membership by 188 votes to 8 in May 2022, and Finland formally became a member on 4 April 2023. Petteri Orpo of the National Coalition Party became prime minister in June 2023 at the head of a right-of-centre coalition, and Alexander Stubb took office as president on 1 March 2024. Finland, with a population of about 5.7 million, shares a border of roughly 1,300 kilometres with Russia, and relations with its eastern neighbour have remained tense since 2022.