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Reviews of Books
contempt of Russians as well as to Finnish alarm over
the behavior of the Russian military during the turbulent summer and fall of 1917. She further argues that
the Finnish "Whites" made the Russians scapegoats
for the Finnish Civil War in 1918 in order to deny that
social problems were the real causes for the war.
Focusing singlemindedly on these matters prevents
Karemaa from coming to grips with other factors
shaping Finnish attitudes towards Russians. Centuries
of war and conflict accompanied by vast devastation
and cruelty, russification policies, and, most importantly, fundamental cultural differences have had also
an important impact. The Lutheran Finns shared in
many ways the Nordic value system with its high stress
on literacy, self-control, industriousness, punctuality,
tidiness, and hygiene. These values were, to large
extent, not shared by the Russians, and this affected
Finnish opinions about them.
Karemaa's coverage of the Civil War also ignores
several critical matters. These include fundamental
causes of the Civil War such as the sudden collapse of
the Tsarist regime in Finland and the resulting power
vacuum, the ensuing struggle to fill it, and socialists'
bitterness over losing the elections to the Finnish
parliament in 1917. Furthermore, the Russian example
and encouragement were important in urging the
Finnish socialists to go to war, and the Russians
provided them the weapons and military planning to
stage an armed uprising.
Karemaa's source use also has some peculiarities.
She largely glides over or ignores work by several
Finnish historians who have concentrated heavily on
Finnish-Russian relations, including Tuomo Polvinen,
Osmo Jussila, and Sune Jungar, while she relies on
some historians whose focus lies elsewhere. Related to
this is less that satisfactory representation of other
cited historians' views. Karemaa has made a contribution to the debate about an important general topic,
but she could have produced a better book by extending her research to cover a longer time span and by
analyzing and thinking more about her own material.
-
PEKKA KALEVI HAMALAINEN
University of Wisconsin,
Madison
The Silenced Media: The Propaganda
War between Russia and the West in Northern Europe.
ESKO SALMINEN.
Translated by JYRI KOKKONEN. New York: St. Martin's.
1999. Pp. xii, 198. $65.00.
This English translation of a book originally published
in Finnish in 1996 is a rare treat to those who are
interested in the phenomenon of Finlandization but
cannot master the Finnish language. Esko Salminen
sets out to explore "how the Soviet Union succeeded in
silencing and manipulating the media of [Finland] for
many years, to serve its own ends" (p. ix). By manipulating security considerations and, in particular, the
centrality of Russo-Finnish relations to Finland's postwar foreign policy, the Kremlin managed, Salminen
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW argues, to curtail free speech in this Nordic country.
And they did so with the help of the Finns themselves.
In particular, longtime president Urho Kekkonen
(1956-1981) was instrumental in creating a climate of
self-censorship, in which the Finnish media sanitized
news about Soviet atrocities in the name of maintaining a working relationship with the USSR.
To his credit, the author uses a variety of sources:
archival materials in Finland and Russia, memoirs,
interviews, and published accounts. With numerous
examples—including the coverage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's fate in the Finnish media—Salminen
makes a convincing case about the restrictions to free
speech that existed in Cold War Finland. He also
describes how "dissidents," including the prize-winning political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen, came under strong criticism in Kekkonen's Finland. Only after
his retirement in 1981 and the ascendancy of Mikhail
Gorbachev to Soviet leadership in 1985 did the Finnish
media gradually begin to move closer to "Western"
standards of journalistic freedom without governmental pressure.
Salminen also explores the Western response to
Finnish self-censorship. Starting in the 1950s but particularly in the 1970s, this was summarized in the term
Finlandization; consequently, Finland and its selfcensorship became a symbol of what could happen to
other non-socialist countries should they lower their
guard. In brief, they would gradually—as Finland had
from the 1950s—lose parts of their internal freedoms.
That Finlandization applied merely, if at all, to Finland
alone was often lost in this debate, which was part of
the attack on the merits of detente in the United States
and Western Europe. Still, the Western debate did
leave a mark on Finland's image. As Salminen puts it
in his conclusion: "The worst aspect [of self-censorship] was the tarnished image of Finland abroad."
Overall, the book is clearly written. Yet it is also
somewhat disappointing, in that it adds relatively little
that is new to what a number of Finnish historians,
such as Timo Soikkanen, have argued before: namely,
that Finlandization was, indeed, a reality. There is also
a somewhat moralizing tone to the book, in that
Salminen, who worked as a journalist during much of
the period he explores in the book, was very close to
the events he describes. Perhaps inevitably, he thus
sees little value in any realpolitik defense of selfcensorship.
In this, he may be right, for the Finnish media did,
by and large, treat the Soviet Union with kid gloves
throughout the Cold War. In retrospect, this seems
hardly to have been necessary. But, then, many other
by-products and even some central facets (from various spy games to a number of nuclear weapons systems) of the Cold War appear to have been equally
inconsequential to the eventual outcome of that protracted conflict. In that context, the fact that some
Finnish journalists, under pressure from their government, chose not to publish as much "dirt" about a
superpower with which their country shared an 800-
FEBRUARY 2000
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
mile border appears less than crucial. If Finlandization
does matter today, it is mainly because of the political
culture it created in Finland itself.
Ultimately, the book is therefore an interesting
chapter not only in the post-1991 debate about Finlandization but in the history of Finlandization itself. For
it affirms a deep-seated irony that has emerged since
the end of the Cold War: while during the 1960s and
1970s—at the height of self-censorship and Finlandization—the Finns themselves denied that any such
phenomenon applied to their country, many Finns are
now, even more vehemently than the Western critics
two decades earlier, pushing the subject further. In a
very clear sense, then, the new Finnish debate about
Finlandization—of which this book is an important
part—is about airing the dirty laundry that piled up
during the Cold War.
Jussi M. HANHIMAKI
London School of Economics
SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN. The Reformation of Ritual: An
Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. (Christianity
and Society in the Modern World.) New York: Routledge. 1997. Pp. 282. $74.95.
It is indeed strange, as Susan C. Karant-Nunn observes
at the outset of this book, that the obviously crucial
problem of ritual change in the German Reformation
has hitherto been neglected. It has long been an axiom
that the reformers made a bid to restore religious rites
to Biblical standards of simplicity, to do away with all
that they saw as superstitious ornaments accreted
during the previous centuries, in short to "disenchant"
them—and instead to instill in the people the pure
Word of God. The study of ritual in this period may
thus give the historian a powerful tool for exploring
the process by, and the extent to which, the theological
ideas of the reformers were translated into religious
practice.
Based on mainly eastern German sources, the book
examines minutely five areas of ritual practice that
framed the life of Christians from cradle to grave.
Each of the corresponding chapters offers a systematic
description of ritual procedures before and after the
Reformation. The result is a distinct picture of the
kind and degree of change that had taken place. Ritual
emerges from this analysis as a "tug of war" between
the Protestant clerical elite, backed up by government,
and the common people on whom they sought to
impose their views. The nature of this campaign is the
focus of the book, which demonstrates that for all their
zeal and governmental support, the reformers registered very limited success.
These are by no means novel insights. Recent works,
such as C. Scott Dixon's The Reformation and Rural
Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 15281603 (1996), have amply documented the massive if
often evasive opposition encountered by the reform
program. It was not simply that the attachment of
simple folk to ancient and honorable traditions was a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
305
formidable obstacle; as the late Robert Scribner
showed, the elimination of sacramental-psychological
"safety kits" only exacerbated matters by making the
world leem a more exposed place, thereby enhancing
the temptation to have recourse to magie ("The Reformation, Popular Magie, and the Disenchantment of
the World," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23:2
[1993]: 475-94). And, as Karant-Nunn argues throughout, not only the reform program but its apostles, too,
were out of touch with those whom they sought to
enlighten: unlike the pre-Reformation clergy, the better-educated Protestant clergy were identified with the
structuren of domination. One interesting implication
of Karant-Nunn's account is that the Reformation had
transformed first and foremost the complexion of the
clergy, and had done this so well that it backfired. Like
other momentous early modern intellectual movements—Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment—the Reformation only widened the gulf between elite and masses. The new breed of evangelical
pastors were mentally too distant from their flocks, a
circumstance scarcely conducive to the accomplishment of their own ends. And indeed, the ritual through
which they tried to implement reform "attempted to be
what ritual in fact cannot become—exclusively a
means of making a populace over into an image
envisioned by those in positions of power" (p. 193).
Small wonder, then, that ritual became a "battleground." Karant-Nunn is disarmingly aware that the
dichotomy between elite and people, what has been
called "a two-tiered model of culture," is crude (pp. 5,
198). Yet she makes no sustained effort to transcend it.
She confines herself to an anthropologically oriented
elucidation of the conflicts surrounding ritual and does
not try to work out their sociological dimension. How
relevant the latter is can be inferred from evidence,
presented by the author herself, which betrays the
actual complexity of the process of Reformation, the
cross-cutting and shifting alliances formed around
contentious issues. One learns, for instance, that the
struggle in Saxony against the banishing of exorcism
from baptism was led by the local nobility (p. 59); or,
more generally, that "all levels of society. . . sustained
a lively spectrum of ... pararitual, and resolutely
refused to abandon it" (p. 193). On that account, it is
indeed inadvisable to try and draw a boundary between
a disciplining elite and those at the receiving end. But
Karant-Nunn does not provide an alternative, dynamic
interpretation of the "gradations, the overlapping, the
multiple hues and nuances" (p. 198) of a society
involved in ritual change and conflict. Given the book's
central arguments, and its ambition to interpret the
Reformation from the perspective of ritual, this is
regrettable. The leitmotif of a contention between
elite-official and popular culture is not adequately
embedded in the contemporary social and economie
setting, a problem that, as Karant-Nunn has so cogently shown, handicapped the Protestant reformers.
HILLAY ZMORA
Ben-Gurion University
FEBRUARY 2000