Far-right politics in Finland

In Finland, the far right was strongest in 1920–1940 when the Academic Karelia Society, Lapua Movement, Patriotic People's Movement and Vientirauha operated in the country and had hundreds of thousands of members.[1] In addition to these dominant far-right and fascist organizations, smaller Nazi parties operated as well.

The Peasant March, a show of force in Helsinki by the Lapua Movement on 7 July 1930

The groups exercised considerable political power, pressuring the government to outlaw communist parties and newspapers and expel Freemasons from the armed forces.[2][3] Conservative and White Guard authorities supported the far right to a large extent. The social-democratic politician Onni Happonen was arrested by police who then turned him over to a fascist lynch mob to be killed.[4]

During the Cold War, all partied deemed fascist were banned according to the Paris Peace Treaties and all former fascist activists had to find new political homes.[5] Despite Finlandization, many continued in public life. Yrjö Ruutu, the leader of a Nazi party competing with the FPO, joined the Finnish People's Democratic League. Juhani Konkka, the party secretary and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper National Socialist , abandoned politics and became an accomplished translator, receiving a cultural award of the Soviet Union.[6] Three former members of the Waffen SS served as ministers of defense, among them Finnish SS Battalion officers Sulo Suorttanen and Pekka Malinen as well as Mikko Laaksonen, a soldier in the Maschinengewehr-Ski-Bataillon "Finnland" consisting of pro-Nazi Finns who rejected the peace treaty.[7]

Captain Arvi Kalsta addressing an FPO meeting

In 2013, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre asked president Niinistö to condemn a neo-Nazi newspaper circulated to some 660,000 households. The newspaper published articles denying the Holocaust and articles such as "Zionist terrorism" and "CNN, Goldman Sachs and Zionist Control" translated from David Duke.[8][9][10] The most prominent neo-Nazi group was the Nordic Resistance Movement, which is tied to multiple murders, attempted murders and assaults of political enemies was found in 2006 and proscribed in 2019.[11] The second biggest Finnish party, the Finns Party, has been described as far right.[12][13][14][15]

The NRM and other far-right nationalist parties organized an annual torch march demonstration in Helsinki on the Finnish independence day which ends at the Hietaniemi cemetery where members visit the tomb of Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim and the monument to the Finnish SS Battalion. The event was protested by antifascists, leading to counterdemonstrators being violently assaulted by NRM members who acted as security. The demonstration attracted close to 3,000 participants according to the estimates of the police and hundreds of officers patrol Helsinki to prevent violent clashes.[16][17][18][19] The march was attended and promoted by the Finns Party while it was condemned by left-wing parties. Iiris Suomela of the Green League characterized it as "obviously neo-Nazi" and expressed her disappointment in it being attended by such a large number of people.[20]

National Socialism in Finland

Several Nazi parties operated in Finland in the 1930s and 1940s, among them the Finnish People's Organization (FPO) led by Jäger-Captain Arvi Kalsta with 20,000 members, the Blue Cross with 12,000 members and the National Socialist Union of Finland (NSUF) led by Yrjö Ruutu. Even the Swedish-speaking Finns had their own Nazi organizations, the People's Community Society led by the former governor Admiral Hjalmar von Bonsdorff and the Black Guard led by Örnulf Tigerstedt.[21][22][23]

One of Finland's largest publishing companies, Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, was granted publishing rights to Mein Kampf after the Winter War in 1940 and Lauri Hirvensalo was approved as a translator by a German publishing house after WSOY confirmed his “Aryan” ancestry. In 1941–1944, 32,000 copies of the book were sold, a large number in Finland and professor Veikko Antero Koskenniemi wrote a glowing review of the book for Uusi Suomi newspaper.[24] Koskenniemi was also the vice-president of the Association of European Writers (Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung, ESV), organised by Goebbels. The group had about 40 prominent Finnish authors, including Mika Waltari, Tito Colliander, Jarl Hemmer and Maila Talvio.[25][26]

Many of the Nazi groups existed parallel to one another, Colliander for example also belonged to Tigerstedt's Black Guard, and Tigerstedt himself also belonged to a Nazi party known as the Patriotic People's Party (Isänmaallinen Kansanpuolue) and the ESV.[23][27] Despite of high degree of cooperation, some of the groups competed with one another, for instance the NSUF and the FPO disagreed about the language question. While the NSUF insisted on Finnish language nationalism, the FPO was bilingual, had many prominent Swedish-speaking Finnish nazis such as von Bonsdorff and Himmler's personal friend Thorvald Oljemark and was popular among the Swedish-speaking population of Uusimaa.[28][29][30]

Even outside of the actual National Socialist movements, there was glorification of the Nazi Germany in Finnish society. The Finnish police magazine wrote about German police sports and the “Citizens' Reporting Service” (Volksmeldedienst) set up by Reinhard Heydrich uncritically and emphasizing the effectiveness of the Gestapo.[31] The Finnish secret police was led by openly pro-nazi and antisemitic Arno Anthoni and under him it cooperated with the SS, Einsatzkommando Finnland and Sicherheitsdienst.[32][33] The State Information Service, responsible for propaganda and censorship also employed aforementioned right-wing extremists and published pro-German material like Finnlands Lebensraum.[34][35][36]

It has been alleged that yet another Nazi group, the Finnish Realm Union (Suomen Valtakunnan Liitto, SVL) was prepared by the Nazi Germany to perform a National Socialist coup against the Finnish government in the case Finland seeks a separate peace with the Soviet Union. The SVL was led by Mauno Vannas, professor of Ophthalmology and Rolf Nevanlinna, mathematics professor and inventor of Nevanlinna theory. The SVL functioned as an umbrella organization of the pro-German and National Socialist groups. According to authors Juha Pohjonen and Oula Silvennoinen the famous Finnish war hero Captain Lauri Törni was also part of this operation.[37][38][39][40]

Terrorism
Murdered leftists in Tampere.
See also: White Terror (Finland)

Arguably the first modern act of right-wing terrorism is the assassination of general-governor Nikolay Bobrikov by Finnish nationalist Eugen Schauman in 1904. However, this characterization is controversial in Finnish society where Schauman is widely idolized; Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen had to defend himself against backlash after describing the act as such.[41][42]

Schauman's act inspired the nationalist movement and was quickly followed by the assassination of Eliel Soisalon-Soininen, the Chancellor of Justice by Lennart Hohenthal. Soisalon-Soininen was the highest ranking servant of the Tsar in Finland after the governor-general, and therefore an "arch-traitor" in the eyes of the nationalists. In 1904-1905 a secret Finnish nationalist society Verikoirat (the Bloodhounds) assassinated Russians, police officers and informants and bombed police stations. The group also planned assassinating the Tsar while he was vacationing in Primorsk but missed him. In 1905-1907 another secret society Karjalan Kansan Mahti (Might of the Karelians) were responsible for multiple murders of Russians and weapon thefts and bank robberies.[43][44][45]

10,000 leftists were killed by right-wing death squads during the white terror in 1918.[46]

In 1919 group called Aktivistien Keskus (Base of the Activists) planned destroying St. Petersburg. 35 Ingrian Finns were armed with handguns and explosives. The plan was to blow up the water works, the power plant and certain factories and set up fires all around the city that could not be put out. The operation was partially successful; the waterworks were destroyed and targets around the city were bombed and set on fire, but the bombing of the power plant failed and one man was captured. Dozens of people were killed and wounded.[47][48][49]

In 1920s-1940s far-right and fascist groups attacked left-wing events and politicians systematically, resulting in deaths. The groups were responsible for bombing and burning down gathering places of the leftists. Minister of the Interior Heikki Ritavuori was assassinated for supposedly being too lenient towards communists.[50][2]

In 1945 after the armistice with the Soviet Union, nationalist groups bombed multiple left-wing events in Helsinki. Attacks in Haaga and Vallila against left-wing meeting halls and papers followed.[51]

During the Cold War, far-right activism was limited to small illegal groups like the clandestine nazi occultist group led by Pekka Siitoin who made headlines after arson and bombing of the printing houses of the Communist Party of Finland.[52][53] Member of the Nordic Realm Party Seppo Seluska was convicted of the torture and murder of a gay Jewish person.[54][55][56]

The skinhead culture gained momentum during the late 1980s and peaked during the late 1990s. In 1991, Finland received a number of Somali immigrants who became the main target of Finnish skinhead violence in the following years, including four attacks using explosives and a racist murder. Asylum seeker centres were attacked, in Joensuu skinheads would force their way into an asylum seeker centre and start shooting with shotguns. At worst Somalis were assaulted by 50 skinheads at the same time.[57][58]

During the European migrant crisis numerous asylum seeker reception centres were targets of arson attacks.[59][60] In its annual threat assessment for 2020, the National Bureau of Investigation found that despite of the ban of the NRM, the threat of far-right terrorism had risen and identified 400 persons of interest "motivated and with the capacity to perform terrorism in Finland". International links and funding networks were pointed out as a special source of concern.[61]

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  58. "Right-Wing Terrorism and Militancy in the Nordic Countries: A Comparative Case Study" (PDF). University of Oslo Center for Research on Extremism. Retrieved 5 November 2020. One particularly severe episode happened in 1997, when a group of about 50 skinheads attacked Somali youths playing football in the Helsinki suburb Kontula. The violence did not stop before the police started shooting warning shots, and 22 skinheads were sentenced for the attack. Pekonen et al. also mention a number of other violent events from the 1990s, including ten particularly severe events from 1995 (not included in the RTV dataset because sufficient event details are lacking): a racist murder, an immigrant stabbed by a skinhead, four attacks on immigrants using explosives, and another four immigrants beaten severely.
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