What was it like to live under Finlandization? Kemi’s History Museum brings it to life.

Tourists know Kemi best for its Snow Castle, but just five minutes down the road the city’s history museum is playing host to a less well-known but equally fascinating attraction. The ‘Finlandized Finland’ exhibition aims to explain what life was like in Finland during the Cold War and make you feel like you’re actually there.

According to exhibition, which runs until 14^th March, the term ‘Finlandization’ was coined by West German academics in the 1960s. They observed Finland’s extremely compliant relationship with it’s Soviet neighbour and, bordering East Germany, feared their country becoming like Finland – ‘Finlandized.’ The exhibition explores the period in considerable detail, candidly arguing that Finland’s Cold War President Urho Kekkonen (1956 – 1981) used the need to appease the Soviets to impose censorship on newspapers and crush political dissent.

The exhibition displays Finnish pro-Soviet propaganda ranging from newspapers to school textbooks. You can read the famous ‘letters’ which Kekkonen would send to newspaper journalists whose reporting of the Soviet Union displeased him, watch television programmes from the time, listen to music from the period and sit in a typical Cold War Finnish sitting room. You can even have your photo taken with life size pictures of Kekkonen and Soviet leaders and all of the information is offered in English.

The exhibition began at Werstas (the Finnish Labour Museum) in Tampere in September last year.

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