Finland

A country that was Swedish for six centuries, Russian for one, and has spent the modern era demonstrating how a small state survives beside a large one. Finland was part of Sweden from the twelfth century and became an autonomous grand duchy under the Russian tsar in 1809, which paradoxically encouraged a national movement - the Kalevala was compiled from oral poetry in 1835 and gave the language a literary standard. Independence came in December 1917 during the Russian revolution and was immediately followed by a civil war between Reds and Whites that killed around thirty-seven thousand people, many in prison camps. The Winter War of 1939 and 1940 saw Finland hold off a Soviet invasion for over three months and lose a tenth of its territory anyway; four hundred thousand Karelians were resettled. Finland fought again alongside Germany, then signed an armistice and expelled German forces from Lapland. Postwar policy kept sovereignty by accommodating Soviet interests, a stance others called Finlandisation. Nokia made it a technology economy. Its schools are among the world's most studied. Finland joined NATO in 2023. Helsinki is the capital. The country has about 5.6 million people. Finnish and Swedish are both official, and Finnish is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it. There are around 188 thousand lakes. The Sami hold recognised rights in the north. Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world for several consecutive years, a result Finns tend to receive with scepticism. The sauna is close to universal, with more of them than cars.

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