Authors
Pia Koivunen1; 1 University of Turku, Discussion
The early 1990s saw a wave of removal of statues of Lenin and other communist leaders throughout Europe. Unlike most of the countries bordering Soviet Union/Russia, Finland did not join this trend but kept its Lenins until 2022. The bust of Lenin erected in the city of Turku in 1977, was removed in April 2022, and the Lenin statue, which the city of Tallinn had given to its town-twinning Kotka in 1979, was taken down in October 2022. Why were these statues kept for such a long time and why was it the Russian invasion in Ukraine that activated the cities of Turku and Kotka to “clean” their urban spaces?
Moreover, while the requests of removing the Lenin statues were heard very soon after Russia’s invasion had begun, another, more recent statue did not face similar demands. Erected in 2012 jointly by the Russian consulate and the city of Turku, this statue, called the meeting of 1812, illustrates czar Alexander I and the crown prince of Sweden Carl Johann negotiating the annexation of Finland, at that time the Eastern parts of Sweden, to the Russian empire. Why did this memorial, which was initiated by Putin’s Russia, cause much less discussion than age-old Lenins?
This paper analyses the Finnish politics of memory from the late 1980s through the 2020s. It places the Finnish case in a broader Central-Eastern European context and discusses how the case of the Lenin statues illustrates the ways in which Finnish-Russian relations have been reimagined and renarrated first after the collapse of the Soviet Union and again after the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine in 2022. Finland is examined here as a former Russian borderland and a neighbour, whose national identity and the mere existence has been dependent on the relations with her giant eastern neighbour.
The paper is based on discussions on the Lenin statutes and other Lenin memorials in Finland in Finnish newspapers, magazines and social media platforms. It traces the narratives around the Lenin statues at the time when they were erected, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and again in 2022, and analyses how these narratives have evolved and changed over time. 
