As the magazine STOP in Finland notes, today the multinationality of Suomi is a statement of fact. And tourists are not averse to it: having morning coffee in a family German bakery, dining in a Thai restaurant, buying not only the usual smoked fish and chocolate for home, but also Moroccan spices. To enjoy one country and, as a souvenir, get a whole world in miniature.
A HUNDRED YEARS ago, something similar had already happened. At the beginning of the 20th century, when Finland was still part of the great Russian Empire, the number of foreign nationals living in Helsinki was as impressive relative to the local population as in the 21st century. And it was just as striking. In his memoirs, Väinö Tanner, a prominent Finnish political figure, noted with some sadness that at the turn of the century 'the Finnish presence was nowhere felt in the capital.' Swiss cheese makers, Norwegian industrialists, Jewish shopkeepers, Italian ice cream vendors, Tatar carpet traders, Russian industrialists sought their fortune on the capital's squares and streets.
It is no surprise that even then one-fifth of marriages were between spouses speaking different languages! Moreover, Tanner added that 'Finns lived like immigrants in their own country.' And if this was a literary exaggeration, it was only partly so: indeed, foreign speech was heard everywhere on the streets and squares, and even in the sales halls of Stockmann, locals were still addressed in Swedish out of habit.
It was then that the famous Helsinki slang (Stadin slangi) emerged, a modern version of which can still be heard on the capital's trams and market squares. Slang is a unique historical-linguistic monument, spoken by both young people and dignified old ladies, proud that 'outsiders' from Turku, Oulu, or Kotka do not understand them. It is, like dough, mixed with Swedish, Finnish, and German, with admixtures of English, Italian (donna – 'girl') and, of course, Russian (voda, mesto, snaijata from 'знать' meaning to know, safka, or 'food', from the word 'завтрак' meaning breakfast).
The latter is quite predictable, because by the beginning of the 20th century, descendants of merchant dynasties with sonorous surnames like Sinebrychoff, Wavulin, Koroleff, Kisileff, Kavaleff, chancellery officials, military personnel with families, Orthodox clergy, and those close to the imperial court had firmly settled in Helsinki… And that is not counting the romantically inclined creative intelligentsia of the Silver Age, who periodically came from St. Petersburg to Finland to indulge in 'dreams of times past,' and the dacha dwellers of the Karelian Isthmus, whose summer season with their northern neighbors could last for years.
But after gaining independence in 1917, the percentage of foreigners in the capital, and in the whole country, gradually began to decrease. So much so that in the 1970s, Finland reached a peak of ethnic homogeneity.
HOWEVER, it is known that history is not afraid of repetition. And in the 1990s, something unprecedented happened again in Finland: the number of foreigners arriving in the country for the first time exceeded the number of Finns leaving it. There were several reasons for these unexpected changes: the law on the repatriation of Ingrian Finns by President Mauno Koivisto, under which at least 30,000 people returned to their historical homeland, the military conflict in Somalia, as a result of which Finland accepted its first group of refugees, and the country's entry into the EU. Today, even though migration to Finland is still a relatively new phenomenon compared to Germany, Switzerland, or even Sweden, its 'mono-nationality' has remained in the past.
From a country that, at the beginning of the 20th century, had Finns emigrating to the USA, Canada, and Australia, Finland turned into a state that people seek, that is, a country of voluntary migration. At the end of 2011, the number of foreign citizens in Finland was 262 130 people, or 4.9% of the total population. The top ten most numerous groups were led by former Soviet republics (50 457); Estonia (29 404), Sweden (29 186), Russia (8 889) and Somalia (8,767). They are followed by Iraq, China, Thailand, former Yugoslavia, and Germany. The Russian language, accordingly, constitutes the largest group of foreign languages – one in five of all foreigners living in Finland speak it.
To avoid excessive idealization, it is worth saying that realizing (and accepting) the fact that in a couple of decades the forest-lake Finland suddenly became international turned out to be not the easiest task. Which was to be expected. To this day, when asked about the population size, most residents will habitually answer: 5 million. Although that round number remained in the 1990s: by 2013, the population had increased by 400,000 – a very significant figure for Finland.
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FOREIGNERS IN HELSINKI