Telling and retelling a historical event: the collapse of the Soviet Union in Finnish parliamentary talk

ABSTRACT

This article studies the collapse of the Soviet Union as a historical event by investigating how it was perceived while it occurred and what subsequent interpretations have been provided of the event and its significance. The event is studied both as meaningful past experience and as a relevant part of the present argument, since retellings generate historical experience. Our digitized corpus includes parliamentary records of plenary sessions from 1980 and oral history interviews of former MPs cover the period between 1988 and 2018. The corpus is grammatically parsed, allowing us to locate mentions of the Soviet collapse.

We combine analytical methods for the study of an event from conceptual history, with its emphasis on the recycling and reinterpretation of concepts, and narratology, with its emphasis on how happenings past and unfolding are narrated into meaningful events at the time of the telling. The abrupt changes in Finland’s powerful neighbour caused both cautious predictions in a quest for stability as well as hypotheses of change and even rejoicing over an ideological victory early on. The significance of the event unfolding was quickly noticed, and our analysis reveals the many uses of the event in politics during the decades to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Event
• epochal change
• Cold War
• Soviet Union
• historical experience
• Finland

Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991 opened up a new era in Finland. Having been born as an independent state during the Bolshevik Revolution and fought two wars against its vast neighbour, then adapted to the political and security interests of the communist superpower, Finland had no experience and hardly any vision of not taking the Soviet Union for granted. When the unfolding of the Soviet Bloc began in East-Central Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Baltic republics also started to manifest their quest for freedom, the political leadership in Finland wanted to signal stability rather than a need for change. Political leaders in many other countries and also numerous Finnish newspapers and politicians took a stand for the independence movements in the Soviet Baltic republics. However, president Koivisto and other leading policy-makers in Finland tried to balance between reacting to a radically changing political situation in Finland’s neighbourhood and supporting Gorbachev’s leadership in the Soviet Union in their public statements.¹

Outside of the conventional and faced with the unexpected, new narratives of Finland as a political entity were needed.² Narratives can be used to organize time, process and change as well as to argue for a desired interpretation of an event.³ This article studies the ways in which Members of Parliament first grasped the unfolding happenings and tried to forge them into a comprehensible event, as well as repeated retellings of the event during the decades to follow. We analyse the tellings and retellings of the collapse of the Soviet Union as rhetorical acts that mediate the experience of the time of the happening with the interpretations and experience at the time of the tellings and retellings.

The ending of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (FCMA) between Finland and the USSR, which had set limits to Finnish foreign policy and the claim for the country’s neutrality since 1948, provides an illustrative example of the difficulty of maintaining the alleged stability in the new unstable circumstances. After the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, which brought the president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Boris Yeltsin to de facto power and initiated the final dissolution of the Soviet Union, president Koivisto wanted to replace the treaty with a new one more fitting to the current situation. The negotiations on a new agreement started in late September and it was to be signed on 18 December. However, a day before Yeltsin had forbidden the Soviet foreign minister to sign it. In fact, the updated pact was not actualized only because the other contracting party ceased to exist. Instead, a treaty on the foundations of relations between Finland and Russia was signed on 20 January 1992.⁴

Behind the outspoken quest for stability, Finnish decision-makers had privately acknowledged that the situation was a crisis or, rather, a sum of several crises.⁵ In his recent book, the former PM Esko Aho (April 1991–April 1995) describes the year 1991 as annus horribilis, recalling not only the consequences of the political circumstances in the Soviet Union and the Baltic republics, but also the rapid decline of the Finnish national economy caused by the stopping of the trade between the Soviet Union and Finland and the liberation of monetary markets.⁶ In many analyses, such as those of the ‘Westernizing narrative’ of Finland or the changes in Finland’s security policy or ‘Finlandization’, the impact of the breakdown of the USSR has merged with an analysis of Finland’s way to EU membership and its consequences.⁷ This is quite understandable, as the process of Finland’s European integration was already underway during Gorbachev’s last years in power.⁸ However, it also means that the breakdown of the Soviet Union has slipped more or less out of sight and become a background factor rather than the issue of principal interest.

We will recast the focus on the collapse of the Soviet Union by investigating how it was perceived while it occurred and what subsequent interpretations of the event and its significance have been provided in changing circumstances, such as Finland’s EU membership and the changes in Russian foreign policy during the last decade or so. We examine how the collapse has been told and retold by the Finnish parliamentarians both in the parliamentary debates and in the series of interviews of MPs after their retirement from the parliament, with a corpus spanning from 1980 to 2018. After the 1990s, the collapse is often mentioned only briefly, without particular description or explanation, which clearly indicates the event has epitomized its significance. We combine analytical methods from conceptual history with its emphasis on the recycling and reinterpretation of concepts and narratology with its emphasis on how happenings past and unfolding are narrated into meaningful events at the time of the telling.⁹

Theories, methods and material

Historiography and narratology both use the concept ‘event’. The relationship between an event and the tellings about it at different points of time has been in some way noted among historians as long as anachronism has been recognized. Particularly oral history studies emphasize that tellings about the past always take place in the present and therefore express the present point of view.¹⁰ After the so-called linguistic turn, the distinction between experience, event and the telling about them gained more theoretical attention.¹¹ In narratology, the cognitive approaches have shifted the emphasis from telling of events as the basic function of narrative¹² towards experientiality as the nucleus of narrative.¹³ For Monika Fludernik, narrativity is constituted by experientiality as ‘the quasi-mimetic evocation of “real-life experience”’.¹⁴ Her influential definition of experientiality as the core narrative feature includes depiction of human consciousness and portrayal of emotively evaluated dynamic event sequences. Both entail something having happened that is narrativized into a meaningful event in the interpretation. In recent narrative theory discussion, Peter Hühn has returned to the distinction between events as objective happenings and events as meaningful, interpretative turning points.¹⁵ In this latter sense, we argue, the narratological understanding of ‘event’ remains crucial to the study of historical experience.

In historiography, the difference between event and history writing has usually concerned the task of a historian rather than the role of contemporaries in telling about events. The British philosopher and theologian W. R. Matthews argued in the 1930s that events were fundamental in history as significant moments in the ‘something going on’. Yet he also noted that an event was an aspect, or a unit, that a historian was construing from their limited point of view, ‘as if it were a unit’.¹⁶ A kindred view of events has been employed in recent years to criticize the influential contextualist approach to intellectual history, often associated with Quentin Skinner. Martin Jay has argued that it is the hindsight view or the perlocutionary effect, to use the Austinian terminology adopted by Skinner, that marks an event, not an illocutionary speech act. According to Jay, events may be radical breaks in the status quo but they are foremost instances that gain their characteristics from that openness towards possible futures, the repetition of their articulation, and, consequently, from their recurring reception.¹⁷

Matthews and Jay did not really deal with the question of how historical actors may have recognized themselves as being part of an event. Perhaps, the most rewarding way of tackling the notion of a historical event and its reinterpretations in the field of historiography is conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), as theorized by Reinhart Koselleck. The basic idea of conceptual history, the contestability and temporal change in political and social concepts, is related to the notion that ideas, experiences and events are being retold and reinterpreted repeatedly for present purposes. The process entails innovation, but people are mainly forced to recycle the existing vocabulary in order to be understood by their contemporaries.¹⁸ This means that a historian should aim at capturing both the lived event and the ways in which an event has been created and reinterpreted afterwards. According to Koselleck, ‘[e]vents that can be separated ex post from the infinity of circumstances […] can be experienced by contemporary participants as a coherent event, as a discernible unity capable of narration’.¹⁹ This notion of people being able to recycle concepts and give them new meanings is useful. It also fits well with Skinner’s analytical notion of ‘an innovating ideologist’, whose aim is to stretch previous meanings of words to fit one’s own present purposes. Such a ‘rhetorical redescription’ involves a reinterpretation of both the current situation as well as the past circumstances.²⁰

The two-folded temporality foregrounded in conceptual history is crucial to any narrative analysis. We pay attention to the two temporal points of experience in narrative: the meaning of living through past happenings²¹ and the rhetorical purpose of telling about them later.²² The narratological conceptualization of the time of the told and the time of the telling enables the empirical identification of the two in an utterance, as well as the operationalization of the varying relations between those points of time.²³ The linguistic identification of employed tenses, deictic markers and personal pronouns provides the basis for detecting the uses of the past in the present time of the narration.²⁴ Together with the recycling of concepts, the narrative relation between the telling and the told reveals tellings and retellings of the Soviet collapse as a meaningful event used for rhetorical purposes.

Our corpus includes parliamentary records of plenary sessions from 1980 to 2018 and a collection of oral history interviews of former MPs from 1988 to 2018. These interviews are long one-on-one conversations going extensively into the interviewee’s biography and political career, with a certain emphasis on crucial parliamentary elections. Perceptions of colleagues, work in parliamentary committees and other key positions, relationships with important political figures and personal attitudes are all commonly featured themes. The interactive interview situation is narrative in nature, and often contains several small stories on what happened during the time discussed.²⁵ Parliamentary talk in plenary sessions is ideally argumentative in the manner of pro et contra debate.²⁶ It also incorporates storytelling used as part of the argument and to illustrate a point.²⁷ Whereas biographical interviews invite tellings about past events, parliamentary talk is commonly oriented towards the current and future situation. Many variations do occur, and our analysis throughout the corpus takes into account both the time of the telling (the date of the interview or parliamentary session) and the time of the told (the expressed or inferred time of what is being spoken about).

The entire corpus has been digitized and grammatically parsed, allowing us to find instances where the Soviet collapse is discussed. Excluding those interviews that were not released for research use, the dataset contains 378 interviews, roughly 883,000 sentences and 11,890,000 words. Parliamentary records are represented by complete transcripts of each plenary session, made available by the parliament within hours or days after the session. Transcribed utterances sum up to about 5 285,000 sentences and 80 million words in 5 200 sessions.

The Finnish-language content of the corpus was processed with the Finnish dependency parser,²⁸ splitting texts into sentences and individual tokens, as well as assigning morphological details, such as noun cases or verb tenses. Syntactic relations were established using universal dependencies (UD), a system of consistent grammatical annotations across languages. Swedish-language texts could not be processed by the parser and were not included in further analysis; even if their parsing had been possible, the differences between languages would have resulted in poorly compatible annotations.

Parsed sentences were stored in a database and a Web-based search tool was constructed to query it.²⁹ The tool was able to provide context in the form of additional sentences before and after every search result, making it easier to evaluate their relevance at a glance. All results were accompanied by general metadata including the speaker’s name, gender, party and date. Morphological annotation allowed the users to locate words and their combinations in the dataset, regardless of each word’s inflected form, and restrict the search further (including, e.g. certain compound nouns). Thus, it was possible not only to track mentions of the Soviet Union in the data, but also to identify other elements likely referring to its downfall.

Our initial search query retrieved all sentences where the Soviet Union occurred together with the verbs ‘romahtaa’ (‘collapse’), ‘kaatua’ (‘fall’, ‘break down’) or ‘hajota’ (‘fall apart’, ‘dissolve’). These seemed to be the most likely ways of expressing the USSR’s fate. The search produced roughly 440 results, a selection small enough to be filtered manually without using computational techniques. After removing several instances where the relevant verbs did not in fact refer to the Soviet Union, but simply appeared alongside it in the sentence, we ended up with 432 text fragments: 204 from the interview material and 228 from the plenary sessions.

To make sure that other appropriate words were not overlooked, we further examined the entire list of verbs appearing together with the USSR in at least one sentence (roughly 1600 verbs in 9700 sentences). An analysis of this list yielded as many as 80 potentially applicable verbs, most of them only featuring in a few sentences. By repeating the same process with these verbs – i.e. by searching for them together with the USSR and removing semantically independent occurrences – we extended our dataset to 530 fragments, with 37 new ones coming from the interviews and 61 more from the plenary sessions. After these steps, we assume that the dataset adequately covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in the original materials.

Foretelling an event to come

The collapse of the Soviet Union was a turning point in history and yet it has been difficult to demarcate when exactly it took place, not least because the end of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the Soviet Union have been mixed together. The state formally ceased to exist on 31 December 1991, but the unfolding of events and the continuous power struggles within and without the USSR were so many and unexpected that the process has been difficult to capture even from a hindsight perspective. Some key moments before the final dissolution of the Soviet state are nevertheless easy to point out, as no one would deny the paramount importance of the breakdown of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, crucial for the breaking loose of the Central European Soviet satellite states and the unification of Germany in October 1990. Moreover, it is impossible to ignore the consequences of the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, which brought Yeltsin into de facto power in the USSR. No doubt, several earlier turning points based on notions of erosion of the ideological legitimacy of the Soviet Union as well as its economic power have been suggested, such as the reform policy initiated by Gorbachev after coming into power in 1985.

The temporal demarcation of the breakdown of the USSR is clearly linked with the ways in which it is explained afterwards. As Archie Brown has noted, ‘[n]o-one in 1985 expected that within the space of seven years Communist rule would have ended in Europe, the Cold War would be over, and the Soviet Union would have ceased to exist’, but afterwards there were ‘no shortages of observers who were quick to see such outcomes as little short of inevitable’.³⁰ Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Charles S. Maier concluded that ‘[e]vents that appear as radical breaks … leave behind dramatic impressions that call for immediate interpretation as well as explanation’.³¹ Some prominent examples of such immediate interpretations include Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Failure (1988) in which he predicted the end of Soviet communism, Francis Fukuyama’s famous article ‘The End of History?’ (1989) in which he claimed a global victory of liberalism, and Ralf Dahrendorf’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (1990) in which he argued for a pluralist and open society in Europe no longer divided.³² These intellectuals, and others, were trying to make sense of the ongoing great transformation. Unfolding happenings have been deemed particularly challenging to tell about, since the narrative mode of understanding is regarded as necessarily retrospective.³³ The early assessments should be taken as rhetorical arguments in relation to the ongoing political struggle rather than purely well-founded analyses of the situation.

Like scholars, politicians are reinterpreting the past, analysing the current situation and making predictions about the future without knowing how the circumstances will evolve. Yet they need to make political decisions in the middle of changes. Parliamentarians, furthermore, are supposed to speak about political matters in the parliament, the most prestigious public forum for political debate. In Finland, the parliament traditionally played a minor role in foreign policy issues due to the presidential system and the special relationship with the USSR. More detailed discussions related to foreign policy in the Finnish parliament took place in the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC). Our analysis shows that many of the MPs who commented on the fate of the USSR around the year 1990 were members of the FAC. However, a gradual parliamentarization of the political system during the 1990s has given more room for parliamentary debates, including also foreign policy matters. Moreover, Finland’s EU membership in 1995 has ‘Europeanized’ parliamentary debates, and foreign policy issues are addressed also through the role of the EU.³⁴ In general, it seems that the MPs’ accounts of the breakdown of the Soviet Union represent a highly important yet so far unexplored source when trying to understand how this epochal change has been comprehended while it happened and how it was used as part of political argumentation afterwards.

In this study, our practical attempt to define when the event of the collapse of the USSR took place focused on the period between Finnish MPs’ first empirical statements referring to that collapse and the final debates of the 1991 parliamentary assembly in January 1992. Although Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 did not have an immediate effect on the relations between the two states, his policy of perestroika and glasnost made the bad economic and political situation in the country publicly known, which also affected what was convenient to publicly say according to the official foreign policy doctrine in Finland.³⁵ Our analysis of the event in the happening is divided into two sections: the very first reactions in this section and then the early signs of an understanding of an epochal change in the next section.

In his annual speech to the nation in the beginning of 1989, president Koivisto stated that ‘the political situation in the world had changed so much that one cannot recognize it from the past’, but also maintained that he did not expect ‘that borders would be changed in Europe, that empires would disappear and new would be born’.³⁶ Koivisto was indirectly confirming the possibility that something special could be in the making. Disnarration, the act of narrating something not occurring, verbalizes the denied event and therefore asks the audience what if the very thing denied happened.³⁷ Furthermore, the statement shows the intricate relation between experience and expectations: while experience today relies on expectations based on past experience, it is the unexpected that usually requires narration as an act of sense-making.³⁸ What the Finnish president seemed to have in mind was the political and national awakening in the Soviet Baltic republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Commenting on what came to be one of the major concerns for Finnish foreign policy in the next few years, he explained the alleged Finnish selfishness in relation to the Baltics (especially Estonia) by pointing out that, while Finland was guarding its own interests, the aim had been not to harm other parties’ interests.³⁹ However, 1989 turned out to be an exceptional year for Finland, too. Not only the political changes in East-Central Europe and in the Soviet Baltic republics, but also the political integration towards the European Community (EC) seemed possible for the first time. The first foretellings of the end of the Soviet Union among Finnish parliamentarians are from that year.

Referring to the policies of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR and the process of European integration in the framework of the EC, Green Party’s Eero Paloheimo claimed in February 1989 that ‘when the Soviet Union will be free, there will be a time, within thirty years, when the mobility of individual people between Finland and the Soviet Union will be quite free. It’ll be possible to come to live here.’ (Eero Paloheimo, 10 February 1989) Paloheimo was actually talking about the ongoing integration with the EC, his point being to envision a future multicultural Finland and Europe rather than to anticipate any sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. However, he captured some instances of the unfolding circumstances, as he referred to seemingly so different issues as a future migration in and out of Finland and the changes taking place in Europe, including the USSR. The use of the deictic marker ‘here’ brings the future vision spatially close to the situation at the time of the telling, enlivening it.

While Paloheimo’s statement can be viewed as a reflection on a possible long-term future, the former MP of the right-wing National Coalition Party, Tuure Junnila, was explicit about a major ideological change in his interview in early November 1989. Junnila, who had been a staunch opponent of the former president Kekkonen’s compliance to the Soviet Union, as well as an outspoken anticommunist, was often labelled as belonging to a far-right camp in his party and in the parliament in general. Speaking one week before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Junnila argued that ‘real socialism’ in the Soviet Union had failed and ‘the opposing ideology, of which the so-called free market economy was an essential aspect, had won’. (Tuure Junnila, 3 November 1989) Junnila was foreshadowing the end of Soviet ideology, but he was also careful not to claim the end of the Soviet Union. According to him, the Soviet Union was ‘almost on the verge of collapsing’, but he also noted that ‘nobody knows yet’ how the changes in the Soviet Union would play out. From our hindsight perspective, it is worth noting that he added that ‘it is possible that one day Gorbachev will be thrown aside and then there will be a new conservative chairman who will turn the course of development’. (Tuure Junnila, 3 November 1989)

On the other end of the political spectrum, Esko-Juhani Tennilä (Democratic Alternative), earlier a member of the former Finnish Communist Party and the faction that was under the influence of the Soviet Communist Party, argued for stability and continued efforts to maintain and develop the Finnish-Soviet relations. He composes a linguistic imitation of the right-wing policy: ‘The idea of the rightist policy is that the relations between Finland and the Soviet Union would have to be derogated precisely by undermining business and commercial cooperation’. (Esko-Juhani Tennilä, 20 September 1989) Tennilä claims the right-wing politicians have a collective purpose, and does this by formulating a hypothetical statement by those politicians. Appropriating the voice of an antagonist is a powerful narrative means of alleging an exaggerated claim by the opposing party, for the speaker then to refute in their own voice.⁴⁰

The notion of an epochal turning point was present everywhere in Europe after what had happened in Berlin and elsewhere in East-Central Europe. Among the Finnish parliamentarians, no immediate comments occurred in which the events in Berlin would have been directly linked to the fate of the Soviet Union. Still, the notion of epochal change became clearly tangible. For instance, the Social Democrat MP Antero Kekkonen maintained in March 1990 in a plenary debate that ‘Europe is changing at a pace and in a manner that for a couple of years would have been impossible to foresee’. According to this well-known former public service journalist, Europe, as it had been decided upon in the Yalta Conference in 1945, broke down. Referring to Gorbachev’s speech in Helsinki in October 1989, in which the Soviet leadership explicitly acknowledged Finland’s status as a Nordic neutral country for the first time since the late 1960s, the Finnish MP argued that ‘the postwar era has ended’ but ‘as citizens of a small country, we can only ponder whether this is, from the European perspective, the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end’. (Antero Kekkonen, 13 March 1990) Being in the midst of unpredictable events unfolding is emphasized by the use of the mental verb ‘ponder’ in the collective person ‘we’ together with the present tense (‘is’), pointing to the situation of the telling.

Later in the same year, after the unification of Germany in October, Ben Zyskowicz (National Coalition Party), who came to be perhaps the most vocal anti-Soviet and anticommunist MP in the Finnish parliament during the post-Cold War years, was quite straightforward in his assessment of the new situation: ‘The fact is that the Cold War, the division of Europe and the communist dictatorships were caused by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union changed, the Cold War ended, the division ended, and the peoples in Europe became free’. (Ben Zyskowicz, 27 November 1990). The past tense portrays the event and its consequences as having already reached a closure. A few weeks later, Eeva-Liisa Moilanen of the right-wing Finnish Christian League used the expression ‘the collapse of the economy and the whole society in the Soviet Union’ while commenting on the budget proposal (Eeva-Liisa Moilanen, 13 December 1990). Her main point was not to analyse the political situation in Europe – she referred to social issues in Finland and the Gulf War – but to give a context to her view of the proposal. However, while not predicting the downfall of the Soviet Union as a state, she spelt out the by then increasingly common view that the Soviet Union as a society was in a decline.⁴¹

These foretellings show that the idea of an epochal change had become common in expressions used in connection with the end of the USSR. The disintegration of the Soviet bloc in Central Europe during 1989 and the unification of Germany enabled some Finnish MPs to claim the victory of free markets over socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union, and even the end of the political division of Europe that had been based on the Second World War. However, such notions were sometimes mixed with the feeling of uncertainty of the immediate future, as seen in Junnila’s interview, in which he speculated on the position of Gorbachev. It is noteworthy that the political position of Finland was not the main issue in the analysed accounts, except in the case of Tennilä, who was concerned with the continuation of good relations between Finland and the USSR.

Telling the unfolding event

While the unification of Germany cemented the situation in Central Europe, it did not define the collapse of the Soviet Union – something that has been omitted in many international accounts of the end of the Cold War. Viewed from the Finnish parliamentarians’ perspective, the future was still quite open. However, the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 was crucial to how the Finnish MPs talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time as Finnish foreign policy took a new course in many ways – the independence of the Baltic states was recognized on 25 August and an amendment of the FCMA treaty was initiated on 12 September – the MPs also expressed their views of the need for a new direction.

The emancipation of the Baltic republics had been a delicate matter for the Finnish political leadership. President Koivisto had a low profile in public and refrained from supporting any one-sided declaration of independence of Estonia, culturally and historically the closest neighbouring Baltic country. It has afterwards been explained that the Finnish foreign policy standpoint in the question of the Baltic republics was not different from many Western countries such as the USA. Moreover, unofficial contacts between Finland and Estonia were numerous, including civic organizations and the press. As a matter of fact, during the coup attempt in the Soviet Union, the Estonian foreign minister Lennart Meri was in Helsinki, preparing to establish a refugee government in case the coup in Moscow succeeded.⁴²

In the parliament, the cause of the Baltic republics had gained some support even before the putsch in August 1991, but so had the cautious foreign policy as well. For instance, Ben Zyskowicz (National Coalition Party) commented upon the right of the refusal to bear arms in the Baltic countries by arguing that it was a matter of righteous demands for their independence (Ben Zyskowicz, 15 May 1990). Mikko Elo (Social Democratic Party), commenting on the official Finnish position on the independence of the Baltic Soviet republics, claimed that, although he understood the impatience of the people in those countries, negotiations were the only means to reach that goal (Mikko Elo, 5 February 1991). After the incidents in August 1991, support of Baltic independence became unequivocal. As Pekka Haavisto (Green Party) put it, ‘the rapid process toward the independence of the Baltic countries, to which the failed coup in the Soviet Union gave the last push, is for Finland an important change’. (Pekka Haavisto, 14 November 1991) Both Elo and Haavisto were members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, thus having access to more detailed insights on foreign affairs than most MPs.

In the circumstances where the Soviet Communist Party had lost its legitimacy, the language of an epochal change with its ideological implications was again articulated in the parliament. Riitta Saastamoinen (National Coalition Party) openly celebrated the fall of communism. According to her, ‘the fall of communism as a system in its place of birth, the Soviet Union, was particularly good news in the midst of the news about the Finnish economic recession’. She explicitly referred to foreshadowing, as she stated that many people who shared right-wing thinking had always known that a system built on suppression of individual rights and freedom of thought and speech could not hold. Using emotional and metaphoric language, she expressed a wish that ‘past anxiety will be swept away by free winds’. (Riitta Saastamoinen, 18 September 1991) Erkki Tuomioja, a prominent Social Democrat and also a member of the FAC, portrayed the epochal change broadly, maintaining that the collapse of the ‘command economy’, that is, planned economy, of the Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was driven by long-lasting trends such as global population growth, technological development and the emergence of global markets. However, he also argued that ‘the fall of the Soviet empire and the Soviet communism was the curtain call of an attempt at autarchy’. (Erkki Tuomioja, 19 November 1991)

Perhaps the most eloquent example of how the sense of change was articulated in Finnish parliament comes from Jörn Donner (Swedish People’s Party). A well-known author and film-maker turned politician, vice chair of the FAC, he stated that ‘it sometimes feels that what we are doing here [in the parliament] is that we are writing and commenting on history’. He pointed out that the issue under discussion, the report on the government’s actions in relation to foreign powers in 1990, had become so outdated that discussing it in the parliament was no longer useful. As he put it, matters were complicated also ‘because we do not know anything whatsoever about tomorrow’. (Jörn Donner, 5 December 1991)

As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, the question of how to deal with the FCMA treaty was delicate, as the Finnish foreign policy leadership was negotiating a new treaty with the Soviet Union while political power in Moscow was moving from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation. The awkward situation culminated in a period of a few days in January 1992, as the Finnish representatives, prepared to sign a new treaty with the USSR, ended up issuing one very similar in content with Russia.⁴³ In the parliament, the FCMA treaty was commented upon at the same time as the foreign policy was taking a new course in September 1991. Juha Korkeaoja from the governing Centre Party, member of the FAC, argued that the FCMA had become outdated in the context of changes in international politics, the status of the Baltic states and ‘the profound transformation of the inner structures of the Soviet Union’. According to him, the future would be about cooperation (Juha Korkeaoja, 18 September 1991). Along the same lines, Riitta Kauppinen, also from the Centre Party, maintained that the FCMA treaty was closely associated with the USSR that was ‘basically an economic coalition and on the verge of breaking down into several states’. (Riitta Kauppinen, 18 September 1991) Kauppinen directly refers to the possibility of what was happening: ‘If one were to think that the Soviet Union now is perhaps breaking down, which one of these states is ready to perhaps pay us the 7 billion marks?’ She is primarily concerned with the financial ramifications, which suits the discussion of the budget as the context of her speech.

After the episode was more or less over, Pentti Mäki-Hakola, often regarded as a conservative representative of the National Coalition Party like Junnila, stated that ‘one should assume that the foreign ministry would be satisfied: the Soviet Union has broken down. It has vanished’. (Pentti Mäki-Hakola, 9 January 1992) He used a short narrative to support his claim that the foreign minister’s [Paavo Väyrynen, Centre Party] enthusiasm to sign the treaty gained even peculiar features. ‘It was a close call that the signees did not make it to a train to Moscow just to discover at the Moscow station that the other party does not exist at all’. This portrayal immerses into the experience of the signees from Finland in their hypothetical arrival at Moscow, only to be surprised by the lack of the other signing party. Mäki-Hakola emphasizes the historical truth of his hypothetical portrayal: ‘This is what almost happened’. The story casts the foreign minister’s enthusiasm in an ironic stance, as he strived for an outdated goal much like the purposeless signees. This story exemplifies that all efforts to maintain old relations with the Soviet Union or Russia were obsolete and foolish, thus rhetorically creating significance of the Soviet collapse as an event and a significant turning point.⁴⁴

The interview of Pertti Paasio in 1999 (21 October) addresses his afterthoughts of the treaty created to replace the FCMA. Paasio, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (1987–1991), foreign minister (February 1989 – April 1991) and chairman of the FAC (1991–1996), recalls that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have been totally unimaginable at the times of the start of perestroika in late 1985, and the interviewer asks about the process of planning for the new treaty in 1991. Paasio describes the confusion at the time and the persistence of the thought that some kind of a continuation for the FCMA was unavoidable. He concludes how liberating it was, though, to not have any military obligations in the new treaty. ‘It sure was a liberating feeling, and a bit of a wild feeling, as well, that here we are now in front of a completely new era’. The strong feeling in the past is highlighted with the linguistic use of deictic markers of the past feelings ‘here’ and ‘now’, which brings the past experience close to the moment of the telling.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union was linked with comments on Finland’s possible membership in the European Community and its effect on neutrality. Tuulikki Ukkola (Liberal Party) called for a proper discussion on different versions of neutrality and, eventually, whether it was needed at all. According to her, there was no certainty whether EC membership could possibly be combined with neutrality, as it was not known how the EC would develop or form its security policies. Speaking in November 1991, she also pointed out that there was no knowledge about what kind of a state would emerge out of the Soviet Union, the state that was falling apart (Tuulikki Ukkola, 14 November 1991). A more traditional view of Finland’s future international position was voiced by a left-wing opponent of European integration, Esko Seppänen (Left Alliance). His point was that, even after the collapse of the USSR, its successor state would be a great power and therefore Finland’s best interest was to maintain its neutrality and stay out of great power conflicts (Esko Seppänen, 16 January 1992). Along the same lines, Mirja Ryynänen (Centre Party, member of the FAC) stated that the consequences of the breakdown of the Soviet Union formed the biggest risk factor in Europe, which spoke for a continuation of Finnish neutrality (Mirja Ryynänen, 16 January 1992). However, even a more proactive role in the framework of European integration was welcomed in the aftermath of the USSR. Tarja Halonen (Social Democratic Party), former minister and later the president of Finland (2000–2012), argued that Finland should apply for EC membership. Still, according to her, it was important that future visions of the EC would be scrutinized during the negotiations, since the collapse of the Soviet Union had altered the great power alignments (Tarja Halonen, 16 January 1992). More straightforwardly, the Social Democrat Marjatta Vehkaoja suggested that Finland should urgently apply for EC membership just because of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and also because Sweden and Austria were applying (Marjatta Vehkaoja, 16 January 1992).

European integration was debated also as a question of the continuation of dependency at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some MPs made an association between the dependency of Finland on the USSR and its further dependency on the EC if Finland became a member state. Heli Astala (Left Alliance) claimed that, in an empire like the Soviet Union, the peoples had a constitutional right to secede from the union, whereas an empire like the EC had no regulations on how a separation would be possible (Heli Astala, 19 November 1991). The Centre Party MP Mirja Ryynänen, also an opponent of EC integration, argued that, while the USSR collapsed because of a centralized rule, the same would follow if Brussels became its Western alternative (Mirja Ryynänen, 16 January 1992). Even the right-wing moderate Jouni Särkijärvi (National Coalition Party) made this association and pointed out the centralized nature of both the Soviet Union and the EU (Jouni Särkijärvi, 16 January 1992). As demonstrated below, the rhetorical association between the USSR and the EU became long-running in hindsight retellings of the collapse.

Another topic explicitly linked with the collapse of the USSR in Finnish parliamentary debates during the last months of the Soviet Union and immediately after its collapse was a concern over the social, economic and environmental situation in the USSR and Russia. It triggered both humanitarian and security-motivated comments. The former chief inspector and famous investigator of economic corruption, Sulo Aittoniemi of Finnish Rural Party, remarked that the Soviet Union and some Eastern European countries showed signs of developing countries with possible consequences like famine, environmental problems, and economic collapse (Sulo Aittoniemi, 19 November 1991). Markku Laukkanen speculated in his question to the Minister of Home Affairs, Mauri Pekkarinen, that the situation in the Soviet Union might lead to hunger-based migration to Finland (Markku Laukkanen, Centre Party, 19 December 1991).

The interviews from that period did not discuss the ongoing situation as often as it was addressed in the parliament. This is also to be expected, since the interviews are in the format of a biographical account. The most notable example of an interpretation of the events still partly unfolding is by Veikko Vennamo, the founder and former leader of the Finnish Rural Party. As noted in earlier research, Vennamo frequently accentuated his role in politics, in particular by claiming from hindsight that he had already known what was to happen before it did.⁴⁵ In the interview on 2 September 1992, he criticizes former president Kekkonen, his favourite enemy portrayed in his memoirs and the interview.⁴⁶ He claims Kekkonen and himself often argued over future predictions. According to Vennamo, all of Kekkonen’s predictions failed and those made by himself turned out to be correct. Vennamo gives an example: ‘He [Kekkonen] for example believed that communism would invade the whole world. He believed that the Soviet Union would dominate Europe and would overrule, and I disagreed’. (Veikko Vennamo, 2 September 1992) This is an early example of blatant use of hindsight for rhetorical purposes. By appropriating Kekkonen’s voice in a prediction obviously false in the light of the situation of the telling, Vennamo can by contrast claim superiority for his own view and early foresight.

The examples above make it evident that the collapse of the Soviet Union quickly became a turning point, a decisive and meaningful event in history. Even though it has been pointed out that historical change actually takes place as gradual transformation and turning points are always retrospective constructions,⁴⁷ several politicians addressed the collapse as a particular turning point while the happenings were still unfolding. Particularly the demise of the socialistic economy was proclaimed and celebrated very early on. The self-appointed victorious side did not widely celebrate ‘liberalism’ as the winning ideology at the time of the unfolding collapse of the USSR.⁴⁸ But no one defended ‘communism’ or ‘real socialism’, either, and even the meaning of ‘socialism’ was under dispute, not least because some centrist and right-wing MPs claimed that ‘the collapse of real socialism’ would also mean the collapse of socialism (e.g. Tuure Junnila, National Coalition Party, 12 June 1990). Conversely, some Social Democrats in particular argued that socialism was far from dead as there were different kinds of socialism (e.g. Matti Vähänäkki, 30 November 1989; Arja Alho, 15 March 1990).

The synchronicity of the quest for stability and the notion of several crises around 1991 can be described as a situation in which some key concepts both preserved their old meanings and were reinterpreted to be useful in the present context and in the future. At that time, ‘communism’ and ‘real socialism’ seemed to have no future at all. The concept of neutrality is an example of the need to recycle the traditionally used concept to express the political position of Finland. The consequent retellings of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a case in point of such an innovative rhetorical redescription.

Retelling the past event

As mentioned earlier in this paper, previous research has often downplayed the very collapse of the Soviet Union, although there are some detailed studies on the subject. One reason for this is the fact that multiple temporal layers – to use Reinhart Koselleck’s terms – were present at the same time.⁴⁹ The most obvious explanation of the emphasis on continuity is that while the Soviet Union disappeared, Russia did not. Regardless of its momentary weakness, no political leader or analyst in Finland can have ignored the fact that Russia was still a great power. Furthermore, as we have seen, the uncertainty caused by the social, economic and political crisis in Russia in the 1990s spoke for the continuation of Finnish foreign policy rather than against it. Consequently, it has been argued that neutrality and small state realism in Finnish foreign policy did not disappear right away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, although the emphasis on neutrality was soon replaced by the policy of non-alignment and, after Finland’s membership in the EU in 1995, by an adjustment to a common EU foreign policy.⁵⁰

Retellings of the event soon exhibit meta-level reflection, as initial reactions to the collapse are commented on only a few years later. Mikko Elo from the Social Democratic Party praised the foreign affairs leadership for acting responsibly right after the collapse in spite of some overly optimistic statements made in the parliament. In September 1995 (12 September) Elo dramatized what had happened a few years before: ‘A statement was made here, according to which we are going to join NATO now and everything is possible’. This representation of an initial reaction to the collapse brings together two experiential timepoints: the enthusiasm soon after the collapse and an ironic comment on it at the time of the telling.

A similar representation vividly dramatizing initial reactions occurs in the early 2000s as well. This time it addresses the theme of capitalism overcoming socialism, prevalent in comments at the time of the event. Erkki Pulliainen (Green Party), in a discussion on changing the corporation law in 2003 (11 December), uses the former leader of the National Coalition Party as an example when he claims that the market economy was actually a short-lived phenomenon after the Soviet collapse. He recalls February 1992 and the first assembly of the parliament since the collapse in December 1991. ‘[…] I remember it vividly: late in the evening, like now, MP Pertti Salolainen stood up and came here at the podium and declared that the market economy has won, the planned economy has lost […]’. Pulliainen builds a continuum from the Soviet planned economy to market economy and further to something he claims is no longer a market economy but rather a craze for market options. By treating the Soviet economy as one end of the continuum, Pulliainen suggests that the other end of the same continuum – economy as it was when he was speaking – is as extreme and potentially dangerous. In order to add rhetorical force to his argument, Pulliainen imitated the alleged past declaration of victory having happened in the very same place ‘here at the podium’, thus bringing together experience at the times of the told and the telling.

Whereas Elo and Pulliainen took a somewhat ironic stance on the optimism in the early reactions, Alexander Stubb (Coalition Party, former PM and party leader, as well as a former EU scholar) painted a nostalgic portrait of it in 2017 (31 May). He mentions growing up during 1989 and the end of the Cold War, in a world where the market economy, liberal democracy and globalization won over the Soviet Union, authoritarian regimes, planned economy and communism. Nostalgically, Stubb says ‘At the time, we lived in a kind of an era of hope’ and goes on to summarize: ‘Some people said that history is going to end, all countries will become liberal democracies, but unfortunately that did not happen’. The voice of those predicting the end of history is appropriated here with a sympathetic stance towards the prediction that, unfortunately, turned out to be too optimistic. Stubb was referring to Fukuyama’s famous claim about the end of history and the victory of liberal democracy. His speech can also be taken as an illustrative example of the change of times in regard to general political developments in Europe, as it was made at the time when the relationship between the EU (and the West) and Russia had been in decline for some time, accentuated in the Ukraine crisis in 2014, and when right-wing populist parties had become a real political factor in most European countries.⁵¹

Similarly to the tellings of the unfolding event, many denounced Soviet communism when referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but none defended it. This is a sign of the epochal change that took place when the USSR disappeared. Socialism was still a more complicated matter, as it was common to speak about socialism when someone else meant communism. The former Social Democrat Arja Ojala defended socialism in her interview by stating that it was not socialism that collapsed but the Soviet Union (Arja Ojala, 24 May 2004). On the other hand, the former member of the Communist Party Mikko Kuoppa (Left Alliance) said in his interview that ‘of course, the collapse and the disintegration of the Soviet Union took away, among many, the belief in socialism and socialist thinking’. (Mikko Kuoppa, 20 May 2015) Making an analytical distinction between socialism and communism was nevertheless quite rare, but parliamentary speeches manifest cases where the collapse of ‘real socialism’ in the USSR is retold as an explanation of the economic crisis in Finland in the early 1990s, with the intent of avoiding criticism towards the economic policy of a later government (Toimi Kankaanniemi, Finnish Christian Union, 17 November 1999). In general, it was common to use ideological labels as rhetorical devices in speeches that were not related to ideologies. An important exception in this regard happened when the statement of the European Council in 2006 condemned the crimes of communism, which provoked Ben Zyskowicz (National Coalition Party) to claim that communism had not previously been treated equally with Nazism and neo-Nazism (8 May 2007).

As indicated above, Finland’s membership in the EU is a recurrent point of reference when the collapse of the Soviet Union was retold, and also the most frequent use of the collapse as an analogy with the present. The features of the USSR are used to characterize today’s ties to the EU. Hannes Manninen from the Centre Party draws the analogy in 2002 (24 September): ‘[…] the Soviet Union was small in bureaucracy compared to this EU bureaucracy, and it does bug the Finnish farmers that they thought the Soviet Union had dissolved, but ended up in a new Über Soviet Union’. This analogy between the Soviet Union and the European Union is particularly frequent in the talk of the Finns Party members. In 2016 (14 December) Laura Huhtasaari used the analogy and a wordplay based on it to predict the collapse of the EU: ‘The Soviet Union [Neuvostoliitto] did dissolve in its time, soon will dissolve the Euro Union [Eurostoliitto]’. Olli Immonen made a claim about similar destinies of the EU and the USSR in 2012 (13 June). It was particularly the party leader Timo Soini who coined these expressions claiming the analogy, making use of it as many as eight times in our corpus between 2003 and 2008. On one of those occasions the analogy is openly discussed and predictions of the future made based on it. This draws a comment on hindsight from a colleague: ‘It [EU] will assume a super state policy. It will become completely congested. But nobody criticized the Soviet Union, either, our elite praised these talks until the very end, and then one day everything collapsed. But I wasn’t commended then, either, but people said just you talk. (MP Kallio: I wonder if this is hindsight now?)’ (Timo Soini, 21 June 2005) Disnarration of ‘nobody’ but Soini criticizing the Soviet Union in the past draws an analogy between Soini now criticizing the EU and his lone correct prediction in the past. In this rhetorically created scenario Soini is the prophet who should be heard now since he is right again.

The rhetorical association between the USSR and the EU addressed Finland’s political dependence on a foreign great power. It could easily be specified to target the question of Finnish security dependence. In 2002, the former minister from the 1980s and the leader of the Finnish Communist Party in 1988–1990, Jarmo Wahlström (Left Alliance) assessed the process that resulted in Finland applying for EU membership and the part played in it by the Soviet collapse. He stated that many at the time thought that national security was the reason why Finland needed to apply for the membership, and that this view has also prevailed in the afterthought. Regardless, he remembers that at the time nobody dared to say that as the reason for the application. ‘One point in the minds of many surely was that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the uncertainty caused by it in a way pushes us towards European alliances for security reasons. I did not see it in that way, though, but considered it a separate issue, so that what happened in the Soviet Union cannot inevitably lead to a situation where Finland would not still have many options for taking care of financial and commercial relations. I never had the sort of a reaction that for goodness’ sake, now we need to get to the safety of the European Union soon or anything like that.’ (Jarmo Wahlström, 22 October 2002). The quotation starts with a juxtaposition of what Wahlström thought and what he claims was the prevailing opinion. The last sentence gives a condensed representation of the thoughts of the majority, who grew scared and sought safety from the EU. This downplays the role of the Soviet collapse as a reason for the EU membership application and rhetorically positions the speaker as one of those who allegedly managed to keep their heads cool in the changing circumstances of the past.

One way of claiming a continuity between Finland’s relationship with the USSR and that with the EU was to describe it as ‘Finlandization’.⁵² This kind of rhetoric was frequent in the early 1990s, when Finland’s negotiation on the membership in the EC/EU was topical. The argument was most often against it (e.g. Timo Korva, Centre Party, 23 October 1992; Tuija Pykäläinen, Green Party, 14 November 1994), but at times the membership was also used as a means of getting away from ‘Finlandization’. (Tuulikki Ukkola, Liberal Party, 31 May 1994) Only few of the references to ‘Finlandization’ overtly mentioned the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite the term having always emerged from Finland’s dependence on the USSR. In particular, Sami Savio (Finns Party) noted that after the dissolution of the USSR the appreciation of the war veterans no longer suffered from the silence that had characterized the era of Finlandization (Sami Savio, Finns Party, 18 October 2016). Earlier, Green Party’s Irina Krohn spoke about Finnish wartime history and the effects of rhetorical retelling on the ways in which it had been discussed during the Cold War era, although without mentioning ‘Finlandization’. She summed up the political atmosphere before the Soviet breakdown, stating how ‘we’ rejoiced over the trade with the Soviet Union brought about by the FCMA treaty but at the same time accepted not telling history as it happened: ‘Then those people who knew what happened there at the Eastern border – they saw what happened there at the Eastern border – were forced to pay perhaps the greatest price for that Soviet lie in which the Finnish society lived until the collapse of the Soviet Union and in which, you could say, in some ways we still live by some elements’. (Irina Krohn, 10 October 2002) This quotation highlights the experiences of the civilians who suffered from guerrilla attacks during the war, because they lived close to the border, and afterwards were forced to keep silent about that. The collective lie forcing that group to oppress their experiences is emphasized by the use of the first person plural ‘we’ and carries a guilt with it that is still partially ongoing at the time of the telling. Krohn goes on to claim these people were traumatized by the experience and should therefore be eligible for compensation. By using the pronoun ‘we’ in connection with the claim for guilt, Krohn extends the past experience towards the present day, at the same time suggesting that the trauma of those with the painful experience also lives on.

Conclusions

We have traced the moulding and modifying of the event of the Soviet Union’s collapse at the time it took place and in later interpretations. The collapse was, undoubtedly, a global turning point in international relations and had a great impact on how ideologies such as communism and socialism were understood. Even though Finland never belonged to the Soviet bloc, it experienced many profound changes. This study has shown that empirical attention to the interpretations of the event at all time points – foretellings, tellings and retellings – helps to diversify the understanding of the event, now that it has been partially reshaped by some later developments such as Finland’s path to the EU. What is more, the fragments where parliamentarians address the event at different points of time help to better comprehend the narrative means used to grasp the unexpected while it was unfolding and to utilize the past for current purposes during the decades to come. Again, a connection between the Soviet Union and the European Union can be seen, as the most frequent use of the Soviet collapse in recent decades has been the drawing of analogies between the two.

As emphasized in conceptual history, the experience of living through the past as it happens should be studied together with subsequent uses of the past. Our study exposes variation in the event of the Soviet collapse over time. Already in 1990 Members of Parliament interpreted the changes in the USSR as the ending of ideological dualism and the Cold War. Epochal change soon became noticed in the first tellings of the unfolding event, and, for example, some right-wing politicians were eager to celebrate the demise of communism and real socialism and the victory of the free market economy. Hypotheses of the great change unfolding and even full portrayals of the event already in a conclusion occurred early on. This calls for a re-evaluation of the theoretical claims that turning points could only be retrospectively identified and that narratives always entail hindsight; general past experience can be used to model ongoing happenings into an event with meaning and significance. These kinds of early predictions were often expressed with hesitation, but sometimes offered as clear foresight. Not surprisingly, hindsight was often used to claim the speaker’s alleged foresight during past events.

Narrative analysis is useful in interpreting the two temporal points of experience, that of living through the event and that of narrating it at a later point in time. Our analysis reveals the use of narrative features such as hypotheticality and indirect evaluation that help uncover viewpoints otherwise not as easily detected. For example, in official early comments, such as the president’s speech, the overt message was an aim at continuity. Yet the disnarrated created a hypothetical future for the audience to imagine, with huge changes from anything experienced before. In the retellings of the event in our corpus, the experience at the time of the told event was often mediated with the use of several narrative voices and positions. Past experience was evoked by mixing together deictic markers such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ referring to past and present. Linguistic imitation of the past voice was also used to appropriate the position of those living through the past events. Both ironic and nostalgic stances towards the early reactions were taken in later retellings.

The changes in circumstance also brought along rapid changes in the use of ideological concepts. Our study shows that when the breakdown of the Soviet Union was discussed in the Finnish parliament, no one defended communism. At the same time, quite many addressed socialism in a manner that aimed at saving it from the decline of communism. The victorious ideology in our corpus was not claimed to be liberalism, as spelt out in some influential scholarly accounts, but rather something more diffuse that emphasized the importance of market economy and political freedoms. These, in turn, were not necessarily associated with the Finnish circumstances.

The geopolitical change was far more important than the ideological one. Finland’s international position changed from a (partly self-appointed) neutrality to a membership in the European Union, in which neutrality was no longer a self-evident option. Many of the analysed fragments address the question of how to end the Cold War relationship with the USSR and then how to build up a new one with Russia. This question was not separate from Finland’s integration into the European Community and later the European Union. Finland’s EU membership has also sustained the rhetoric of the Soviet Union in Finnish parliamentary talk in the contexts of imperial dependency and national sovereignty.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant no. 308792/326512, Voices of Democracy 2017–2022, PI Matti Hyvärinen.

Notes on contributors

Mari Hatavara

Mari Hatavara is Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare. Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Her research interests include interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. She specializes in the analysis of narrative voices across fictional and non-fictional narrative environments. During her professorship at Tampere University (since 2009), Hatavara has worked at Ohio State University Project Narrative (2019), York University Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies (2017), Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (2016) and The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (2011). Hatavara is coeditor of The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (2015), and special issues on Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts (Style 2017), Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media (Partial Answers 2019) and Real Fictions. Fictionality, Factuality and Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Storytelling (Narrative Inquiry 2019).

Jussi Kurunmäki

Jussi Kurunmäki, Doctor of Social Sciences and Docent in Political Science and Political History, is Adjunct Professor at the University of Eastern Finland. His main fields of research include conceptual history studies of parliamentary democratization and political ideologies, as well as the theories of conceptual history. Kurunmäki is coeditor of the Finnish anthology of conceptual history Käsitteet liikkeessä (Concepts in Motion) (2003) and the volumes Die Zeit, Geschichte und Politik; Time, History and Politics: Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Reinhart Koselleck (2003), Rhetorics of Nordic Democracy (2010), Democracy in Modern Europe: A Conceptual History (2018), as well as the special issue on the political rhetoric of isms in Journal of Political Ideologies (2018). Kurunmäki is the chairperson of the international network Concepta – International Research Seminars in Conceptual History and Political Thought and a member of the executive board of The History of Concepts Group (HCG).

Mykola Andrushchenko

Mykola Andrushchenko is a doctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on the analysis of Finnish political language use by statistical and machine learning methods.

Notes

1. See Koivisto, Witness to History; Blomberg, Vakauden kaipuu.

2. Bruner, Acts of Meaning; Hyvärinen, “Expectations and Experientiality”.

3. Herman, Story Logic, 48–50; Browse and Hatavara, “I Can Tell”; Björninen et al., “Narrative as Social Action”.

4. Kansikas, “Dismantling the Soviet Security”; Uutela, ‘“The End of Finlandization”’; Rentola, “When to Move?”.

5. Forsberg and Pursiainen, “Crisis Decision-Making,” 245.

6. Aho, 1991 Mustien joutsenten vuosi, 7.

7. See, e.g. Browning, “Coming Home”; Pesu, “Kun pienvaltiorealismin hegemonia murtui”; Forsberg and Pesu, “The “Finlandization” of Finland”.

8. See, e.g. Blomberg, Vakauden kaipuu, 120–129.

9. Koselleck, “A Response to Comments”; Chatman, Story and Discourse; Freeman, “Narrative as a Mode”.

10. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 22–23.

11. See, e.g. Koselleck, Futures Past.

12. Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited.

13. Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, 335.

14. Ibid., 12–13, 28–30.

15. Hühn, “Event and Eventfulness,” 159–160.

16. Matthews, “What is an Historical Event?” 208, 215.

17. Jay, “Historical Explanation,” 564–569.

18. Koselleck, “A Response to Comments,” 66–67.

19. Koselleck, Futures Past, 105.

20. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 150–157, 173–179.

21. Herman, Story Logic.

22. Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric.

23. Björninen et al., “Narrative as Social Action”.

24. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 11–14, 143–144.

25. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 106–107.

26. Palonen, The Politics of Parliamentary.

27. Polletta, “Storytelling in Politics”.

28. Haverinen et al., “Building the Essential Resources”.

29. Andrushchenko et al., “Using Parsed and Annotated,” 3–5.

30. Brown, “Perestroika and the End,” 1.

31. Maier, “What Have We Learned,” 254.

32. Brzezinski, The Grand Failure [The author’s dating of the book is August 1988]; Fukuyama, “The End of History?”; Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution.

33. Freeman, “Narrative as a Mode,” 27–29.

34. See Jyränki, “Kansanedustuslaitos ja valtiosääntö,” 81–177; Raunio, “Semi-presidentialism,” 301–321; Ihalainen et al., “Parliament as a Conceptual,” 1–16.

35. See Rentola, “When to Move?” 272–274.

36. Quoted in Blomberg, Vakauden kaipuu, 80, 97.

37. Prince, “The Disnarrated,” 5–6; Lipson Freed, “What Can’t We,” 201.

38. Hyvärinen, “Expectations and Experientiality,” 17–21.

39. Blomberg, Vakauden kaipuu, 97.

40. Hatavara and Mildorf, “Hybrid Fictionality,” 401, 405–406; Browse and Hatavara, “‘I Can Tell,” 343–346.

41. For early speculations on the end of the Soviet Union in the press, see, e.g. the journalist Eero Silvasti’s article in the weekly magazine Suomen Kuvalehti (8 July 1988) and the article by Timothy Garton Ash in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (16 February 1990).

42. Rentola, “When to Move?” 277–280.

43. Kansikas, “Dismantling the Soviet Security,” 95–98.

44. Cf. Nünning and Sicks, “Turning Points,” 9–10.

45. Hatavara and Teräs, “Minä, Kekkonen ja,” 87.

46. Ibid., 80.

47. Nünning and Sicks, “Turning Points,” 1–2.

48. Cf. Fukuyama, “The End of History?”.

49. Koselleck, Sediments of Time.

50. See, e.g. Aunesluoma and Rainio-Niemi, “Neutrality as Identity?,” 75–78; Törnudd, “Ties that Bind”.

51. For a similar recent scholarly reassessment, see, e.g. Krastev and Holmes, The Light that Failed.

52. See also Forsberg and Pesu, “The “Finlandization” of Finland,” 486.