In his essay ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, the late Yale political scientist Samuel Huntington pointed out that Finland bestrides one of the world’s key cultural fault lines, dividing the two civilisations of Christianity and Orthodoxy. In a sense, the Finns are forever torn between the history they share with Christian Europe thanks to the Swedish influence – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and so on – and that of the Orthodox world, with its tsarist and communist systems.
