| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Esko Salminen. The Silenced Media: The Propaganda War between Russia and the West in Northern Europe. Translated by Jyri Kokkonen. New York: St. Martin's. 1999. Pp. xii, 198. $65.00.

This English translation of a book originally published in Finnish in 1996 is a rare treat to those who are interested in the phenomenon of Finlandization but cannot master the Finnish language. Esko Salminen sets out to explore "how the Soviet Union succeeded in silencing and manipulating the media of [Finland] for many years, to serve its own ends" (p. ix). By manipulating security considerations and, in particular, the centrality of Russo-Finnish relations to Finland's postwar foreign policy, the Kremlin managed, Salminen argues, to curtail free speech in this Nordic country. And they did so with the help of the Finns themselves. In particular, longtime president Urho Kekkonen (1956–1981) was instrumental in creating a climate of self-censorship, in which the Finnish media sanitized news about Soviet atrocities in the name of maintaining a working relationship with the USSR. 1

To his credit, the author uses a variety of sources: archival materials in Finland and Russia, memoirs, interviews, and published accounts. With numerous examples—including the coverage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's fate in the Finnish media—Salminen makes a convincing case about the restrictions to free speech that existed in Cold War Finland. He also describes how "dissidents," including the prize-winning political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen, came under strong criticism in Kekkonen's Finland. Only after his retirement in 1981 and the ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev to Soviet leadership in 1985 did the Finnish media gradually begin to move closer to "Western" standards of journalistic freedom without governmental pressure. . . .

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