Vol. XIII (2007), no 20 - The International Newsletter of Communist ...

The International Newletter of Communist Studies Online XIII (2007), no 20 138
propagate new communist methods but rather considered the old local traditions to represent
communist thinking. After 1945 its attitude has been similar.
Kansan Tahto has defended the economic interests of the workers in Northern Finland in
particular. The newspaper was born at the same moment as the forest workers in Lapland had
their first large strikes, and it sided with the forest workers against the forest companies.
Though Kansan Tahto did not initially agree with the local forest workers about their forms of
organisations, it has demanded improvement of their working conditions and salaries from the
1920s up to the 1970s.
Concern for the subsistence of the working people in Northern Finland got its first strong
expressions in Kansan Tahto as a result of the food shortage during World War I. Besides the
workers in towns, the newspaper has expressed its concern for the smallholders in Northern
Finland. In its first years Kansan Tahto wanted to get land for tenants and farm workers.
According to it, the land reforms after the Civil War were failures, and the newspaper
demanded more land for those who had bought a small farm. After 1945 the newspaper spoke
in strong words for additional land for the owners of small holdings formed after the war. In
the late 1950s it went as far as to claim that the agricultural policy would depopulate the
countryside in Northern Finland. It was perhaps because of the large migration from country
to towns and from northern Finland to Sweden and Southern Finland that Kansan Tahto’s
interest in small-holders weakened in the mid-1960s.
Seasonal unemployment was an acute problem for the smallholder - forest worker in
Northern Finland from the beginning of the 20 th century. Kansan Tahto took the question on
its pages during World War I, but it was only in the 1920s that the paper reminded it to be a
social-political problem which needed solving. At first the newspaper demanded work or
assistance for the unemployed. From the 1940s it opposed sending of the unemployed to road
construction works far from their homes.
After the Second World War Kansan Tahto had a very optimistic attitude to the rise of
Northern Finland by means of industrialisation. The newspaper was among the initiators of
the movements to get new industrial plants in Northern Finland and contributed to the
foundation of large chemical, iron and steel factories in the area between the 1950s and
1970s.
Though economic questions were of importance for Kansan Tahto, it also wanted to raise
independent and civilised workers. After 1907 that indicated publication of classics of world
literature. Kansan Tahto favoured such Russian and Scandinavian realists as Leo Tolstoy,
Maxim Gorky, Fedor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg but also Jack London.
After the Civil War cultural questions were not regarded as important, though Revontulet
(Northern Lights), a literary weekly published in 1926-30, published classics and articles of
the local workers. After 1945 the cultural issues did not get as much attention, though the
SKDL put a strong stress on them.
The years 1965-68 were the high point of cultural questions in Kansan Tahto. It was the first
and only time it also had a special cultural editor. Thus the newspaper also wanted to be
involved in breaking the old truths created after the Civil War and establishing a new kind of
values, norms and habits. That phase was, however, not of long duration, and the newspaper
took defending positions as the bourgeoisie started its counterattack at the turn of the
decade.