Upton A. The Finnish Revolution 1917-1918

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. — 608 p. — (The Nordic Series. Vol. 3). — ISBN: 0-8166-0905-5.The reader may think that this is a large book and I make no apology for that. The importance and intrinsic interest of the subject matter fully justifies a comprehensive treatment. My reasons for embarking on the project were necessarily highly personal: Any foreigner who chooses to work on Finnish history is likely to possess a special combination of incentives and qualifications that in the nature of things does not occur often. It seemed to me that, being possessed of such a combination, I had some obligation to give a non-Finnish readership access to this significant and littleknown episode in modern European history. I would not claim to have exhausted the subject even now; to my knowledge further relevant materials exist that I have not had the opportunity to examine. But the book has already consumed what time could be spared from my full-time university teaching duties over a ten-year period and a line must be drawn somewhere. It is my hope that having opened the subject up, others may be stimulated to probe further into it.