Rural (In)Justice: Smallholding as Social Policy in a Modernizing Finland, from 1945 to the 1960s

Abstract

This chapter opens a perspective on welfare state-building in an agrarian society. Using extracts from lower court records, Ville Erkkilä scrutinizes post-Second World War land reform in Finland, its legal consequences, and the experiences it entailed. The chapter first analyzes the redistribution of land as an interaction between the traditional rural lifestyle based on the ownership of land and Finnish welfare state-building. Second, the chapter focuses on the lower court’s changing self-perception and administration of justice. In matters concerning the newly resettled independent smallholders, the courts not only balanced between judicial tradition and national legal policy in a radically altered environment but also confirmed the principles defining the Finnish countryside for decades to come.

Introduction

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Academy of Finland-funded Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, funding decision number 312154.

The early twentieth-century social and economic history of the small countries between the former Russian and German Empires was characterized by large-scale projects of redistributing landed property. From Finland to the Balkan Peninsula, the newly independent nation states attempted to modernize their societies and redefine their economic constitutions by means of land reforms.¹ After the Second World War, all the countries of the “Green zone” or “fringe regions” implemented yet another massive land redistribution. This time, it was in most cases labeled as a socialist project, although in reality these land reforms had very much to do with resettling the vast number of inner-state refugees and reinstating the structures of peacetime society in a region that had been the eastern warfront of the battle for Europe.²

In the Finnish case, the post-Second World War reconstruction meant building the infrastructure for nationally essential industry and reforming the public administration and legal system to be more in line with its Scandinavian neighbors.³ At the same time, it was pivotal to secure a peaceful and predictable societal order and as clearly as possible choose a different path from the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe. However, to carry out the reconstruction project, the Finnish government selected the same set of old tools that were also used in the now-socialist fringe regions: The government once again resettled the landless (and homeless) part of the population on small plots of undeveloped land. The idea was that the people themselves—when necessary—would clear these small plots for cultivation from forest or peat land, which they were more than willing to do.⁴ In total, some 400,000 war veterans and Karelian evacuees were resettled after the Second World War to the mostly agrarian municipalities of Finland. Hence, the massive redistribution of landed property that the government implemented immediately after the Second World War was at the very center of the Finnish reconstruction process.

The land reform in itself was a political and administrative project, but the many unintended consequences of that radical and far-reaching act were dealt with in courtrooms, and it is there where the inevitable clash between the rural lifestyle and the drastic, top-down project of the land reform was verbalized. The state’s intention—as laid down in the legislation as well as expressed in the official interpretation of the law—was to modernize the country in a harmonious, restrained way, and at the same time extend its social political imperatives also to issues concerning agricultural production.⁵ Yet with its approach, the state in practice countered the old fundamental conception in which small-scale farming constituted the essence of Finland and allegedly also provided a roadmap for the future development of Finnish society. As a result, there was a continuing contradiction between the rural understanding of justice—the perpetual right to land—and the official endeavor of building a welfare state.

The data for my case study come from the court records of the district of Janakkala in southern Finland from 1945 to the early 1960s.⁶ The chapter scrutinizes the attitudes and sentiments of the rural population that derived from a clear-cut demographic change in post-Second World War Finland. By 1950, the resettled war veterans and evacuees had increased the population of many agrarian municipalities near Janakkala, along with the whole of southern Finland, by 10–15 percent. Yet already in 1960, the small municipalities had lost a good part of their population or barely maintained the same level of inhabitants, whereas small cities in rural areas had experienced a growth of 30–50 percent in just a decade.⁷ The sudden influx of people into the agricultural municipalities after the war and equally dramatic migration away from them during the 1950s bears witness to a drastic change in the everyday reality of the Finnish countryside that significantly altered the economic and legal circumstances defining the rural experience.

In this study, I will combine a quantitative and qualitative approach for extracting the experience of the rural population. I will outline the framework and structures that affected the people living in the countryside. By concentrating on a few individual court cases within the structural change indicated by the initial quantitative analysis, I am able to deepen my investigation to the level of rural experience. I will argue that the land reform—although an already familiar political practice in Finland for tackling an unprecedented and overwhelming social problem, and in line with the similar endeavors actualized throughout the other Eastern European fringe regions—in the post-Second World War circumstances brought about consequences that effectively separated Finnish society from the Eastern European trajectory.

The land reform started a process in which the previous ideal of a country characterized by a multitude of smallholdings dissolved. Along with demographic and economic development, the conditions that defined the legal relations of the smallholders to the state changed, but at the same time, the land reform significantly affected the revamping of the self-understanding of the regional local courts vis-à-vis state governance. Yet, amid the favorable progress in Finnish society concerning the rule of law and the welfare state, which becomes evident in the larger trends of the changing countryside, for many rural people the land reform in contrast produced experiences of blatant injustice.

The Land Reform

The Finnish Land Acquisition Act of 1945 was based on the expropriation and resettlement laws drafted in the early 1940s, in the aftermath of the Winter War. The sweeping scale of the post-Second World War reform was not, however, what the resettlement committees of the early 1940s had in mind or could have foreseen.⁸ The vast number of people who needed to be immediately resettled in 1945 grossly exceeded the scenario for which the government had been prepared. The implementation of the Land Acquisition Act was entrusted to the Department of Land Settlement under the Ministry of Agriculture. On the local level, the execution of the law was carried out by land redemption/expropriation boards (147 of them) and settlement boards, which comprised local administrators, agricultural experts, and a few lay members representing both the recipients and surrenders of land.⁹ Although, in the last instance, it was possible to appeal to the courts in disputes regarding expropriation or receiving land, very few ultimately did.

That the redistribution of land itself does not surface in the local court records is, however, not a sign of an uncontroversial process. In fact, it reveals more about the administrative nature of the actual redistribution in which the contribution of the judicial system was minor. The reform altered the property regime of the Finnish countryside, and in many municipalities exacerbated and highlighted the problems that generally occur in rural communities. Hence, the land reform was actualized in the lower court records with a delay and, at first, in civil cases: in proceedings dealing with defamation and petty assaults, when quarrels between the newcomers and the native residents got out of hand; in self-help cases, when the natives decided to correct some wrongs of the redistribution process by personally re-confiscating property that once was theirs; and in trials concerning on the one hand the hostility of the natives to relinquish their land to usufruct, and, on the other hand, the exceeding of the newcomers of their commonsense right to use other people’s property in order to take care of their own holdings.¹⁰

Although the nature of the disputes between the settlers and the natives as well as their reflection in the court records was no different from a “normal” agricultural setting, there is no denying that many felt they had been treated unjustly in the process. By looking at the court records, it is clear that the tensions were real, and especially many of the native residents did not seem to think highly of the evacuees. “I have no problem with letting other people use my road. It is just those people. They destroy and mess up everything,” explained a tenant from Hausjärvi on his decision to block his road from other users.¹¹ But, in the end, the reasons for disputes between the newcomers and the natives were vague, and for the most part people were too busy with their everyday subsistence to take their quarrels to the national level. In that sense, the land reform fulfilled one of its purposes: to provide social tranquility by giving people meaningful work in cultivating their plots.

Despite the fact that the massive land reform did not cause an eruption of immediate social conflicts, in the long run the reform backfired due to (at least) two major reasons: the slow transition of the Finnish national economy toward the market-based European model of agricultural production, and the limits of environmental resilience. The initial plan of smallholding Finland did not come to fruition, but instead it devolved into unpredicted demographic development and rapid urbanization. For some this provided options for climbing the social ladder, while for others it meant debt and narrowed life choices.

The above-mentioned “environmental resilience” refers to the defining character of Finnish agriculture: fighting against the rising water table, or, in other words, draining the swamp. Most of the used arable land in 1945 had been claimed from peatland—by hand—during the late nineteenth century and in the interwar period.¹² This not only meant that in 1945 the existing arable land was vulnerable to any changes in annual rainfall, but also that the remaining uncultivated land was not ideally fit for agricultural purposes.¹³ On average, and in Janakkala, a smallholder used a majority of his working hours for tasks whose purpose was to ensure that the soil was dry enough and hence fertile.¹⁴ However, just one unusually rainy year was enough to undo the hard work of many years of soil improvements. Heavy rain washed the fertilizer (if one could afford it) off the fields and raised the water table, which in turn made the soil too acidic for grain. During the war, most of the soil improvement measures—despite the heroic efforts of the women who were left alone to take care of the farming—were naturally left undone. In addition, 1942 and 1943 were very rainy years.¹⁵

As a result, many of the war veterans returned to a plot that was basically barren. This fit in very badly with the government’s rationing program.¹⁶ “It is just plain hopeless,” commented a farmer who had sewed 10 hl of seeds on his land and acquired a harvest size of the same 10 hl.¹⁷ Yet, the land—even unfertile land—was one’s own, and often any allusions by the officials that a prolonged failure to deliver the goods required by the law on rationing would result in losing one’s farm were met with hostility.¹⁸

The technical development of the 1950s and 1960s did ease some aspects: Once tractors became commonplace and the fertilizers more advanced, farmers did not have to spend so much time on the routine tasks of keeping the soil dry and fertile.¹⁹ This did not mean that the fight was over, however, or that modernization brought only blessings to the smallholders. For example, the farmers in Janakkala were engaged in at least two bitter legal battles against the electric companies. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government assigned both the production of the additional energy that the growing infrastructure necessitated and the drawing of the new power lines to local electric companies operating hydroelectric plants. However, the (small) dams these local electric companies built for producing electricity in effect flooded the fields by the waterways in many places in Janakkala.²⁰

The resulting legal battles are illuminating for two reasons. First, even the established farmer families struggled when an unprecedented external factor affected the annual cycle of keeping the land fertile. For the “new farmers” whose plots were located in terrain less favorable for farming, the results were more drastic. Second, the farmers had to resort to the courts in order to get the dam plans canceled and receive some compensation for the damage caused. The public administration—that is, the state—could have regulated the issue in a more determined manner, but it chose not to. This decision estranged the farmers from the state and clearly demonstrated that when larger economic interests collided with the source of livelihood of the smallholders, administrative appeals would not bring forth favorable rulings from the perspective of the rural population.²¹

Dashing Hopes: Debt, Economic Hardship, and Bankruptcies

It was not that the government failed to realize that many of the small plots were unviable. Especially in the eastern parts of the country, the initial idea was that the smallholders would gain only a portion of their income from farming and a good part would be covered by working for the forestry companies. Nevertheless, deliberately or inadvertently, the government did not take into account that the economic conditions for the resettlement policy were completely different from those of the 1920s or 1930s.²² In short, the demands that the global economic conditions brought to the Finnish project of modernization meant that the days of self-subsistence small plots was over. A cost-effective national agricultural sector would have necessitated more productive methods of farming, beyond what the tiny smallholdings were able to deliver.²³

The government’s plan to gain an economically sustainable society through some kind of inflated smallholding reserve (and there were rational, although outdated, economic theories that justified the choice) can be explained in several ways, most of which relate to the state of emergency and political conditions.²⁴ Yet, it must have been obvious to the majority of the political and economic elite that the land reform was a maneuver for no more than a couple of decades. The fact alone that most of the smallholdings started with a debt that they could not in any circumstances manage determined this course of life as temporary.

The initial economic principle of the land reform—the capital needed in establishing the new farms was provided or at least guaranteed by the public sector, but in the form of a loan—covered the foundational defects of the reform and postponed the unavoidable outcome to the following decades. In addition to redistributing land to the landless, the government had provided a “home building loan” (kodinperustamislaina) to young couples from 1945 onwards. It was supposed to help (very) young couples to settle down and start a family, which in 1940s public opinion represented the foundation of a healthy nation. However, Finland could not afford a direct government transfer, nor was the idea of an unconditional gift popular in a public atmosphere that demanded sacrifices and a pioneering spirit from young adults. Instead, the benefit materialized in the form of a five-year loan that had to be paid back in the early years of the 1950s (the couples received a year’s extension to the repayment period for each child born after taking out the loan).²⁵

Without a doubt, the loan helped some young couples start their family life, but for some it just postponed the inevitable fact that the countryside and especially the majority of the new smallholdings could not provide an economically viable subsistence. Hence, it is no coincidence that the economic conditions of some single households worsened in the early years of the 1950s. In Janakkala already in 1952, the number of debt cases and defaults was at a high level in comparison to the 1940s and late 1930s, which obviously were not “ordinary” years, but in any case—and especially for the younger generation—the economic challenges were unprecedented.²⁶ Nevertheless, the number of bankruptcies and insolvency cases did not escalate in the district of Janakkala in the early 1950s, although the number of individual debt cases deriving from bonds, shop invoices, rental issues, real estate transactions, and so on was significantly high. This was due to the variety of career and earning options that the slowly modernizing country offered in cities and larger municipalities (kauppala), despite the filibustering effect of the land reform.²⁷

The second spike of debt cases was in 1960. This time the increased number of minor defaults was accompanied by a drastic growth in insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings. Paradoxically, the peak of insolvency proceedings can also be tracked back to the government: in the vast majority of the bankruptcy cases (over 85 percent), the creditor was the state treasury.²⁸ The government’s unprecedented willingness to use legal means to collect its receivables, and equally unprecedented reluctance to find creative solutions to prevent its citizens from falling into insolvency, is an indication of a paradigm shift in the ideology of social policy. The government was no longer ready to push forward the idea of the “smallholding-Finland” by whatever means necessary. A visible change in the postwar agricultural support policy—a change that did not, however, dissolve the wider dilemma of economically unviable agriculture—was the 1956 Agricultural Income Act. By means of the new law, the government attempted to support viable farming, which many interpreted as a political decision to abandon the smallholders.²⁹

In the insolvency and debt hearings, the over-indebted smallholders expressed their bitterness toward the “state” and placed their hope in their networks of local people. Most no longer had any belief in the sanctity of the traditional rural lifestyle, if there ever was such a common sentiment. The brighter future—according to the statements—a place where one could possibly grasp a meaningful life again, was to be found in cities, mostly in the nearby towns of Lahti, Hämeenlinna, and Tampere.³⁰

Lower Courts Regulating Rural Life: Changing Rural Self-Determination

From the perspective of Rechtsstaat (or state-under-law), pre-Second World War Finland was an agricultural society in many respects similar to the other Eastern European “fringe regions.” The Eastern European regimes shared a past as provinces in the early twentieth-century European Empires, an ambiguous relation to Germany, and a national path with a fumbling beginning of civic society, characterized by authoritarian attempts and the weak independence of the judicial system.³¹ After the Second World War, however, the anti-communist political elite of Finland and the courts had a common enemy: the (alleged) internal division of the nation state. It seemed that the Soviet Union—factually or presumably—would use this internal weakness and rupture Finnish society by dragging Finland into the group of East Central European satellite states loyal to Kremlin dictates.

Hence, Finland used the penal power of the judicial system in conjunction with a redistribution of landed property to pacify the countryside. Paradoxically, Finland shared this quest with the socialist regimes of Central Eastern Europe.³² Accordingly, the total crime rate in post-Second World War Finland followed a similar pattern to most of the Eastern European regimes: There was a spike in the overall number of crimes immediately after the war, which gradually leveled off during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The rapid increase in criminal activity has been traditionally explained as a symptom of the difficult adaption to peacetime society and as an outcome of the government’s tightened grip, which aimed at rooting out any (counter-)revolutionary ideas from the public sphere.³³ However, in rural Finland, the intensified and legally pursued control by the state concerned the existing legal norms on rationing and hunting, and the hegemonic interpretation of the criminal law regarding substance use (hereafter Hunting, Rationing, and Substance use cases, i.e. HRS proceedings). These norms were an extension of the public regulation into a sphere that previously had been considered “private” or at least municipal, and they had their roots in the state-building of the interwar period and in the state of emergency brought about by the war.³⁴

Thus, in Janakkala after the Second World War, as in the rural areas in general, there was no significant spike in “other” forms of criminal activity, which included assault, homicide, and theft (see Fig. 13.1).³⁵ Based on the statistics, it is safe to maintain that the provinces were not especially unsettled. Rather, the number of criminal proceedings derives from the high number of HRS cases. It is also in this sphere—in the further development of the legal policy regarding the HRS crimes—where the parting of ways between Finland and other fringe regions is evident. Whereas immediately after the Second World War the number of HRS convictions was approximately two-thirds of all criminal convictions in Janakkala, by the mid-1950s, the share of the HRS cases in the total crime rate was much smaller, at around 40 percent. In addition, in the period 1945–1954, the nature of alcohol-related crime changed significantly. In 1945, the convictions were mostly a consequence of offenses against public order and in connection to “asocial” behavior (toimettomuus),³⁶ but in 1954, most of the convictions for “public drunkenness” were linked to traffic offenses.³⁷ The change regarding the phenomenon of HRS crime within just a decade is significant, and it reveals the transformed shape of state control.

Fig. 13.1

The total number of criminal convictions per year at the municipal court of Loppi/Renko, Finland, in 1945–1954, the number of alcohol-related crimes, offenses involving rationing laws, illicit hunting, and other crimes specified (Archives of the court records of the municipal court of Loppi, Ca1:71–76 (1945–1950); archives of the renovated court records of district of Janakkala, KO a:86–91(1951–1956), dJ NAHa)

In 1945, however, close state control was a matter of fact, and it extended to the administration of justice by the local courts. In the immediate years after the war, judicial power effectively allied with the state in safeguarding the societal order and implementing the aggressive modernization program. Yet, at the same time, it interfered with the very core of the rural experience. For a state trying to survive in the postwar environment, regulating agricultural production, looking after natural resources, and confiscating private property were vital, but the apt justifications did not remove the fact that during the postwar years of personal reconstruction, many smallholders felt that the state effectively blocked their prospects of building a rural life. As one smallholder stated in a hearing concerning an offense relating to rationing regulations:

My calves are my future. For now, I don’t have what you demand from me. How could I? I have many of them but they are still young and weak. But in a couple of years they will be better, and I can provide everything you ask and more. If I was to surrender the amount of meat the rationing-office requires from me, I would need to slaughter almost all of them, and I would be no farmer anymore, nor could I ever become one again.³⁸

The political aims behind the legislation on HRS cases were pursued by a blunt and penal-centered administration of justice. The lower courts were not officially supposed to investigate cases of non-compliance with the provisions on rationing, but to merely confirm the decisions of the regional rationing offices.³⁹ In practice, the system was completely blind to temporal variation, to differences in personal conditions, and to the challenges the war had brought about for the rural population: trauma, sickness, and depression. The fines for alcohol-related offenses were particularly high and accumulated easily. Failure to pay these fines resulted in incarceration. Never were there more fine-defaulters incarcerated in postwar Finland than during the years of reconstruction. In 1960, approximately every fifth prisoner was incarcerated because of unpaid fines.⁴⁰ The local forest rangers (riistapoliisi) worked particularly meticulously. If the accused had used dynamite for fishing, shot a squirrel, or just taken a walk with a rifle in the forest, a conviction was an inescapable consequence. The forest rangers had the right to shoot unleashed dogs during the closed season, which they often did, many times in the yards of their owners.⁴¹

In the regimes across Eastern Europe during the years immediately following the end of the war, the lower courts were quick to interpret that the ambiguous will of the legislator (the state) was equivalent to legal rule in situations and cases where the law was vague or incomplete. This was an understandable exaggeration both from the perspective of keeping society together (Finland) and revolutionizing it (socialist regimes), but for the rural population in both cases, it was less fortunate.⁴² The Eastern European governments shared a common starting point and faced similar perennial problems in modernizing their rural areas, but the means they adopted later—after the dust had settled—in their respective projects were fundamentally different from each other.

In Finland, the perspective of public governance—the legislation and the adjudication of the courts alike—slowly moved from punitive to preventive and corrective in a more complex manner in the late 1950s and early 1960s.⁴³ This “welfaring” of the use of coercive state power meant that social institutions other than courts and penitentiaries—such as social services—were deployed, and rather than using punishments as corrective measures, the emphasis of the disciplinary power of the state slowly moved toward social and medical care and preventive education.⁴⁴ The first steps of that change affected the sphere of rural HRS crime already in the 1950s. Although in Finland the government continued to steer and regulate agricultural production extensively by subsidies for the most part of the twentieth century, in late 1950 there was no more need for a system of comprehensive rationing of agricultural products. The “asocial” ceased to constitute an existential threat in a society with a corporatively regulated labor market. In addition, the administration of natural resources (forests and game) was gradually outsourced to local and rural networks: a key aspect of the subsequent rural identity of relative self-determination and independence. The forestry associations and hunting clubs were an extension of state power while following their own internal rules and watching over local interests.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of this chapter, there is also a second, more prominent reason. The courts distanced themselves from the role assigned to them by the government, and from a self-perception that before the Second World War had defined their place within the nation state.⁴⁵ For example, the municipal court of Loppi took a clear stance against the national regulation on rationing and stretched its own principles on legal certainty and impartiality in a case concerning a rationing offense in 1947. The accused was a woman—who I refer to here as Virtanen—whose smallholder husband had died during the war, leaving the widow as the sole owner of a small plot. In the interrogation report, a local police officer wrote:

4 under-aged kids, the oldest one 7 and the youngest (twins) 6 months. Livelihood looked inadequate. Virtanen had been very sick for about a year, for which reason in hospital 4 times. During those stays other people had taken care of the home, mother and sister had looked after the house whenever they had the chance to do so. […] No one had helped Virtanen in exchange for money, so she had to pay with the harvest [hay], and give away a lot more than the actual value of the work would have required. Yet, the local men did the harvesting only after they had completed the tasks in their own fields and did not really store the hay. As a result, Virtanen’s whole harvest was smaller than the amount she was supposed to surrender.⁴⁶

In its decision, the rationing office had ruled that the value of the surrender, which Virtanen had failed to deliver, was to be confiscated (with interest) from Virtanen. In addition, the office demanded a sanction fee for the non-compliance with the provision of rationing.⁴⁷

The court overruled the decision of the rationing office, acquitted Virtanen of all charges, and publicly lectured an official from the rationing office present at the proceedings. At the beginning of the next assizes, the district prosecutor read a statement in which the district judiciary outlined its new approach on rationing cases: Instead of merely confirming the decisions of the rationing office, the court—like some other district courts before it, the prosecutor emphasized—would in the future concentrate on examining the intentionality of the deed (of breaking the regulations on rationing) and then adjudicate accordingly.⁴⁸

The historical meaning of the shift discussed above becomes concrete if we again compare Finland to its early twentieth-century context, the fringe regions of Eastern Europe. In the immediate years of postwar reconstruction, and from the point of view of the rule of law or division of societal power, Finland was not much different from its East Central European cousins. In Finland, the “state of emergency” and the patriotic determination of the reform covered the fact that for a while, political steering displaced all other branches of societal decision-making, and from the individual point of view, that sometimes produced experiences of injustice.

During the period of “reconstruction” in Finland that criminologists place between 1945 and 1960—and in contrast to the development taking place in East Central Europe—the lower courts started to emphasize their position as independent institutions in the national framework. In the context of the post-Second World War reconstruction, this meant that the judicial system steadily distanced itself from contemporary political aims and state power, and instead emphasized its litigating and adjudicating role in society, its authority deriving from legal tradition, and expertise in interpreting fundamental societal norms and agreements. That the Finnish lower courts deliberately began to fend off any ideas of serving as rubber stamp institutions to political steering is of course due to the fact that the political regime allowed the legal system to distance itself and keep its own independence. Vice versa, in East Central Europe, the lower courts underwent a drastic political “renewal” immediately after the battles had ceased.⁴⁹

Conclusion

In the agrarian society of Finland in 1945, building a welfare state was inevitably entangled with agricultural and housing policies. In the Finnish countryside, this reconstruction process with all its legal, economic, and social dimensions was actualized in the transition brought about by the post-Second World War land reform. The land reform was from the very beginning conditioned by the urgency for formative social reforms. The clear motives behind the reform were the aims of pacifying the countryside and providing enough manpower and raw material for the forest industry.

However, the obstacles provided by the ecological resilience of the countryside and the global economy in effect ruined the plan of turning the nation into a safe haven of small plots. The land left from the previous settling campaigns was to a large extent unfit for providing a source of principal livelihood, and the subsistence of many smallholdings was initially tied to additional income provided by forestry. The shaky premises of the new plots were further challenged by a meager national economy that entailed dogmatically enforced austerity measures such as rationing. The vast public projects of modernizing energy production trampled on the smallholders’ source of livelihood, and the government’s choice of providing initial capital for the new plots by means of individual loans before moving to a policy that supported lucrative farming in the 1950s generated insurmountable obstacles for many smallholders. In practice, the land reform resembled more a quick fix rather than a long-term development project. Many individual life stories consisted of a narrowed horizon of possibilities beset with debt and bitterness against the state.

The outcome of the post-Second World War Finnish land reform is difficult to simplify in black-and-white terms. On the positive side, Finland managed to provide opportunities for upward social mobility for its citizens—and it did so exceptionally well in comparison to the other former fringe regions, for example. On the negative side, most of the clearing for cultivation was done in vain, and the countryside could not offer a primary source of subsistence for many war veterans and evacuees, or for their children.⁵⁰

In 1945, any lived experience of the state looking after, supporting, and taking care of its citizens diminished in the shadow of the experience of the recent Second World War.⁵¹ The shared memory of the war constituted an imagined community of Finns, and for the most part this reminiscence—an experience of war—was enough to justify the sacrifices the rural people had to make in the 1940s and 1950s.⁵² The state was unable to fulfill its promise of a steady rural life for most of the evacuees and war veterans, but it did secure a legal way to pursue justice in the changing rural society and labored in providing a safety net for the marginalized—a task too challenging for the rural community alone, as the harsh years of the reconstruction showed. According to the court records used in this study, a grass-roots, slow revolution in the self-understanding of the Finnish courts started to take shape in the final years of the 1940s. The records from Janakkala indicate that the starting point for that development was the stand that the courts took in the legal dilemma regarding the limits of state power in rationing, adjudicating against the state, and siding with the smallholders. The courts prioritized rural experience over the imperative of allowing a wide mandate to the state and its administration.

The generation that appeared in the primary material of this study to a large degree found their place in rural Finland, mostly not in the small municipalities to which the “new farmers” initially were assigned, but in the nearby small towns and their suburbs. Ultimately, it was their children who abandoned rural Finland all together. The smallholdings might have barely provided for a family when the collective was ready to keep the standards of living low, but it was not enough for two or three generations. Furthermore, the government carried out accelerated modernization by appealing to and leaning on the common denominator among the population: the war experience. For the people who found no promised smallholder haven in rural Finland and instead got into trouble with the tight regulations that characterized Cold War Finnish society, the power of that experience faded away, and there was nothing left that could have connected the loyalties of the people and the national cause.