"Open the window to Europe, and if you can't get it opened, then smash it," Czar Peter the Great is supposed to have said.
In the room of the Kremlin in Moscow where Stalin does his work, there is a portrait of Peter the Great on the wall, together with portraits of Lenin and Karl Marz.
Soviet Russia seems to be carrying out the order of Peter the Great.
Finland and the Baltic States appear as the first links in Russian expansion around the Baltic—this "Russian sea," as Peter himself said. Is Stalin following the line originally drawn by this imperialistically-minded Czar of all the Russians The Finns, in their long history, have known six centuries of Swedish rule and more than a century under the Russian Czars. About twenty years ago, following civil war and revolution, they declared their- independence, and this was recognized by Russia In the intervening years they have attained a stable government and achieved some degree of prosperity.
Unrelated to any other European race, except the Estonians and the Mpgyars (Hungarians), the Finns appear to have migrated into Europe from the area between the Urals and the Volga. One branch of this people turned southward and settled in the Hungarian Plain. The other migrated northward to Estonia, and thence to Finland in the first century of the Christian era. They were a race of hunters and trappers, with a tribal organization, and in this desolate region of lakes, forests, and marshes, with its severe climate and thin soil, it was centuries before settlements were established.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.