Histories of Europe’s Communist Parties often focus on forces like Italy’s PCI or France’s PCF. But one of the West’s most important Communist Parties in the Cold War period has received curiously little attention. This despite the fact that the Communist Party of Finland (SKP) was a mass party that vied for power in a country bordering the USSR. The biggest Communist Party in Scandinavia, in 1980 the SKP had over 51,000 members in a country of under five million people.

From the outset, the SKP’s history was closely intertwined with Finland’s Soviet neighbor. The party was founded in 1918 in the wake of a bloody civil war sparked by the Russian Revolution. Immediately banned, the exile-led SKP nonetheless continued to operate in Finland through front organizations. In the 1930s these structures were largely destroyed by the repression and far-right terror in Finland, coupled with Stalinist purges which struck against its Soviet-based leadership.

Legalized after World War II, the party made a remarkable recovery, truly becoming a mass force in a democratic society. The SKP created a broader Finnish People’s Democratic League (SKDL), which amassed a quarter of the vote and played a leading role in the workers’ movement for decades, while also repeatedly joining coalition governments. However, the party’s contradictions and changing material conditions in Finland eventually caused division and, finally, collapse.