Finland without WWI

I for one like to imagine a world without WWI, and I also hope of making a TL about this one day.

Over to topic, one idea I've toyed with is Finland somehow becoming independent from the Russian Empire, but then I realised that that would likely encourage other minorities like the Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians? etc. to demand autonomy, if not, full independence.

So then I started to wonder, what is the future gonna be for Finland in a world sans WWI?
And could they ever become independent without the Russian Empire collapsing due to encouraging Russia's other minorities?

EDIT: Shit, shit, I put it in Before 1900. can someone move it please?
 
I for one like to imagine a world without WWI, and I also hope of making a TL about this one day.

Over to topic, one idea I've toyed with is Finland somehow becoming independent from the Russian Empire, but then I realised that that would likely encourage other minorities like the Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians? etc. to demand autonomy, if not, full independence.

So then I started to wonder, what is the future gonna be for Finland in a world sans WWI?
And could they ever become independent without the Russian Empire collapsing due to encouraging Russia's other minorities?

EDIT: Shit, shit, I put it in Before 1900. can someone move it please?

Unlikely: the Russian core of the Empire was industrializing rapidly, and was producing the infrastructural connections to the outlying regions and going through the military reforms to produce an army that could easily crush scattered insurrections by individually weak Nationalist forces. The increasing dependence of/integration into the core Russian economy would also make any push for independence more dicey, and the Ceasero-Papist Czar Nicky knows this. Baring the internal breakdown of central authority within Russia proper, Finnish independence is a wild dream
 
The Russian government would not grant a autonomy to a minority of 2.5 million out of a population of over 130 million. The Russianization of Finland would continue.
 
Unlikely: the Russian core of the Empire was industrializing rapidly, and was producing the infrastructural connections to the outlying regions and going through the military reforms to produce an army that could easily crush scattered insurrections by individually weak Nationalist forces. The increasing dependence of/integration into the core Russian economy would also make any push for independence more dicey, and the Ceasero-Papist Czar Nicky knows this. Baring the internal breakdown of central authority within Russia proper, Finnish independence is a wild dream

This is basically what I think, too. If the Russian Empire continues to develop and industrialize and generally more or less keeps its shit together, the very best Finland can hope for is the kind of autonomy it had just before the Russification policies started in 1899. Of course there is the utopian best case scenario for a federalizing Russia that is a constitutional monarchy, or that has peacefully deposed the Romanovs, that could offer Finland even deeper autonomy.

But then in the worst case we could see deepening Russification in the 20th century, with the end point in a place where the Grand Duchy loses all autonomy, suffers successive waves of repression against Finnish culture, ethnicity and identity, and at some point will have ethnic Russians as the majority in the Finnish areas, with Finns as a dwindling minority that will eventually be just a footnote in history books.

Finnish independence after 1809 would have always required some form of breakdown of the Russian Empire, for internal or external reasons, or for both as IOTL. After Finland became a part of the Russian Empire, it was more likely that it would continually be a part of a Russian system. Independence for Finland after that was pretty unlikely. That is one of the main reasons I tend to call the OTL a Finn-wank, one of the best possible worlds for the Finnish people and nation.
 
Last edited:
Top