Thoughts about the past and the present

 Policy warning. My readers may have noticed that I don't like the enthusiasm with which Finnish genetic research is looking for Finns' ethnic roots in Russia. Unlike language, which has only one root, the genetic heritage is multi-rooted. Genetically, the inhabitants of Finland are a mixture of the southern (Estonia) and eastern (Karelia, Vepsä) Baltic Finno-Ugrians, Scandinavians of different time periods, Sami and increasingly other ethnic groups. These groups, except for the last 30 years of immigration, have been intermingling for hundreds of years. This is forgotten, as was also the case in the Estonian study, which I discussed in my previous post. Geneticists in Finland and Estonia are ideologically very single-minded in their desire to find a multidisciplinary solution by simplifying things. Of course, it is necessary to find out where our language comes from, and linguistics studies that.

Things get more complicated when the Russian view of Finns' roots is added to the previous one. I am unusually well aware that, according to the Russian point of view, the Finno-Ugric peoples living in Russia are called Finns, and Finns as one of them. In reality, the linguistic and ancient genetic roots of the Baltic Finns formed a reasonably homogenous entity that differed from other Finno-Ugric people. Baltic Finnic speakers diverged from other Finno-Ugric language speakers already 1500 years before the Russia as a state was created and formed their own genetic pool.  The political problems between Russia and the West will last, and the ideology of Finnish researchers about the origin of Finns in Russia may weaken the status of the Finno-Ugric people of Russia in their own homeland. We should see the difference between the past and the present, we should not create historical illusions that create problems in the development of communities.