Suomi eilen ja tänään 'Finland, Yesterday and Today' was written as a manuscript by Kaisa Häkkinen and Seppo Zetterberg for translation into numerous minority Finno-Ugric languages in Russia. In the late 1990s, the M.A. Castrén Society commissioned this manuscript as a information package for providing minority-language information on Finnish history, culture and statehood in 1995. One of the ideas behind this project was to provide primary information that was not available through any other channel – give minority language a meaningful use as a source of new information. Thus, translations were made into the minority languages Komi-Zyrian, Udmurt, Meadow Mari, Erzya and Moksha. The translators were linguists who had spent time in Finland and therefore had personal experience of Finland as well. All of the translations including a Russian translation were publish in Russia in 1997.

2023