Russians see Finland positively: Survey

The majority of the Russian people have a positive attitude towards Finland, finds a survey commissioned by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Finland in Moscow.

The survey was commissioned in summer 2017 to investigate the attitudes of Russians towards Finland.

More than 68 per cent of the Russian respondents under the survey showed a positive or very positive attitude towards Finland, a government press release said.

The survey was conducted by the Russian Levada Centre to which a total of 1,600 people from different parts of Russia responded. This was the first time a survey of this kind has been conducted in Russia.

According to the survey findings, more than two out of three respondents have a positive or very positive attitude towards Finland, while only 10 per cent of the respondents had a negative or very negative attitude towards Finland.

Especially the young with a high level of education and those with a good income had a positive attitude towards Finland. The results indicated that people living in Moscow have a particularly positive attitude towards Finland (88 per cent).

The respondents also considered the relations between Finland and Russia good. Of the respondents, 68 per cent considered the relations to be normal, good, peaceful, or friendly and 16 per cent as cold or tense. Only 0.2 per cent of the respondents chose “hostile” as an answer. Among other Western countries, Russians have an equally positive attitude towards, for example, Sweden as they have towards Finland.

According to the survey, news featured in the Russian media on family law issues in Finland, where one of the parties is from Russia, has not impaired the image of Finland among Russians to any appreciable extent.

The results indicate that only one in 10 Russians have seen a lot on child custody clashes in the mass media. A quarter of respondents have occasionally heard about the topic, and more than half have never heard about it.

The survey also investigated into the extent to which Russians trust the information they receive from the mass media about child custody clashes. Of the respondents, 17 per cent said they trust the information they have received from the Russian media, 0.9 per cent said it is not easy to form an objective opinion on cases of this kind, and 8.0 per cent said they do not trust news published on the topic in the Russian media.

The share of respondents with a negative attitude towards Finland among those who had watched news about family clashes was only a few percentage points higher than among those who had not heard about the matter. However, considering the survey’s margin of error, the two types of responds have only a small difference.

According to the survey, the image held by Russians of Finland is most affected by TV programmes about Finland, schools and textbooks, films, the internet, newspapers, and periodicals and literature.

When asked about the things that first come to mind when thinking about Finland, the respondents mentioned the sauna, its northern location, Helsinki, nature and a high standard of living. When asked about the image of Finnish society, most of the respondents mentioned prosperity, dignity, modernity and innovativeness, democracy, a welfare state, and freedom.

The survey also had questions about Finland’s security policy position. Almost a half of the respondents considered Finland a neutral (35 per cent) or non-allied (13 per cent) country. Of the respondents, 6.0 per cent thought Finland is a member of NATO.

When asked about the events or actions that could impair their attitude towards Finland, most of the respondents mentioned Finland’s NATO membership (26 per cent) or stricter sanctions imposed by the EU on Russia (20 per cent).

Of the respondents, 40 per cent were generally aware of the Winter War and almost one in 10 of them said they know a lot about it. Approximately one-third of the Russians had never heard about the Winter War. A clear majority of the respondents were of the opinion that the wars between Finland and the Soviet Union do not influence their attitudes towards Finland. Only 8 per cent considered the wars as a negative influence on the image they have about Finland.

Russians were also asked if they would like to move to Finland if they could. Of the respondents, 12 per cent said they would like to move to Finland and 79 per cent said they are not interested in moving to Finland.