ABSTRACT
Although the first volume of Capital had already been published as a series of pamphlets in 1913-18, a large amount of Finnish translations of Marx and Engels’ works were published in Moscow by Progress publishers. Obviously without this ‘Soviet support’ it would not have been financially possible to issue the central corpus of Marx and Engels’ works in a relatively minor language like Finnish. The ‘Introduction’ and ‘Forms which Precede Capitalist Production’ are included in the fourth of the six volumes of Marx and Engels’ selected writings. The Finnish translation of the Grundrisse followed Progress publishers’ new edition of Marx’s Capital in three volumes. In 1975 Antero Tiusanen, a renowned translator of Marx, translated the ‘Introduction’ for the publishing house of the Finnish Communist Party, Kansankulttuuri, but a full translation was not to come for another decade, when in 1986 Progress publishers finally printed it in Moscow in two volumes, translated from the MEGA2
edition of 1976-81, entitled Vuosien 1857-58 taloudelliset käsikirjoitukset (Grundrisse) [The Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, Grundrisse] with an extensive commentary from the Russian edition. Initially Progress publishers were reluctant to publish it but thanks to Petteri Baer, the leader of the Kansankulttuuri at the time, who reassured them that the Grundrisse would sell, they decided to print 1,700 copies of it. This might seem an exaggerated amount for Finland nowadays, but volume three of Capital had already sold 9,000 copies.
