I have lots of non-finns at my work who speak very little finnish. They seem to do fine. On the other hand integration to finnish society might be bit of a challenge unless you happen to find a sweetheart here.

"or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over"

Most finns _don't_ speak Swedish, or it's very limited. It's a second language in law only because Finland was part of sweden from 1300 - 1800. There is nothing too politically awkward to gloss over. Finland was not conquered by sweden. We basically were swedes for 500 years, with a weird local language that no civilized person spoke.

Historically Finland could have been part of either a feudal society that became inclusive (Sweden) or that became stereotypically exclusive (Russia). As part of Sweden Finland was among the forerunners of countries that got a modern legislation and administration in the 1600's and strong cultural ties to the rest of europe. During this time the elite spoke Swedish.

The political interaction with Russia during this time was handled mostly by military means.

Finland's population rose from 50,000 to 800,000. The population of the entire country was less than the population in global biggest cities (a trend that continues to this day).

There was not much input to scientific or cultural development of the world as most energies were spent in surviving winters without famine and evading capture into slavery by invading various eastern entrepreneurs. Industrialism took it's first faltering steps, but there was not much capital to invest (a trend that continues to this day).

Then came Napoleon, who wanted to pressure Sweden to join into an embargo against England. At this point France was allied with Russia (this would change eventually) but for now Czar Alexander in 1808 was happy to oblige.

The initial plan was not to take control of Finland, just to occupy it until Sweden acquiesced. Things happened, and Alexander decided to keep it. But what to do with it?

As it turned out, there were two trends working to the benefit of the finnish polity. First, the czar was pretty sure sweden would eventually like their dominion back. Secondly, this idea of small nation states as buffers between big players was taking hold among the great nations (Belgium was one of these as well a few decades later). And there were no resources that the czar would really like. The country was foreign, there were no feudal lords the czar could command, the whole area was controlled in a totally unrussian way. Sure, he could put his boot down and russify the lot, but all of the things discussed above lead to the fact that instead Alexander accepted a plan that Finland would become a semi-autonomous duchy with it's own constitution and money. This would have been quite an impossible idea a century later but now it felt as an excellent idea.

There was only one problem.

There was no finnish national sentiment to speak of. And you can't have a strong autonomous nation state without a sense of nationality. At this point all educated people spoke swedish. Basically, it was an area ripe to return to sweden.

So, czar happily supported and encouraged the few individuals that thought that Finland should have it's own national spirit (the sentiment of nationalities was already spreading in europe and was not totally foreign in finland). So, in effect, they machined a campaign that it was effectively _cool_ to be finnish. Swedes changes their names to finnish in droves.

At this time, finnish language as a written tongue started to develop as well. It had more or less stagnated until now, but as finnishness was becoming a thing, surely something should be written in it as well.

So that is the reason there are no great literary works in Finnish before the early 19th century. There was no literary tradition, and everyone who would have been capable of producing great works wrote in swedish and other european languages any way.

So now we have a country with more or less modern administration, a national sentiment and a language. But it's still dirt poor.

This would be remedied eventually. The russian governors recognized that their domain was mostly unindustrialized backwater, and they heavily supported industrialization efforts. The funny thing is, that on the other side of the border the russian state did not support extensive industrialization, but on the finnish side it actually supported it quite a lot.

In effect, russian domination gave finland it's national identity, it's governing body, it's industry and supported it's literary and artistic efforts. Finland effectively was a dominion under czar's direct authority, and finn's loved their czar.

This love changed to something else in the late 19th century as the russian state started a strong russification push in all of it's dominions. But finns were still more or less content as their life went on. The finnish elite is strongly part of the russian high life - St. Petersburg has a large finnish population and finnish artisans produce goods for the wealthy. For example more than few of the Faberge eggs were made by Finnish artisans.

Come 1917, the czar dies, the house of Romanoff is no more, and the finns discover to their horror that legally they are no longer a duchy under russia as the way it was legally written was that finland was under czar's domain and not part of the russian state. Legally, it seems they are now on their own. Horror changes to realizing a possibility of an actual nationhood. So, a few politicians travel to Lenin to kindly point out that legally they are no longer part of russia, and, ahem, they would be very greatfull if the bolsheviks could awknowledge this. Lenin can do whatever he likes with them, but frankly, he has bigger political problems at hand (he will have for a while as the russian civil war will rage for years) and so for some reason or other he let's the silly finnish bourgeoise have their cute little state. The communists will anyway take over soon as the masses will rise in rebellion.

Except, they won't. There's a bloody civil war in 1918, finns settle it, continue existence as a parlamentarian state and... that's where it all comes from.

In II. world war they block soviet invasion with strong support from Nazi germany (yes, they were basically in league with the nazis but the alternative would have ranged from soviet opression to total annihilation - had he won Stalin could have basically destroyed every finn if he felt like it. He killed ten times more soviet people as an afterthought as there were finns in total.).

So, basically, Finland is country filled with people who for the most of civilized world history have died of starvation and have been hunted as slaves. Only in the last 150 years the country emerged from a rural backwater into a fairly succesfull nation state.

This history explains quite a lot of the typical finnish egalitarian sentiment. We've died of starvation. We've been sold as slaves. There's been no rich local lords since everyone has been equally miserable. There's been no big cities. Most of the urbanization has happened in the last 50 years. So, we're a bunch of people who's families are mostly country yokels, who's families have been quite poor, but who really like to read and write, do maths and enjoy cool gadgets.

I think the main reason Finland is pretty successful is it's centuries long history of inclusive institutions, and intentional investment into human capital (i.e. education). This history is very strongly linked with the swedish state and language, in one way or another, hence, there is nothing impolite about it.

Sorry about the long post.