The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  The 1939–40 Winter War against the Soviets is, for instance, often cited as Finland’s crowning sisu moment. Though it is true the Finnish army demonstrated astounding bravery, tenacity and fortitude in repelling the invasion of a Soviet military force more than three times its strength, and though they did this with virtually no help from Sweden, essentially the Finns still kind of, you know . . . lost. As courageous and indefatigable as they unquestionably were, the Mannerheim Line counted for little in the end. Arguably even more regrettable than the territory and reparations they ultimately ceded as a result of the defeat, was that their loss to Russia drove the ever-pragmatic Finns straight into the arms of the Germans. The Finns went on to fight against the Soviets, arm-in-arm with the Nazis, for three years.

  It is easy to judge in retrospect, and we all understand that the Finns were fighting on the side they believed was best able to help maintain their freedom, but siding with the most thoroughly evil political system in modern history doesn’t look that great from a historical perspective.

  I am not the first person to wonder whether, because of this and other historic scars (perhaps most painful of all, the Civil War of 1918), the Finns actually might hate themselves. Finnish novelist Eila Pennanen concluded much the same in his celebrated 1956 novel, Mongolit.

  I thought it was worth floating my ‘Finnish men drink to soothe egos fractured by centuries of foreign rule and military loss’ theory to Roman Schatz.

  He wasn’t that taken by it.

  ‘I think that’s a wimpish excuse served on a silver platter, frankly,’ he said. ‘Finnish men didn’t start drinking because they felt ashamed of World War Two, Finnish men are damned proud about how this little country managed to defend itself against the Germans and Russians – and even one shot was fired against the British you know, somewhere in Lapland, I think. No, Finnish men were drinking long before that. Listen, if you sit here in November, all alone, it’s dark and grey, you feel like having a drink. Then you feel a little better, and you think maybe if I have another drink I’ll feel even better. In Finland you drink to get rid of all the shit from the week, to zero yourself and have a big convulsion and puke everything out and not remember it the next morning.’

  Schatz has a radical solution to the Finnish drinking epidemic: ‘Alcohol should be completely deregulated. If you did that you would have a hundred thousand people dead, that is the sober truth, but after that you would have the viable part of the population who could actually deal with it.’ He was joking. Sort of. ‘I am a liberalist so I believe that some people have the right to drink themselves to oblivion.’

  He also mentioned something called the ‘warrior gene’, which had been identified in the Finnish DNA, and cast their relationship to alcohol in a slightly different light. I looked it up. In fact it’s an enzyme, Monoamine Oxidase A, which works together with serotonin. According to research carried out by the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse, there does seem to be some link between Monoamine Oxidase A levels, alcohol consumption and impulsive, violent behaviour. Research has shown that Finns have higher levels of the enzyme than other people and, apparently, it doesn’t mix well with alcohol; inebriation seems to bring out the warrior in some Finns, making them even more up for it. It was a depiction that Heikki Aittokoski, recognised.

  ‘I do notice that when I am out at a party, having a good time, at some point, somewhere around eleven-thirty in the evening, people start behaving aggressively,’ he told me one day over lunch close to his office at Helsingin Sanomat. ‘They get that warrior gene going, they start behaving like idiots, throwing punches, wrestling – and I am talking about “respectable” people – and for some reason I don’t quite understand, it is accepted. The next day people laugh, “Did you see so and so?” and then forget about it. In the States they’d have an intervention and send them off to rehab. Here it’s “That was kind of funny, he was pretty fucked up,” but no more than that. We tend to accept behaviour you wouldn’t accept in Sweden.’

  The English actor Neil Hardwick, who has lived in Finland for forty years, agreed. ‘Alcohol doesn’t make them pleasant people, it makes them aggressive,’ he told me. ‘They are very serious and pragmatic about it: we work during the week, but now it’s Friday, we’re going to get drunk.’

  Like Schatz, Hardwick ascribed the Finns’ drinking at least in part to the weather and the winter darkness, or kaamos: ‘February to June is just so long, and nothing happens. It’s awful. Spring is so late and it really is very dark for large parts of the year. You never turn your lights off in the winter. You don’t get used to it. I’ve tried vitamin D supplements and used a sunlamp, but it actually gets worse the longer you are here. Every year I wonder if I can get through it. I think that is why there is this sense that when you do get the chance to take your pleasure, you take it, for God’s sake, because the summer is so short and the moments when you can enjoy yourself are few and far between. I think that explains that sort of intense hedonism.’

  Sadly for them, around the world the Finns are defined by this ‘intense hedonism’ and the carnage that can ensue. It is not an ideal image for a progressive, modern democracy to project and so, in recent years, the kinds of people whose job it is to worry about Finland’s international reputation have been trying to change it. During a five-year process, the Finnish government consulted everyone from the head of Nokia to schoolteachers on how they saw themselves and how they wished to be perceived by the world. The result was a ‘brand vision’ entitled, A Mission for Finland, which attempted to position Finland as the problem-solver of the world, plus an ad campaign emphasising the Finns’ honesty and reliability, featuring the slogan ‘Is there a Finn on board?’ – their version of ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ the inference being that you can always rely on a Finn.

  By chance I was introduced to one of the members of the branding committee, Paulina Ahokas of Music Export Finland, one evening during a fire-alarm-induced interval at a performance by Finland’s leading modern dancer, Tero Saarinen, which we both happened to be attending at the Alexander Theatre (Saarinen’s performance was astonishing, but also a little bonkers. It was so avant-garde that the fire alarm sounded for a good few minutes before the audience slowly began to realise that it wasn’t part of the performance. Needless to say, the fire brigade was already there by the time we had been shepherded outside.)

  ‘If you were designing a country today, from scratch, you would end up with Finland,’ Ahokas told me confidently when we met at her office the next day. ‘Finland is a miracle, but it’s a story no one knows.’

  Among other qualities, she cited Finnish society’s equality of opportunity – ‘The fact that we take care of everyone and everyone has a fair chance, regardless of their background’; the Finns’ trustworthiness – ‘Ours is one of the most reliable handshakes in the world’; and even the weather – ‘I love the snow, it brings light into the city in the winter. Rather that than the English damp.’

  Then I mentioned the alcohol issue. It was a bit of a millstone in terms of one’s international image, wasn’t it? ‘Well, it is a hindrance,’ she said, then suddenly brightening: ‘But there is a lot of joy in being crazy AND trustworthy!’

  That Friday evening I ventured out into central Helsinki to try to assess for myself just how ‘crazy’ the Finns were in their cups. I started the evening at 8 p.m. in a bar on Tennispalatsi (where the basketball matches were held during the 1952 Olympics). The place was packed but subdued. By 9 p.m. it was absolutely heaving, a few drinks were being spilled, but nothing particularly untoward. I left around 10 p.m. and headed across the square, stopping off at another bar for further, serious-minded social-anthropological field work.

  I left that bar at around 11.30 p.m. to find the streets rather more crowded, with gangs of teenage Goths roaming around in long black leather coats and silver jewellery, bellowing their mating calls across the square. They were quite staggeringly off their faces. Crescendos of breaking glass echoed all ar
ound and an army of bottle collectors swarmed over the rubbish bins (to encourage recycling there is a return-payment for bottles and cans in all the Nordic countries, so bin-rummaging is a common occupation among the less well-off. There have been times – usually when my taxes are due – when I have given this line of work serious consideration myself).

  As Friday night turned into Saturday morning and the mood on the streets of Helsinki began to turn a little more threatening, I became aware of the black-clad private security guards stationed outside most bars and pubs. Truth to tell, though, it was no worse than in any other major city in Northern Europe, and certainly less scary than a Friday night in, say, Crawley or Leicester.

  In Crawley I would fear for my life, in Helsinki I merely feared for their dress sense.

  Chapter 4

  Sweden

  YOU HAVE GOT to love a country that enters Lordi into the Eurovision Song Contest and wins, which consumes more ice cream per capita than any other European country (14 litres a year), and has more tango dancers than Argentina.1 This is a special place, of that there is no doubt.

  In his essay ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, the late Yale political scientist Samuel Huntington pointed out that Finland bestrides one of the world’s key cultural fault lines, dividing the two civilisations of Christianity and Orthodoxy. In a sense, the Finns are forever torn between the history they share with Christian Europe thanks to the Swedish influence – the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and so on – and that of the Orthodox world, with its tsarist and communist systems.

  This might lead you to expect them to be somewhat schizophrenic, or culturally ‘conflicted’, which I suspect is true. In Finland, Cultural Lone Wolf, Richard D. Lewis sums up what he sees as the contradictory nature of the Finns thus: ‘Finns are warm-hearted people, but they have a desire for solitude. They are hard-working and intelligent, but often seem slow to react. They love freedom, but they curtail their own liberty by closing their shops early, limiting their access to alcohol, prohibiting late baths in apartment buildings, and taxing themselves to death. They worship athletics and fitness, but until recently their diet gave them the highest incidence of heart disease in Western Europe . . . They love their country but seldom speak well of it.’

  Since 1947, when Finland was forced to cede 10 per cent of its territory to Russia, that east/west line has literally divided the country, but Finland has had to live with this duality for much longer: ‘Finns in the early part of the twelfth century found themselves in the middle of a great power conflict, a situation that would persist – in hot and cold war periods – right up to 1945,’ writes Lewis. ‘The manner in which the Finns have dealt with this geopolitical balancing act defines to a large degree the history of the nation.’ That’s a long time to have been pulled in two directions. No wonder the Finnish psyche is such a tangled mess of deep-seated taboos, many of which seemed rooted in this duality of influence.

  There is their complex relationship with the Swedes and their anxieties about the Russians; their fears about what the rest of us think of their non-verbal social inadequacies; the drinking and violence; the terrible Civil War; that awkward business with the Nazis; a 1947 partition every bit as divisive as the sub-continent’s; the growing fear of Nokia going under and prompting another national near-bankruptcy like the one in the early 1990s, and so on.

  You could argue that all the clichés of Finnishness – the drinking, the violence, the reticence, even the saunas – are really just symptoms or side-effects of their taboos. The Finns are, essentially, defined by what they leave unsaid.

  Prime among these cultural conflicts is their relation to the Swedes. A while back I got to know a Finnish father at the school my children attended. We would often meet at social functions to catch up and, as the evening went on, put the world to rights over a few glasses of wine. There was one thing I could never really understand about my friend though: he would often drop into the conversation the fact that he was a Swedish Finn. After the second mention I was, like, ‘Yeah, right, you said already. And?’ But it was important to him that I know this: he, the urbane, Swedish-speaking sophisticate from the southern coastal regions, was distinguishing himself from the other Finns, the woodsmen from the hinterland and the frozen north. He was from the Finland of Sibelius and Alvar Aalto, not one of the monosyllabic boozers from the forests.

  Contact between Finland and Sweden predates records, but probably began via the stepping stones of the Åland Islands across to the south-west of Finland, which was about the only habitable part of the country for many millennia. The Swedes settled and started to trade with the Finns, who came from deep in the forests with their fur and their tar, and gradually ‘conquered’ Finland between 1155 and 1293.

  The Finns have numerous grounds for resentment concerning the period of Swedish rule: the 1696–7 famine, caused by two particularly harsh winters, to name just one. Approximately a third of the population of Finland was left to starve by an incompetent Stockholm government. This has not been forgotten.

  What is most remarkable about Swedish influence amid the higher echelons is the extent to which it continued long after the Swedes had relinquished power in the early nineteenth century. Barely had the 1809 Diet of Porvoo agreed the terms under which the Grand Duchy would be ruled by Russia, than the new Finnish ruling class – still mostly made up of Swedish Finns, it has to be said – were busy enshrining equal rights for Swedish speakers in its constitution. Swedish remained the only official language in Finland for more than half a century after the two countries divided; snobbery burnished Swedish culture for longer still. ‘It was common practice for families with social aspirations to conceal a Finnish origin behind an adopted Swedish surname,’ writes T. K. Derry.2

  Today, though their prominence is waning, the 300,000 or so Swedish Finns who live in Finland still exercise a surprising amount of influence in the higher echelons of the establishment and in industry (perhaps the most famous case being Björn ‘Nalle’ Wahlroos, an outspoken banker and one of the richest men in Finland, who has come to symbolise a particular kind of free-market-capitalist Swedish Finn).

  ‘It is difficult to gauge the influence of the Swedish minority,’ Heikki Aittokoski told me. ‘Probably only 10 per cent of them are old families with money, and of course they have lots of influence – this is centuries-old money and they have companies and employ thousands of people – but the majority of Swedish Finns are ordinary people. The bad boy is definitely Wahlroos. He is the most famous capitalist in Finland and every time he says something it makes the headlines.’

  Swedish Finns have their own national assembly, the Folketinget; their own political party, the Swedish People’s Party, which usually has a minister in government; their own national theatre, which is virtually as large as, and arguably more elegant than, the Finnish national theatre; and they even have their own flag, a yellow cross on a red background. Swedish remains an official language in Finland and is compulsory in schools. If a region has more than 8 per cent Swedish speakers, it must operate on a bilingual basis. Though only 6 per cent of Finland’s population are Swedish Finns, there are still some places on the coast in southern and western Finland where they make up the majority, notably the self-governing, Swedish-speaking – but technically Finnish – Åland Islands, of which my chief recollections from a visit a few years ago are a morning spent visiting one of its main attractions, a snail farm, and being devoured by midges every evening. By law, in these Swedish-speaking parts of the country even the street signs have to be in Swedish first and Finnish second. Some parts of London have a sizable – perhaps even majority – French population; could you imagine Kensington Borough Council putting up street signs in French?

  ‘There is still an ambiguity between the Swedish-speaking Finns and the Finnish Finns,’ Roman Schatz told me. ‘The Swedish Finns used to have a sense of superiority, but that isn’t true any more. That is history. Finland has Nokia and cocktails and snowboarding now. W
e don’t need them.’

  I am told you can often tell Swedish Finns apart from ‘proper’ Finns by their physical appearance, but they do remain avowedly Finnish, with little desire to become Swedish, less still to move to Sweden. Finland is their home. Hence Finland’s bilingual status remains rigorously enforced even, according to Schatz, among newborns. ‘I was enrolling my son in a baby swimming group but they said they only had places in the Swedish-speaking one, the Finnish one was full. I said, “But they’re babies! They don’t speak any language.” In the end, I had to claim that he was German Finnish and, by arguing that German was a sister language to Swedish, they let him in!’

  ‘Sweden is the enemy you love to hate, and hate to love,’ Neil Hardwick told me. ‘I don’t think the Swedish Finns run Finland, but they do run their own affairs in a cliquey way and they corner large sections of the cultural and educational budgets for Swedish-speaking projects. There is a tremendous amount of shadowy support for Swedish projects, a bit of an old boys’ network.’

  ‘Finns used to have – and still do to a certain extent – a huge inferiority complex with Swedes,’ agreed Aittokoski. Then again, I suppose that’s understandable. We all do.

  The special treatment of the Swedish Finns particularly rankles with the fast-rising, right-wing True Finn party, which rocketed from 4 per cent to over 19 per cent in the polls in recent years and which, as I write, is the third largest political party in the country. As well as the usual anti-immigrant rhetoric (a key element of their success, despite the fact that Finland has even fewer immigrants than the other Nordic countries), the party also wants to eradicate the Swedish influence in Finland.

  But Aittokoski – who is not a Swedish Finn – has a different approach to the issue. He sees their treatment as ‘a prime example of how to take care of a minority’. Although the Finns have good cause for resentment towards the Swedes, for him the Swedish connection was a valuable bridge to the West during the Cold War.