The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  Besides, erasing Swedish Finns from the history books could prove awkward, as many of Finland’s greatest historical figures, not least the leaders in the fight for, and development of, Finnish nationhood, were Swedish Finns – like the country’s national poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg; its greatest composer, Jean Sibelius; greatest architect, Alvar Aalto (whose mother was Swedish); and even the greatest military hero, Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, after whom every Finnish town’s main street appears to be named. Tove Janssen, creator of the Moomins: another Swedish Finn.

  One person who I’d been told would have some interesting insights into Finland’s complex historic relationships was historian Laura Kolbe. I met Kolbe, a petite, intense woman in her mid-forties, in her office at the University of Helsinki one day. I wondered if she agreed that the Finns had an inferiority complex when it came to their former masters.

  ‘I think it’s more that we envy their success,’ she said. ‘Sweden has been like a sun that just attracts everybody, a kind of magnet for success . . . and I think many Finns are grateful to the Swedes.’

  I pressed Kolbe a little more on this. She sounded a little too magnanimous. Were there really no grudges? It didn’t take much pressing . . .

  ‘I recently stayed in Uppsala, and I started again to think about my relationship to Sweden. Do I love this country or do I hate this country? And I noticed it is a bit of both. I do feel that, if you look at the two countries today, it is unfortunate that they were separated in 1809 because both need the other to be completely fulfilled: the Swedes could get the seriousness, the dramatic, the feeling for real life from the Finns. They haven’t been challenged enough, they’ve been complacent, lived a nice life in their suburban houses. You know, all the artists and writers in Sweden now are incomers. The best books and plays are written by people who are not Swedish by birth. It is a society that lacks a dynamic. And then of course you look at Sweden and you could say that their wealth is coming really from Finland protecting them, so there is – I don’t think bitterness – but a realism. There is a little bit the sense that while we were holding up the wall, the Swedes were tending their gardens.’

  I heard this from several Finns – the notion of the Swedes as slightly foppish; squeamish about getting their hands dirty; egging the Finns on to give the Russians a bloody nose as they fluttered their lacey hankies on the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia. Several Finnish males used the word ‘gay’ to me when describing their Swedish counterparts. As we will see, the Swedes did rather well out of their neutrality, both during the Second World War and in its aftermath.

  ‘In Finland Swedes are commonly thought of as gay, the men at least,’ said Roman Schatz. ‘They are soft and pale, they don’t have hair on their balls. In the Swedish army they don’t have to cut their hair. They give them hairnets!’ I checked up on this, and, rather wonderfully, this is a true story: in 1971 the Swedish army ordered 50,000 hairnets to contain their soldiers’ then newly fashionable long locks.

  Revealingly, in the ‘masculinity versus femininity’ section of Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede’s hugely influential 1980 ‘cultural dimensions’ study into the values of cultures around the world, Finnish society was deemed to be the most masculine in the Nordic region, while the Swedes were not only the least masculine in the region, but in the world.

  Finland’s adoption of the euro represented a major break from the Swedes who, of course have kept their krona. The Finns were proud to be the first country to adopt the single currency, thanks to the time difference. That said, the countries’ slow-burn rivalry still gets a highly charged airing each year with an annual track-and-field event between the two countries, called the Suomi-Ruotsi-maaottelu (literally the ‘Finland–Sweden International’).

  ‘It is abso-bloody-lutely nationalistic,’ Schatz told me, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. ‘The TV slogan in Finland for it this year is “It’s not important that Finland wins, but that Sweden loses.”’

  * * *

  1 Finnish tango music is always in a melancholy minor key. One explanation for the dance’s popularity, offered to me by a woman I got chatting to in Café Tin Tin Tango, is that if you can get Finnish men dancing long enough, they stop drinking. The tango takes some time to master.

  2 Talking of Finnish independence, I had an insight into the different ways in which Finland and Sweden interpret the events of 1809 when I visited Helsinki on the 200th anniversary of the Diet of Porvoo. In Helsinki, the Finns were marking the bicentenary with an unmistakably celebratory tone to the extent that, according to one outraged Finnish ministry of education insider I spoke to, the Swedish government had apparently had the temerity to try to get the Finns to tone down their celebrations. In contrast, the rather downbeat title of Stockholm’s commemorative exhibition was ‘1809 – A Kingdom Divided’. Clearly the loss still grated with the Swedes.

  Chapter 5

  Russia

  AS ALL PET Shop Boys fans will be aware (from the lyrics of ‘West End Girls’), in April 1917 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was smuggled from his exile on the banks of Lake Geneva and sent by train via Stockholm to the Finland Station in St Petersburg. The release of Finland from Russian control, which he had promised some years before, was only a matter of time.

  Finnish autonomy, dreamed of since 1809, and prepared for with the nationalist Fennoman movement (motto: ‘Swedes we are no longer, Russians we do not want to become, let us therefore become Finns!’), should have heralded a brave new age for Finland. As historian Laura Kolbe told me, ‘During that time we were able to build up a national identity, the Finnish language, the mythologisation of the Kalevala [Elias Lönnrot’s 1835 collection of Finnish folk poetry and myths, which were a great influence on Tolkien]. We decided who we were.’ Instead the country descended into a self-sabotaging nightmare, the aftermath of which would linger for decades.

  Communism was on the rise in Finland, as it was elsewhere in Europe. Radical Finns rallied behind the red flag, while the middle-class Whites were led by General Mannerheim, who had actually served time in the Russian army under the tsar. Though the resulting Civil War lasted fewer than four months, its psychological scars linger to this day. The Whites won; 37,000 people died. Many Reds and their supporters were executed or imprisoned, and though there was an eventual amnesty for them, for decades afterwards the whole miserable episode was largely swept under the carpet. It was the single most divisive moment in Finnish history. That may sound self-evident – duh, it was a civil war – but Finland’s history does seem to have been especially bitter, and one imagines that the famed Finnish reticence would hardly have helped the healing process.

  ‘It is still difficult to get any ceremonies on the Red graves,’ one Finn whose family fought on the Red side told me. ‘There are many unofficial Red graves out in the forests. Those divisions are not in the open, but if you go to any village in the countryside, everyone can tell you which family was on the Red side and which was on the White.’

  Laura Kolbe says it took the Finns fifty years to come to terms with the Civil War. ‘It’s no longer a living memory, but still every Finnish family has a kind of relationship to it, either you were in the White part or the Red part. Today it’s not like it was in the sixties, but yes, you carry a kind of traumatic relationship [to it] because it was really brother against brother, communists against bourgeoisie and farmers.’

  ‘The whole Reds versus Whites thing is still very touchy,’ agreed Neil Hardwick. ‘After a while you can figure out who is on which side. It shouldn’t matter, but it runs so deep. I used to call myself a communist, but you don’t mention that these days, it’s a silly word these days, but us old lefties, we kind of recognise each other, there’ll be eye contact. But in the seventies the lefties were thought of as actually extremely unpatriotic – they would have sold the country to Moscow if they had the chance – but I never wanted anything to do with that.’

  Perhaps the wounds of the civil war might have healed more easily
had Finland not had the Soviet Empire breathing down its neck, the Politburo obviously being supportive of Finnish communists. Though Finno–Russian relations progressed well enough immediately following independence, as the Second World War approached, the Russian Bear once again turned its attention to its little neighbour to the west.

  As with previous Russian interest in Finland, Stalin was probably never that serious about conquering the country, he just wanted a larger buffer zone to protect St Petersburg, now renamed Leningrad. He requested control of some of the Finnish islands that lay just beyond the city, as well as the Finnish port of Hanko. The Finns refused and the countries went to war in November 1939, a conflict which would prove to be the ultimate test of sisu.

  The Finns faced certain defeat with only around 200,000 men and virtually no planes or tanks to defend the country against the 1.2 million-strong Red Army. Following a truly harrowing, permafrosted campaign that lasted three months and saw prolonged periods in which the temperature fell below –40ºC, 26,000 Finnish lives were lost compared with 127,000 Russians. For a sense of how grindingly awful this conflict was, Pekka Parikka’s 1989 film, The Winter War (a kind of Finnish The Thin Red Line), rams it home quite harrowingly during three hours of blood-stained snow, splintered trees, scorched trenches and severed limbs, the entire film played with virtually no emotion on the part of the actors (the one ‘light’ moment comes when the soldiers of Infantry Regiment JR23 on the Mannerheim Line somehow find the wherewithal to build a sauna).

  As terrible as it was, in a sense the Winter War galvanised Finland, helping to bring together a divided nation and earning the Finns the admiration of the rest of the world. Their white-clad ski patrols, nicknamed ‘the White Death’ by Russian soldiers, became a Second World War icon. US war correspondent and ex-Mrs Hemingway Martha Gellhorn was in the country at the time and helped create the enduring image of the Finns as hardy and determined: ‘The people are marvellous, with their pale, frozen fortitude,’ she wrote in one dispatch.

  Neutral Sweden did little to support its former territory during its conflicts with Russia, and even prevented the League of Nations and the Allies coming to Finland’s aid in the early part of the conflict. Understandably there remains a residual bitterness among some Finns, not just about the blockade, or at being left to dangle by the Swedes during the War, but also at the way in which the Swedish economy flourished so brazenly, supplying both the Germans and British with raw materials, and from the sense of security that it enjoyed by having doughty Finland as a buffer against the Soviets for many decades afterwards. As one Finn put it to me: ‘Sweden made hay while Finland held back the Soviet Union.’ Was there any lingering resentment? After a very long pause he answered, with classic Finnish laconicism, ‘That’s a good question.’

  Finland’s limited success in resisting the Soviets – as I mentioned, the Mannerheim Line was eventually breached in early 1940 – was all the encouragement Hitler needed to believe he could defeat Stalin, and so the relatively brief Winter War was followed by the three-year Continuation, during which, despite initially declaring neutrality (‘Don’t mind us! You two carry on!’), the Finns eventually decided their best interests lay in joining the Nazis fighting against the Soviets under Operation Barbarossa. The Finns allowed over 200,000 German soldiers to fight in the north of their country and gave the Nazis access to various raw materials, particularly their nickel.

  Though it is always easy to condemn such collaboration in retrospect, one can hardly help but view the Finnish alliance with Hitler with some scorn. And would the Soviets actually have invaded Finland anyway? Documentary evidence from the Soviet high command of the time suggests this was never on their agenda, rendering the alliance with Germany that bit less defensible.

  Naturally, the Finns disagree. ‘We fought together with Germany against the Soviet Union; but were not allied with Germany, that would have been different,’ argues Kolbe. ‘We were not collaborators in the same sense as the Netherlands, or Norway, or Denmark. We were a military brotherhood. We really prohibited Russia from occupying Finland, with the help of Germany.’

  The ever-pragmatic Finns draw a fine distinction here: they were operating very strictly within their own, anti-communist, national interest to reclaim their territory and prevent a Soviet invasion: they were not assisting Hitler’s Third Reich ambitions. The appalling atrocities that we now know were perpetrated by the Russians after they conquered Finland’s neighbouring Baltic states (which are only now recovering from the Soviet era), suggest the Finns were wise to do anything they could to avoid becoming part of the Soviet Bloc, however questionable the morality of their allegiances might appear from the vantage point of history. As a caption I read in the Rovaniemi history museum has it: ‘The international situation forced Finland to seek support from Germany.’

  In the last months of the war, though, the Finns did eventually turn on the Germans. The Germans took their revenge by burning every building, destroying every bridge and ripping up every road they came into contact with as they fled northwards through Lapland which is why, as my son and I saw when we visited Santa, Rovaniemi is today a soulless grid of concrete apartment blocks: everything had to be rebuilt from rubble during a time of unimaginable austerity.

  As punishment for siding with the Germans, Finland ended up giving Russia 10 per cent of its territory. This included much of agriculturally rich Finnish Karelia; almost a hundred power stations; great tracts of forest; and, crucially in terms of its economy, the port of Vyborg. Finnish refugees fled back into Finland. It had, effectively, undergone its own equivalent of Partition, a national rupture which has these days been completely forgotten by the rest of the Europe.

  Mannerheim somehow manoeuvred Finland out of the grasp of the Soviet Union; his second masterstroke was the rejection of Marshall Plan aid. Refusing American assistance was a classic example of Finnish obstinacy and bloody-mindedness. Though Finland was desperately in need of funds, its courageous self-sufficiency allowed the country to settle its debt to Russia while keeping it free of any ties to America. There would be no US bases, no membership of NATO, and so no threat to the Russians that Finland might be used as a stepping stone for any invasion from the West. In turn, Russia felt less need to strong-arm or invade Finland and so, instead of becoming another Estonia, the country benefitted hugely in economic terms from being a strategic pawn in the Cold War chess game.

  Many attributed Finland’s success at keeping Moscow at bay during the 1970s to one man: Urho Kekkonen. Initially as prime minister and then president for twenty-five years, he guided Finland along a diplomatic tightrope up until his resignation due to ill health, aged eighty, in 1981. There were times when Kekkonen toyed with dictatorship himself, dissolving parliament in 1961 to reassure the Russians that he was in control, for instance, but through various other Soviet-related crises – such as the so-called ‘night frost’ of 1958 when the Russians cancelled their orders to Finnish industry and withdrew their ambassador – he managed to preserve Finland’s independence. ‘If you want to know why we were the only country not occupied by Russia at the time,’ one Finn told me, ‘you need to understand this man’s relationship with the Soviet Union.’

  Today, Kekkonen occupies a quasi-mythological position in the history of his nation, with rumour and counter-rumour concerning his east–west allegiances, as well as his actions during the Civil War, still swirling around almost thirty years after his death in 1986.

  ‘In all his speeches he always underlined the importance of good relations with Russia. We had it in our bones. Finland was forced to make its opinions more mild,’ Kolbe said when I raised criticisms about Kekkonen’s ‘Active Neutrality’ approach: what some see as his subservience to Moscow and his close relationship with Khrushchev (they were hunting buddies). ‘The Soviet Union was so powerful, and there were ideological pressures to accept the Soviet version of history. It wasn’t so much the Russians telling us what to say. I would call it “National Realism�
�. It’s easy for you to say we were pushed and pressurised: you, of course, had NATO.’

  Kolbe had described Kekkonen as having ‘excellent connections with the Soviet leaders’, but many would take that further. Was he, in fact, a Soviet stooge?

  ‘It was all very John le Carré, from what I understand,’ Neil Hardwick told me of Finnish–Soviet relations in the sixties and seventies. ‘He was very close to the Russians, and you never really knew which side he was on. Once, years ago, I was in a pub in London, in the theatre district, and there was this old guy in a raincoat, very drunk. I kept looking at him thinking, “Hmm, I know him, who is he?” He noticed me looking at him and said, “Don’t you know who I am? I am George Brown [former Labour foreign secretary in the Wilson government and a staunch anti-Soviet].” We got talking a bit and I said that I lived in Finland, to which he replied, “Ah, that Kekkonen, he worked for the KGB you know.”’ Whether this is true or not, what is little disputed is that the Finnish president was trusted by the Soviets (they awarded him their equivalent of the Nobel – the Lenin Peace Prize – in 1979), earning Finland the dubious nickname Kekkoslovakia.

  Perhaps the single most perilous moment in Finnish–Soviet relations came in 1978. ‘The Russians proposed a common military exercise between Soviet and Finnish troops,’ remembers Kolbe. ‘And our politicians, quite skillfully, said, “Maybe not, perhaps we can come and follow your troops and you can send yours to follow ours, but let’s not mix.” Throughout the Cold War we were close to a diplomatic invasion, a stealth invasion.’

  This stealth invasion took many forms, some of which have an almost Ealing Comedy aspect to them. Several Finns when remembering this era had mentioned to me the extraordinary phenomenon of the ‘Home Russian’, a kind of Iron Curtain buddy system in which Finnish politicians and others in the establishment paired up with a Russian opposite number.