Finnish factions
Paul Neuburg Helsinki Mr Taisto Sinisalo, fifty-year-old deputy chairman of the Finnish Communist Party and head of its Stalinist wing, is both a curse and a blessing to others in Finnish Politics. Of somewhat teddy-bearish appearance, with thick smooth hair and glasses, and dressed for parliament in a light grey suit, green shirt and chequered tie, he looks rather like one's image of an intellectuallyinclined deputy headmaster at a comprehensive school in Crouch Hill. His Christian name, Taisto, means 'Struggle', and the Taistoites, as his supporters are called, insPire fear in managements up and down the Country, many of them shop stewards 'interested much less in bettering the lot of the workers than in destroying the whole economic system,' as one works manager put it in the Kymi Valley industrial area, Mr Sinisalo's stronghold some eighty miles from Helsinki. When, on rejecting reformism, Mr Sinisalo himself is asked whether he thinks Finland ripe for revolution instead, he admits that it is not. 'But,' he says, 'we must create a revolutionary situation.' At present, he and his cohorts are making Finland in an important sense ungovernable, and at the same time discrediting the Finnish Communist Party, in voting terms the third most important in western Europe. After gains by the left in last autumn's elections, there are now signs of a rightward Shift in the popular mood. This despite the fact that the moderate majority wing of the Communist Party, having bowed to President Kekkonen's ukase to enter a new coalition government at the end of November, has not since behaved either destructively or as the agent of big brother next door. It even appears ready to consider an economic Package only a little better for the workers than that favoured by the leading party of the coalition, the social democrats. But it cannot do so because of Mr Sinisalo. If the Queen finds only a caretaker prime minister w.hen she visits Finland this month he and ,his followers will, however unintentionally, nave been chiefly responsible.
The sticking point of the government's economic strategy is a 2 per cent increase !n turnover tax that is meant to balance the budget and cut consumption. In the midst Of the worst economic crisis in Finland since the war, with foreign debts amounting to more than 20 per cent of the GNP last ?'ear, inflation running at over 17 per cent, `d unemployment up to 3.9 per cent (some !twee times the normal rate) the chief task h_anded to the coalition government by
President Kekkonen was to 'maintain emr21°Ymene. Subsidies for the purpose have ueen increased, but the government is also
seeking to reduce foreign indebtedness by more than half and to bring inflation down to a single figure. To do this, it has put a stop on borrowing from abroad except to finance exports, is reducing public expenditure, and wants to keep the growth of real wages to 1 per cent this year.
The Communists and the Finnish TUC, dominated by the Social Democrats, claim that the increase in the turnover tax, on the cards since October, would by raising prices wipe out all real wage growth and effectively lower living standards. The unions would like to see the tax increases postponed until next February, but the Communists want the government, in which they have four ministers, to find the money by higher corporation taxes and super-taxes, increased taxation on farm produce and borrowing from abroad. These measures have little appeal to the Bank of Finland or the social democratic leadership, let alone the nonleft parties in the government, industry and the farmers.
A decision is imminent. 'It can't be postponed any longer,' I was told by Mr Ulf Sundqvist, General Secretary of the Social Democratic Party, which, although it has expressed reservations about the effect of higher turnover taxes on low incomes, agrees that the increase is necessary. Known, at the age of thirty-one, as a leftist radical just beginning to mellow, and fully intent on realising the nationalisation and land control proposals of what he calls the Marxist programme of his party, Mr Sundqvist does not want the Communists to leave the government on the tax issue. He insists, however, that they must take their share of responsibility for the economy.
It is generally thought that the moderate Communists would be prepared for a deal dissimilar only to a degree from that sought by the Social Democrats. They want to stay in the government, basically because they believe that this will do them and the work
ing class more good than if they withdraw. Led by sixty-three-Year-old Mr Aarne Saar
inen, who as chairman of the party for a decade earned ,himself Moscow's and the Stalinists' disfavour by a round condemna tion of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and who now maintains that the French Communists are as entitled to their tricolor Communism as the Finns are to their blue-and-white national variety, they also claim to have the rank and file behind them. 'Out of some 320 delegations that I have received in the past four months,' said Mr Paavo Aitio, Minister of Labour and
head of the Communist parliamentary
group, 'not one asked for us to withdraw from the government.' What prevents the moderates from agreeing to a compromise is that this would give the Taistoites true grounds for accusing them of having sold the working classes down the river; and this in turn stiffens the attitude of the TUC, ever fearful of being overtaken on the left in its endless struggle for control of individual unions. The Taistoites thus form the tail of the Finnish left that wags the dog, Mr Sinisalo is simply not interested in any deals that the bourgeois parties can offer. 'We were dragged into this govern ment by our opponents,' he says, 'and the danger is they'll make reformists out of us.
A Communist ceases to be a Communist if he doesn't go on aiming to put an end to capitalism.' Nor is he interested in the pub lic show of unity usually maintained by Communist leaderships. The central committee session of the Finnish CP, on the question of entering the coalition, produced a vote of twenty for and fourteen against, and a meeting in March on the government economic programme brought a similar division, after diametrically conflicting speeches by Mr Saarinen and Mr Sinisalo. 'I don't know of another Communist party in the world that conducts its business in this way,' said a party functionary.
Even more important than the split in the central committee has been the struggle between the two wings of the party in the country at large, with recriminations reaching fresh heights in recent weeks. The Taistoites and their paper Tiedonantaje are not only accusing the Saarinen wing of having hoisted the flag of capitulation to capitalism but also, for the benefit of the Russians, of helping both sides with subsidies, charging them with national deviationism, a highly unpopular thing in Moscow these days.
Mr Saarinen, in an exceptionally acid speech made at a Communist youth organisation meeting in Kemi in the north-west, a stronghold of what the Finns call 'backwoods Communism', counter-attacked by accusing the Sinisalo wing of the use of ideological gunpowder for selfish sectarian ends. He also charged them, again for the benefit of the Russians, with nothing less than a Finnish version of Maoism. (This is, of course, a figure of speech, as the Chinese, according to other diplomats in Helsinki, maintain that 'in Finland there are socialimperialists (the Sinisalo wing) and revisionists (the Saarinen wing) but no true Marxist-Leninists.') The Russians have so far kept up an impartial facade, though those who think they know in Helsinki connect the moderate Finnish Communists with Mr Brezhnev's group in the Soviet leadership, and the Taistoites with the hard-liners. Mr Saarinen's supporters maintain that their leader would not have made such a strong speech against his rivals without a nod from the Russians, but others point out that a few days afterwards the Soviet Komsomol chose to bestow decorations on two Finnish Communists both of whom were Sinisalo men. The internecine struggle of the Finnish CP over government participation is no advertise ment for other western Communists close to the same prospect; but then it is hard to know how far the Russians want to see western CPs take the coalition road, with all the ensuing concessions to democratic and national susceptibilities.
In Finland, one object in drafting the Communists into government has been to teach them the need for responsible compromise. 'It has been my strong belief,' President Kekkonen said in the course of an interview, 'that we have to develop our affairs in such a way that the Communists enter society as a responsible part of it.' Getting the Communists to compromise is indeed said to have been one aim of Kekkonen's manoeuvres on the Finnish political scene for much of his twenty-year presidency. 'But,' he says, 'I have many times encountered disappointments and frustrations in this respect, and the Communists themselves seem to be so split on the question that it is difficult to see where their divisions will lead.'
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