A northern Ruritania
Andrew Brown
Helsinki The boats that ply between Stockholm and Helsinki exhibit all the characteristic features of a Scandinavian state. They are clean, hygienic, and full of ingenious engineering. Virtually everyone on board is getting drunk as quickly as they possibly can. Everything has been done to keep the citizen-customer satisfied: there are bottleopeners in every cabin, and coin-operated electronic breathalysers (most of them vandalised) in the lobbies. There is even a token minority of sober passengers, which is very well looked after. None of the Scandinavian countries is really described by this nightmarish stereotype, but it is still a delightful experience to disembark in Helsinki and there find a city that does not seem Scandinavian at all.
The centre of Helsinki, with its surprisingly narrow streets and bustling small green trams, resembles a provincial capital in the Austro-Hungarian Empire far more than it resembles Stockholm or Copenhagen. Then the impression of a Central European town is destroyed by the soft Northern light, and by the shiny, modern, well-filled shops. Huge lilac bushes bloom in public squares. Opposite the leader page, the Swedish-language paper prints two columns of readers' poems, one of which, in praise of summer, ends: 'No job, and no clothes on either' Perhaps this is a Scandinavian country after all.
But this impression is in turn destroyed by the sight of violently individual buildings whose architects appear to have modelled their worst hangovers, life-size or rather larger, in grey or brown knobbly concrete. But this ugliness is refreshing, because personal. It does not seem typical of Finnish taste. This is a country unlike all others.
Politically and economically, Finland is tightly organised into the standard Scandinavian pattern of benevolent coporatism — a system which seems to work quite well here. But it seems also to be a country very tolerant of individual foibles, partly, perhaps, because social life is still more formally structured here than in Sweden. A Minister was in the news because he had been found by a colleague semi-conscious and with two black eyes in his hotel room. The colleague called an ambulance, and reported the matter to the police. But the assaulted Minister has withdrawn this complaint, on the grounds that he cannot really remember how he came by his injuries. In Sweden, such a story, if printed at all, would represent at very least an attempt to discredit both the ministers involved and their party. In Helsinki no one supposed that this story revealed or concealed anything.
This realism and lack of hypocrisy is not confined to domestic policy. Finnish foreign policy is composed in equal parts of fervent patriotism and an equally fervent disavowal of nationalism. A television journalist summed up this attitude, though not the resulting policies, when he observed that 'It's worth licking arses abroad if that means that we can live as we like at home'.
Finnish patriotism cannot be doubted. Finland is the only country ever to have fought a Soviet army to a standstill twice, first in the Winter War, and then in the War of Continuation, which was fought alongside Operation Barbarossa. The price, of course, was terrible: more than half a billion dollars' worth of reparations, which had to be paid without the help of Marshall Aid; nearly half a million refugees had to be resettled when Karelia was ceded. Fifty thousand auxiliaries from Ingria, between Leningrad and Narva, who had hoped to become Finnish citizens, were handed back to Stalin. Nearly 90,000 Finns were killed, and 56,000 permanently disabled. Those corpses that could be identified were taken back to their towns and villages for burial. A country where this is done hardly needs ostentatious cenotaphs. It is itself a war memorial.
During the negotiations that preceded the Winter War, the Finns took the position that 'what we have, we hold'. By 1945, they could only say that 'what we held, we still have', but this represents a considerable achievement. Unaided, the Finns have managed to establish that a military conquest of their country, though no doubt possible, would cost more than Finland could possibly be worth to anyone but the people who live there. This does not, of course, apply to the areas that the Russians think they need for military purposes – but these needs were not invented by Stalin. The current frontier is roughly the same as the one which Peter the Great imposed 00 the Swedes.
The Treaty which has regulated RussoFinnish relationships since 1948 is very similar to the treaty which the Russians consider legitimised their invasion of Afghanistan. No one is quite sure how similar, since the treaty is only unambiguous in time of stable peace, but while peace lasts, the pact allows the Finns to make the best of the political and strategic facts of their situation, and this is about all that diplomacY can ever. achieve – and more than it usually does.
It is very difficult to tell what influence the Russians exercise over Finnish domestic politics. The Communist Party here, though large, has split into two factions. One, led by the party chairman, is more or less Eurocommunist, and forms part of most coalition governments. The mmonty faction, led by the party's vice-chairman, regularly votes against all governments. Though the Russians have been able to prevent the party from splitting up entirely, they have been unable to reunite it. If they cannot even control theCommunistParty, it seems unlikely that they are the puppet masters of the rest of the country. But since good relations with Russia are so important to Finland, the hypothesis of Russian influence provides, like astrology, an explanation of almost anything in Finland.
The Russians are known, for example, to dislike the idea of Conservative participa tion in the government, and the Conservatives, though now one of the largest parties in the country, have not been invited into any coalition since 1966, a courtesy which is otherwise extended to almost every politician in the country. But the coalition parties are able to use the Russian attitude as a statesmanlike alibi for their reluctance to share power, something which could be just as well explained by simple political selfinterest. Again, Communist participation in the government may please the Russians — even though the Communists are simultaneously in opposition — but by making a Communist Minister of Labour, the government has been able to run a very tight anti-inflationary policy without coming under pressure as a result of the subsequent rise in the unemployment rate.
The real crunch will come with the presidential elections in 1984. Since the President is elected not by direct popular vote but by a college of electors, it is by no means certain that the most popular candidate will get the job, unless he gets an overall majority in the first round. The problem is that the most popular candidate at the moment, the Social Democratic Prime Minister, Mauno Koivisto, is apparently unacceptable to the Russians, who would prefer President Kekkonen to stand yet again. The distribution of party support makes it unlikely that Koivisto will get an overall majority in the first round, if he stands (though this problem has been debated all spring, there are, as yet, no official candidates).
Since the President alone is responsible for the conduct of foreign policy, the speculation about Koivisto's candidature has raised again the awful question of whether the President's job is to be a Finnish statesman or a Russian governor. But the Finns will probably manage to exploit the Russian position somehow, just as they have managed to make the best of almost all the disadvantages that history and geography have heaped on them. Walking around Helsinki, which is mercifully free of the bad effects of Americanisa tion, I had the feeling that this was the last wholly European city left. It would be a tragedy if it were ever to be `Finlandised'.
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