Russian Finland

"Come in, come in," Aimo Minkkinen said as he ushered us through the museum shop to the office beyond. "I must apologize for all the clutter in the shop," he added, evidently referring less to the scholarly editions of Marx and Engels neatly stacked on bookshelves in the corner, than to the racks of t-shirts, mugs and badges that hold center stage. There are postcards of Trotsky, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Lenin, amid reprints of old Soviet-era posters and nicely retro Lenin plaster busts painted in gold, white or black.

"That's the way things are under capitalism," Minkkinen quipped, almost as if our visit to the Lenin Museum in the Finnish city of Tampere might well be our first-ever encounter with a market economy. Earlier this year Dr. Minkkinen marked 20 years of service as director of Europe's foremost surviving museum on the life, work and influence of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). "And it has not always been easy," Minkkinen said, explaining that the museum has had to move with the times. "We have succeeded where similar museums in the former Soviet Union have all closed down," he said with an evident sense of satisfaction.

If the price of survival is peddling trinkets and souvenirs in the Lenin Museum's gift-shop, then it is a price well worth paying. Aimo Minkkinen is a quietly thoughtful man and he is keen to stress that the museum is more than a mere apologia for Lenin. "With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Lenin made some misjudgments, some miscalculations."

But Minkkinen reserved his sharpest critique for Stalin. "I am not sure that the city of Tampere should be proud of the fact that Stalin and Lenin first met in this very building." And so they did, for the Lenin Museum is housed in the former Tampere Workers' Hall, which holds an illustrious place in socialist history. Tampere, as indeed all of Finland, had been part of the Russian Empire since 1809, and this heavily industrialized city, a place of mills and factories, bubbled with revolutionary fervor. It was a natural choice for hosting a Bolshevik conference in December 1905, at the end of a year that had seen political and social unrest across the Tsarist Empire.

From Revolution to Independence

Finns had their own particular grouse, having, since early in the twentieth century, endured the sortovuodet (literally, "years of oppression"), during which Finland's autonomous status as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire was progressively eroded. The Russification of Finland proceeded in several stages from 1900 until the 1905 Revolution, which paused the process. Measures included the imposition of Russian as the language of administration in the Grand Duchy, subordinating the Finnish army as a division in the Russian Imperial Army, increased use of Russian in schools, and strict censorship of Finnish newspapers and other publications.

So while the industrial workers of Tampere saw in the Bolshevik cause the possibility of economic betterment, a somewhat wider section of Finnish society judged that revolution might seed the cultural liberation of Finland. Lenin knew Tampere well — he had moved to the city in August 1905 — and he played the local card to good effect. "This was the stage that Lenin chose," Minkkinen said, pointing across the museum hall, "to promise Finland its independence when the Bolsheviks assumed power."

The Tampere conference was not an easy ride for Lenin. Stalin attended as a delegate from the Caucasus region, meeting Lenin for the first time (on January 7, 1906) and challenging his proposal that the Bolsheviks should promote candidates for election to the State Duma.[1] "So it was here that Lenin's finesse came head-to-head with Stalin's revolutionary impatience," Minkkinen explained.

The Tampere conference might have been a mere footnote in the broader sweep of Russian history, but in the revolutions of 1917 (and in the Finnish Civil War the following year) Tampere was a major Bolshevik stronghold. And Finns themselves did not forget the significance of Lenin's stay in Tampere. The promise of an independent Finland was realized very quickly after Lenin and the Soviets ousted Alexander Kerensky's Provisional Government. Lenin signed an order approving Finland's independence on December 31, 1917. After centuries of subservience to Sweden (until 1809) and then 108 years with an ambiguous and often difficult relationship with Russia, the Bolsheviks were the midwives of the first truly independent Finnish State.

A Northern Partnership

Almost a century later, the fates of Finland and Russia remain intertwined. The two countries fought a brutal Winter War (1939-40) and were on opposite sides for most of World War II. The end result was that Finland was forced to cede parts of Karelia and Petsamo to Moscow, comprising 10 percent of its territory and a third of its industrial capacity. Yet post-war Finland found a rapprochement with its huge Soviet neighbor. Under the so-called Paasikivi Doctrine,[2] often derided by the U.S. and its allies as Finnish deference to Moscow, successive Helsinki governments pursued a policy of studied neutrality. This pragmatic accommodation brought Finland enormous economic benefits, ensuring a rich network of contacts between the two countries. Even today, Finland remains the only EU neighbor of the Russian Federation that is not a member of NATO.

It is a mark of how close the two countries are that last December a new high-speed train service was launched between Helsinki and St. Petersburg, cutting the journey to three and a half hours (in May the number of trains on the route was doubled). It is one of a number of highly successful Finnish-Russian joint ventures in everything from forestry, paper mills and Arctic maritime technology, to shipbuilding and the steel industry.

First-time visitors to Finland who know Russia well are invariably struck by the similarities between the two countries. Carl Engel's impressive neoclassical buildings in Helsinki are highly redolent of St. Petersburg. No surprise perhaps, as Helsinki became the capital only after Finland was incorporated into the Russian Empire. The previous capital, Turku, on the south-west tip of the Finnish mainland, was judged by Imperial authorities to be too distant, and too influenced by Swedish thinking, to serve reliably as capital of the new Grand Duchy. Helsinki, until then just a modest port city, was made the capital in 1812. Russian traders, merchants, soldiers and bureaucrats arrived and they set about creating a city that in its grandeur rivaled even St. Petersburg.

Russian touches are everywhere. Ride out to Suomenlinna, a gorgeous island in Helsinki harbor, and you will find perfectly preserved Russian traders' houses. Of course, post-independence Finland has taken care to give heavily fortified Suomenlinna a Finnish imprint. Its name was changed (Suomenlinna means "Finnish fortress") and in the 1920s the Orthodox church on Suomenlinna was taken over by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. The distinctive domes of the Eastern tradition were removed and replaced by a severe tower, which, with typical Finnish pragmatism, doubles as a lighthouse, its warning signal to mariners flashing out over Helsinki harbor.

Suomenlinna's island church may have switched allegiance, but the touch of the East is still very visible in other churches in Helsinki and across all of Finland. Uspensky Cathedral, a fabulous, huge red-brick structure on a low hill overlooking Helsinki harbor, is a constant reminder to visitors and locals that this is a part of Europe that still makes space for Orthodox faith and practice. Indeed, Finland does much more than merely tolerate Orthodoxy. The Lutheran and Orthodox Churches have parity of status as officially-recognized State Churches in Finland. True, the Finnish Orthodox Church broke with its Russian mother-church in 1923, and today operates as an autonomous Church under the aegis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Church has ruffled ecclesiastic feathers in Russia and more widely in the Orthodox world by substituting Finnish for Church Slavonic in most liturgies and discarding the Orthodox Paschalion in favor of the Western method of calculating the date of Easter.

Uspensky Cathedral is just one of many impressive Orthodox churches in Finland. Another is the superb neoclassical church in Turku, commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I and designed by Carl Engel, which was consecrated in 1845 and gave a Russian imprint to the former capital. Others include the fine Church of St. Alexander Nevsky and St. Nicholas in Tampere, and the dramatic red church, also dedicated to St. Nicholas, in the west coast city of Vaasa. The latter is a good reminder of Vaasa's strong Russian connections. The city received migrants from Russia during the early years of the Grand Duchy. On the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, residents of Vaasa petitioned the authorities to change the city's name in memory of the late tsar. So Vaasa became Nikolaistad (until 1917) and continued to attract Russian settlers until after the Russian Revolution. In the 1940s, a new wave of migrants from the east, mainly from the north-Karelian White Sea area, further revitalized the Orthodox community, one that is far removed from the Orthodox heartland in eastern Finland.

Karelian Issues

But it is in the borderlands of Karelia, in the remote, forested country where Russia and Finland rub shoulders, that the interests and histories of the two countries most conspicuously intertwine. Ilomantsi is a small village in this region. It is in Finland but lies further east than St. Petersburg. Whichever direction you approach from, it is a long, long drive to Ilomantsi, with waves of forest blending into the heavens. The signs on the dirt road recall Orthodox litanies: Ilomantsi 100 km, Ilomantsi 90 km... and so on. From time to time by the side of the road is a little tsasouna, a simple wooden chapel in the forest used by devout Orthodox locals who live far from any parish church.

This is a region that has been fractured by history. Back in Tampere, Aimo Minkkinen joked that Finns and Russians have much in common. "You know, there's a bit of a Russian in every Finn," he said, and we all laughed. Come to the Karelian wilderness and you see what he means. The landscape, the farmsteads, the villages and lifestyles vary little on either side of the border. The little town of Nurmes, seven hours northeast of Helsinki by train and still in Finland, looks for all the world like a community in northern Russia, only a little tidier. And the town has impeccable Russian roots: it was founded by Tsar Alexander II in 1876.

"Okay, there are some differences," said an elderly man in Kuivajärvi, a remote village in eastern Finland where we stop on our long drive through the border region. Kuivajärvi is just a few hundred meters short of the border with Russia. The man's house is a typical Karelian log structure. By the door there is a badly worn copy of The Mother of God of Konevitsa, an icon that is well known throughout Karelia. The man was busy hoeing a small patch of land, but paused to tell us the story of a Karelian farmer who found, when the authorities were confirming the precise border line between the Soviet Union and Finland, that his home was bisected by the international frontier.

"So," the surveyors asked the farmer: "Are you going to live in the Russian or the Finnish part of your house? You'll have to choose."

"I'll opt for Finland," the farmer is said to have replied. "The winters in Finland are not so bad as in Russia."

The man in Kuivajärvi had surely told this apocryphal tale a dozen times before, but he laughed as if it were the first telling. "Of course, the winters are just as bad here as on the other side of the border, but there are some differences between Finland and Russia." He points at a plume of smoke that curls up into the clear Karelian sky on the Russian side of the frontier. The culprit is the huge Soviet-era ore-enrichment plant at Kostomuksha just a few miles over the border. "That doesn't do a lot for the environment," he said, before going on to condemn the Soviet policy of housing people in ugly cement-pannelled, four-story khrushchovkas. "So the odd thing is that nowadays you still find villages on this side of the border that look little changed from the days of the Grand Duchy," he observed. "Here you find Russia preserved in aspic."

It is a relief to arrive in Ilomantsi. One can have too much of dirt roads. And after several hours, one bit of Karelian forest, whichever side of the border you are on, begins to look much like another.

"Welcome to Ilomantsi," said Father Jannis with a friendly smile. He is a young man, Greek by birth. For four years he has served as Ilomantsi's parish priest. His is an Orthodox parish that has truly been fractured by history. The border with Russia has shifted over the years. "But we keep in touch with our Russian neighbors," Father Jannis said. In the early 1920s, two areas east of Ilomantsi, Repola and Porajärvi, begged their Soviet masters to be permitted to join Finland. It wasn't allowed, and the Finnish metsäsissit (forest guerrillas) engaged in short-term terror tactics to reclaim the lands for Finland. It wasn't to be, and now Father Jannis and his parishioners make an annual pilgrimage by boat, rowing over a border lake to meet their Orthodox neighbors on the Russian side of the frontier.

The spirit of nearby Russia is everywhere in the Karelian borderlands of Finland. Newcomer though he is, Father Jannis plays a credible game of kyykkä, Karelia's popular version of skittles and a variant of gorodki played on the Russian side of the border. The region's hallmark Karelian pies (known as karjalanpiirakka in Finland) are equally popular on both sides of the border. And the proximity of Ilomantsi to Russia is revealed in the local habit of referring to the community as a pagosta — from the Russian pogost, meaning a small township in a remote area. The local newspaper is called Pogostan Sanomat (Pogosta News).

Finnish Nostalgia for the East

"Yes, there really is something of the Finnish soul just over that border," said an elderly lady in Ilomansti as we walked along Kirkkotie (Church Lane) towards Ilomantsi's magnificent Orthodox church — a fine wooden building on the edge of town, its exterior decorated in shades of ochre and green recalling the sandy soils and forests all about us. And she was right, for most Finns define their heritage and nationhood not by reference to Sweden, which dominated Finland for the 500 years up to 1809, but in terms of Russia.

The defining icon of Finnish national consciousness is the Kalevala, the epic poem that tells stories of rural life and culture from the shores of the White Sea down to Lake Ladoga.[3] And yet, much of that territory has, ever since Finland emerged as a distinct nation-state in December 1917, not been controlled by Helsinki. And throughout Finland's 94 years of independence, Russia and/or the Soviet Union have challenged its eastern frontier, with Finland ceding Karelian borderlands, the Karelian isthmus and the historic Finnish city of Viipuri (now Vyborg) as a result of the Winter War and World War II. And it lost its access to the Barents Sea in September 1944 when the Petsamo region was also ceded to the Soviet Union.

The Finnish gaze on its lost eastern territories (and on lands further east that were never historically part of Finland) is laced with a heavy dose of nostalgia. Elias Lönnrot had travelled extensively through these regions in the 1830s, gathering material for the Kalevala. Villages were singled out for their ballads and rune singers. Finnish artists of the Romantic movement sketched the simple lives of Karelian villagers. Early photographers like Into Inha came and shot achingly beautiful images of wooden houses, peasant lives and landscapes. Karelianism was inscribed on the Finnish soul and served, both in the last decades of the Grand Duchy and in the years after independence, as a counterpoint to life in a Finland that was industrializing and urbanizing very rapidly.

The Orthodox Church, distinctive styles of rural vernacular architecture (particularly the wooden buildings of Karelia, which in truth used designs common across a great swath of northern Russia), as well as a unique manner of singing, storytelling, cooking and dressing powerfully combine to forge an image of a lost Finland. Thus have the Russian borderlands become the historic Finland of the imagination.

Cross-border Traffic

Since the political changes of 20 years ago, many more Finns have been able to venture over their country's eastern border and seek out Lost Finland. They look for the shadows of old Viipuri in modern Vyborg. They find an old Lutheran church in the coastal town that they still call Koivisto, but which since 1948 Russians have called Primorsk. They find that the villages where Elias Lönnrot first heard many of the poems which inspired the Kalevala have long since disappeared. Kostamus is buried under the sludge ponds of the iron-ore workings at Kostomuksha. Akonlahti suffered the fate of so many small communities in Russia during the Khrushchev period. It was deemed a place without prospects, so in 1958 its population was forcibly moved to dreary khrushchovkas and the traditional wooden Karelian houses of Akonlahti were burnt by Soviet soldiers.

"You learn not to expect too much when you go across the border as often as I do," said a Finnish driver in the short queue for Russian customs at the Värtsilä border post. "There's not a lot of old Karelia to be seen," he explained. Traffic in the opposite direction is busy with Russians flocking over the border. First stop in Finland for many day trippers from Vyborg and
St. Petersburg is Lappeenranta, a small town just ten miles from the frontier with an improbably high density of jewelry shops.

Today's Russians feel very comfortable in Finland. They go to beautiful Hamina (which was first a Swedish and then a Russian garrison town before becoming a Finnish one) for the shopping, but those who wander through the town center find neoclassical civic buildings and one of the finest Orthodox churches in Finland. The overall effect is of a sanitized Russia.

Russians have always seen Finland as a place to relax. The Romanovs used to make excursions from St. Petersburg to the waterfalls at Imatra and a new generation of moneyed Russians follow in the footsteps of the tsars. The only difference is that the falls are not as dramatic nowadays, the flow of the River Vuoksi having been tamed by a hydroelectric power station. Much further north, the winter sports resort of Salla has become a favorite weekend getaway for Russians living in the Murmansk area.

But Helsinki is still the prime attraction, and the city's hotels and restaurants court the lucrative Russian market. Menus and signs are often in both Finnish and Russian. The road from the Russian border is busy with visitors from the East, with many signs reminding them where they can stop to buy fish on the journey home.

At one point the highway from St. Petersburg to Helsinki dips down through the Finnish forest to cross the River Kymi. At the right time of the year, you can watch the salmon leap the rapids here. On the bank of the fast-flowing Kymi is a simple wooden house, an unpretentious place. It was on the steps of this building that Maria Fyodorovna would sometimes sit and peel potatoes. The Empress Consort of Russia could reclaim at Langinkoski a life of simplicity that was denied her at the palaces in Russia's great imperial cities.

When Alexander Alexandrovich and Maria Fyodorovna first came to Langinkoski in 1880, Alexander was not carrying the burdens of office. But his father's assassination the following year changed all that. Langinkoski became a place where Russia's royal family could relax. Alexander was a keen fisherman, and Maria would cook and walk in the woods. Today, the humble holiday home by the Kymi River has been restored to what it was like during the regular summer visits of the tsar and his family. The Imperial Russian Standard, with the double-headed eagle so intimately associated with the Romanovs, still hangs in the living room.

So Finland is not merely a place for Russians to go shopping or to enjoy weekends away in well appointed hotels. Just as Finns look over the Russian border to explore the imagined landscapes of Finnish history, so Russians look to Finland to understand their own past. They go to the Orthodox Church Museum in Kuopio, which has a remarkable collection of artifacts associated with northern European Orthodoxy.[4] And, much to the pleasure of Aimo Minkkinen, they have even discovered the Lenin Museum in Tampere. "Yes," the museum director said. "We have something here that you'd be hard pressed to find in modern Russia." For both Finns and Russians, the past is indeed another country. RL

[1] The Duma was a concession by Tsar Nicholas II to the unrest and strikes of 1905. Its role was defined in the 1905 October Manifesto, which endowed the new Duma with limited legislative powers. [back]

[2] Juho Paasikivi was President of Finland from 1946 to 1956. He was an astute political strategist who had been Finland's representative in Moscow prior to the Second World War and well understood the need for an independent Finland to come to an accommodation with the Soviet Union. [back]

[3] Oxford has published a fine new poetic translation of the Kalevala: amzn.to/finnishepic [back]

[4] The museum is presently closed for refurbishment and will reopen in 2013. The location of the museum is significant. Kuopio, not Helsinki, is the headquarters of the Finnish Orthodox Church. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Karelia and All Finland. [back]