Foreign News: Sisu

HELSINKI, host to the Olympic Games, a city of 400,000, was abustle. Shop shelves were heavy with wares. Flaxen-haired girls in bright print frocks ate ice cream in the Mannerheiminiie. In the busy streets, pedestrians hailed taxis and visitors alike with their “Hej!” (pronounced hay), which, like America’s “Hi!”, serves equally as well as a greeting, a toast, or a bid for attention.

Many of this week’s visitors (see SPORT) were as interested in seeing how Finland, in the role of little David, stands off the big Goliath on its right, as in watching slim young men in gym suits do the running broad jump. They saw little in Helsinki to remind them of a menace ever present. As in West Berlin, the people who live closest to danger are calmest about it. Less than a dozen miles from spotless, gleaming Helsinki itself, Russian guns firmly emplaced on Finnish soil are ready, if necessary, to reduce the pale architectural spectrum of Finland’s capital to rubble. “Please don’t write about that,” a Finnish civil servant told a TIME correspondent in Helsinki last week. “We in Finland never mention Porkkala.”

Porkkala is the name of a 150-sq. mi. enclave just west of Helsinki (see map) that Finland was forced to “lease” to Stalin by the Russian-dictated peace treaty of 1947. There on Finnish soil, behind a secrecy no Finn is al lowed to penetrate, the Russians maintain a division of troops and train their long-range guns on the water lanes to Leningrad. The Russians allow Finnish trains from Helsinki to Turku to pass through Porkkala, but Russian locomotives (actually U.S.-made, sent under lend-lease) pull them, and the windows are sealed with sheet steel on the trip through the fortified zone.

There are other indignities forced upon them by victorious Russia: Petsamo (Pechenga) in the north and timber-rich Finnish Karelia on the east, both annexed by Russia in 1944. The Finns prefer to think and talk of the land they have left, vast (130,000 sq. mi.), rugged and beautiful, stretching high into the Arctic, where the sun shines day & night in summertime. It is a land of 60,000 gleaming lakes set in dark forests that sprawl over 80,000 square miles, a land of granite-strewn farms stingy in yield, of busy, sober towns and endless stretches of bleak, inhospitable marsh and tundra. “We gave them 17,000 square miles of our territory and perhaps a quarter of our national wealth after the war,” explained a Helsinki editor last week. “But we will close our eyes to all the little slights and sacrifices as long as we can preserve the essence of our in dependence.” “Dollar-Type.” A nation of northern ostriches? Far from it. The Finns are not stupidly hiding their eyes from their future, but they are determined not to fall into another fight with a powerful and predatory next-door neighbor 66 times their size (in area, Finland is the sixth largest country in Europe; in population it is the third smallest). Under popular, 81-year-old President Juho Kusti Paasikivi and able, unpopular Agrarian Premier Urho Kekkonen, the Finns have learned to walk the nerve-racking path of independence like tight-rope walkers.

In free Finland, editorial writers may say what they like about Russia, but they carefully think before saying it. The cafe arguer may damn Stalin to his heart’s content, but he makes a joke instead. Finland’s President proclaims publicly in the bleak tones of a bank examiner: “Our relations with Russia are friendly.” In private he says wistfully, “Finland is a Western nation.” Finland refused Marshall Plan aid on the ground that that would be entering an alliance against Russia, but it accepted a U.S. loan. When a newsman remarked that this was a pretty fine distinction, Premier Kekkonen replied: “Well, we live on fine distinctions.” A Finnish reporter recently described his country’s new, elongated currency as “dollar-type,” referring only to its size and shape. His editor blue-penciled the phrase : “We don’t want to be needlessly offensive to the Russians.”

Yet, four years ago, when Finland’s Communists (a smaller group proportionally than those in France or Italy) were on the point of launching a full-blown Czech-type coupled by Minister of the Interior Leino, Finland’s government fired the treacherous minister and ruthlessly purged all Reds from his police force. It was the boldest anti-Red gesture made by any free country in Europe since the war, but Moscow said not a word.

Paid in Full. At the armistice of September 1944, Russia handed vanquished Finland the stiffest reparations bill in recorded history, about 11% of her national income for eight years. The bill was carefully itemized. One-third was to be paid in the woodworking products which made up 80% of Finland’s export earnings. Another third was to be paid in ships and cables, for which Finland would have to build new yards and import vast quantities of raw materials. The remaining third was to be paid in the products of heavy industry, for which Finland possessed neither the plants nor the material.

Russia’s extortionate demands were based solely on the fact that she needed these items. How Finland, without iron, coal or heavy industry, was to produce them was Finland’s worry. Aware that failure meant Russian occupation, bruised and battered Finland went to work, mobilized her depleted manpower, rationed her resources, her food, her living space and her energy, built plants and bought raw materials. By the end of this year, she will have paid the staggering bill in full.

SSS. The Finnish 1,000-mark bill is engraved with a picture from mythology showing a band of naked people standing on a shore and looking wistfully out to sea. Finns today joke that the picture shows them waving to the last reparation ship. It is only a joke, however, for industrious Finland has emerged from doing the impossible, not naked and bankrupt, but riding on a wave of prosperity. Last year the sky-high prices for lumber and pulp all over the world sparked an export boom that more than doubled Finland’s gold reserves and gave her a whopping $135 million (31 billion Finnmark) trade surplus.

Prices have risen, but wages have risen much faster. A characteristically Scandinavian form of socialism (social security and worker welfare rather than nationalization) has eased the worker’s lot everywhere. In Valkeakoski, one privately owned staple fiber factory provides lakeside homes for its workers, helpers for their wives when ill, fresh meat and vegetables from its own farms for their tables, a steamer for excursions, a hall for their drama society, an orchestra, a chess-club and an 89-bed hospital.

Against such competition, Finland’s Communist Party, counting 16% of the national vote but virtually leaderless except for a spinsterish, twice-divorced Nordic Ana Pauker named Hertta Kuusinen,* has only barely held its own. Nevertheless, along 800 miles of Russo-Finnish frontier, the Russian bear still lurks, all set to pounce. Why doesn’t he? “Why kill the cow you are milking?” say some sardonic Finns, but that is not the whole answer. Alone of all Russia’s next-door neighbors, Finland has stayed outside the Iron Curtain.

“All of Finland,” said a Finn last week, “can be found in three S’s—the sauna, the schnapps and sisu.” The sauna is the hardy Finn’s favorite form of relaxation: a bath in superheated steam followed by a brisk beating with sharp twigs and a plunge into icy water. Schnapps is the national drink, a potent pick-me-up that can turn a stolid Scandinavian into a feral dervish. Sisu, a word old in the Finnish language, is mystic and untranslatable; roughly it means guts. It denotes the Finn’s ability to pay his debts, to rout his enemies, to beat the odds on any bet without fuss or furor. Sisu is Finland’s answer to Communism.

*Whose Finland-born father, Oato Kuusinen, is deputy chairman of the Presidium of Russians Supreme Soviet.