Finland: Making the Best of Deference

Pressures and profits of a special relationship with the Soviets

The editorial in Pravda last Friday was as unsubtle as it was intrusive. It noted that Finland (pop. 4.8 million) must choose a new President in January to succeed Urho Kekkonen, 81, who stepped down from the office last month after 25 years, for reasons of ill health. Then the Soviet Communist Party’s official newspaper baldly proclaimed its own favorite candidate for Kekkonen’s job: Ahti Karjalainen, 58, acting president of the Bank of Finland, a member of Kekkonen’s Center Party and a onetime protege of the ex-President.

The endorsement was carefully timed for the opening of the Center Party’s nominating convention. With the party split almost evenly between Karjalainen and the current Speaker of the Finnish Parliament, Johannes Virolainen, 67, Moscow obviously was trying to swing a few votes. Said Pravda: “This party is confronted with the most important decision in its entire history.”

The graceless Soviet nudging provided a stark example of the workings of “Finlandization,” the pejorative term for Finland’s deferential relationship with the colossus next door. Kekkonen, who energetically supported the policy, called it “active neutrality.” But to many Westerners, it has come to signify abject neutrality—or what happens to a lightly armed, nonaligned country in close proximity to the Soviet Union. According to some worst-case scenarios, all of Western Europe would be prone to Finlandization if it unilaterally scrapped the protection of its own and U.S. nuclear arms.

In Finland’s case, neutrality means following Moscow’s lead in foreign affairs. Helsinki has responded warmly to the latest Soviet drive for a nuclear-free zone in Scandinavia. Finnish diplomats were conspicuously silent at the United Nations when that organization condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soviet human rights abuses at home are never criticized publicly in Finland, even though Helsinki was the site of the 1975 international conference that finally wrote human rights observance into accords between the Soviet Union and the West.

Finland’s economic relationship with the U.S.S.R. is complex, intimate and highly profitable for the Finns. Under special trade treaties drawn up every five years, Finno-Soviet economic ties have taken on an almost mercantilistic flavor. About two-thirds of Finland’s oil conies from the Soviet Union, which in turn provides Finland with its largest export market. This year the U.S.S.R. is expected to take 24.6% of all Finnish exports. Under a special agreement, Finland pays for its Soviet oil not with money but with manufactured goods, machinery and construction services. As one result, Finland for the past two years has shown economic growth rates of 7.2% and 5.3% respectively, well above the average for the 24 industrialized countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Says Leila Lotti, 36, research director for the Finnish branch of the Gallup poll organization: “America just doesn’t understand our trade with the Soviet Union. It’s helped Finland out tremendously.”

The tight-lipped and occasionally melancholic Finns insist that their acquiescence to the Soviets is widely misunderstood abroad. “We are a fiercely independent people,” says Matti Khova, managing director of a private Finnish economic research group. “You cannot hurt a Finn more than by saying he is dependent on the Soviet Union.” The Finns, who lost two wars and 12% of their national territory to the Soviets between 1939 and 1945, claim that they are simply being “realistic” in their relations with Moscow. As one prominent politician puts it, “When it’s useless to do something, we don’t do such things.”

Possibly as a consequence of such attitudes, cynicism runs deep in Finnish society. Typically, the most popular television serial in the country in recent years was a rendition of The Good Soldier Schweik, the Czechoslovak tale of an apparently dim peasant-soldier who fumbles through World War I, surviving while giving the impression of following orders. Last month 120,000 Finns marched in 54 cities and towns during one of the largest peace demonstrations in the country’s history. Even so, pacific sentiment has not taken hold as it has in other Western European countries. Explains a student at the University of Helsinki: “The peace movement in this country has tended to be monopolized by the far left, seen as a thing of Communist propaganda. They talk about peace all the time, and no one believes them.” When the country’s leading pacifist, Ulla Gyllenberg, tried to encourage Finns to place lighted candles in their windows as a pacifist gesture, the project fizzled. Explained a Finnish journalist: “We only put candles in our windows for one thing, to demonstrate our independence from Russia on Independence Day” (Dec. 6; for a century ending in 1917 Finland was a grand duchy of imperial Russia).

An undercurrent of Russophobia runs through the country. Says a Finnish grandmother whose husband died fighting against the Russians: “I can’t help thinking of them as enemies.” Businessmen frequently complain that they cannot find enough Russian-speaking employees to meet their needs. Says Pentti Somerto, managing director of the Finnish Employers’ Confederation: “Young people feel it is not patriotic to learn Russian.” By contrast, 92% of Finns study English as a second language. Helsinki is shamelessly Western, a triumph of capitalistic materialism, replete with Cartier jewelry and Sassoon-trained hairstylists.

Ambivalence about Soviet patronage is a permeating fact of Finnish life, one that is not likely to change soon. Nor will the country’s relationship with the Soviets, no matter who is elected President in January. As one Western diplomatic observer puts it, “Kekkonen anticipated Soviet objections for so long, it became a habit.” The habit is one the Finns show little inclination of wanting—or daring—to break.

—By George Russell. Reported by D.L. Coutu/Helsinki