Finlandia

Several things about our three weeks in Finland were evocative and memorable. There is a mood about the place that is intriguing. (Musical confessional, the mood is helped by listening to Sibelius' Finlandia, which I just paid iTunes for and am now enjoying, along with Sandy who has been a fan of it for years.)

The music is memorable for several reasons. Part of it is the national anthem of Finland (and is a very pleasant musical contrast to other anthems I could mention). Parts of it are in the soundtrack to "The Unknown Soldier" (Tuntematon sotilas) by Edvin Laine, about the war between Finland and the USSR, a little-known part of WW II, where Finland lost the province of Karelia (prominent in the art of Gallen-Kallela and the music of Sibelius) and for many the cultural heart of the nation, to the USSR.

The map shows the part that was lost to the USSR after WWII.

We saw the film on the bus while driving through now Soviet Karelia on the way back from St. Petersburg to Tampere, with the UT-UMN summer course.

We had just stopped in Viipuri or Vyborg, which had been the second largest city in Finland, now a pretty run down, much smaller Russian town, with very few of the original, pre-1944 inhabitants. From the Russian point of view, it was just too close to St. Petersburg and they like as big a land security buffer as they can get.

There is an interesting what if section by one of the Finnish newspapers, Helsingen Sanomat. I quote:
What if...? The 600-year-old former Finnish city of Vyborg would have shaped the whole country

The dilapidated town near St. Petersburg would now be Finland's second largest city and a centre of economy and culture...
at http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20030812IE20

The outcome was certainly tragic for Finland. It was the end of over 1000 years of Finnish occupation (under Sweden, Russia, and independent Finland) and over 400,000 people fled. Those who stayed suffered badly under Stalin, who was very suspicious of them.

So one of the elements in Finnish culture is a sense of the loss of Karelia. I don't know if young people think much about that there now, but the ones over fifty or so that I talked to certainly did.

A related intriguing piece of Finnish history is their uneasy position between east and west. Although Finland is very successfully integrated into the EU, with a high tech economy that beats much of the rest of the EU, there is relatively little support for joining NATO, unlike Poland or some of the other former Warsaw pact ex-allies of the old USSR. Living next to a very large, periodically aggressive Russian bear is not the easiest thing in the world.

It reminds me a bit of the traditional lament in Mexico, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States." In fact, where I live in Texas used to belong to Mexico, which we don't always manage to remember. And (Anglo) Texans have frequently not treated "Mexicans" in Texas very well, even when their ancestors had been there for generations. It is far from the scale of Stalin, his executions, camps and massive expulsions or forced migrations of ethnic minorities in the USSR, but we could do much better.

More to come on Finland.