Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Read online

  • the problem of achieving reconciliation (especially after a crisis involving a war or mass killings) between parties that were in conflict—reconciliation either between groups within a country, or else between a country and its neighbors.

  To begin to address these questions, the next chapter will present the first of my two examples of national crises that were triggered abruptly by an attack or a threatened attack by another country. We shall see that Finland, the delights of whose language played such a big role in my personal crisis of 1959, will illustrate many of our factors related to outcomes of national crises.

  PART 2

  NATIONS: CRISES THAT UNFOLDED

  FIG. 2 Map of Finland

  CHAPTER 2

  FINLAND’S WAR WITH THE SOVIET UNION

  Visiting Finland—Language—Finland until 1939—The Winter War—The Winter War’s end—The Continuation War—After 1945—Walking a tightrope—Finlandization—Crisis framework

  Finland is the Scandinavian (Nordic) country of only 6 million people that borders Sweden to the west and Russia to the east. In the century before World War One it was just an autonomous part of Russia, not an independent nation. It was poor and received little attention within Europe, and almost no attention outside Europe. At the outset of World War Two, Finland was independent but still poor, with an economy still focused on agriculture and forest products. Today, Finland is known around the world for its technology and its industry and has become one of the world’s richest countries, with an average per-capita income comparable to that of Germany and Sweden. Its security rests on a glaring paradox: it is a liberal social democracy that for many decades maintained an excellent and trusting relationship with the communist former Soviet Union, and now with current autocratic Russia. That combination of features constitutes a remarkable example of selective change.

  If you are visiting Finland for the first time, and you want to understand the Finnish people and their history, a good place to begin is by visiting Hietaniemi Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Finland’s capital city of Helsinki. Unlike the United States, which buries its soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington and in other separate veterans’ cemeteries around the country, Finland does not have separate military cemeteries. Instead, Finland’s fallen soldiers are brought home to be buried in the civilian cemeteries of their town or parish. A large section of Hietaniemi Cemetery is devoted to dead soldiers from Helsinki. They hold a place of honor there, just uphill from the graves of Finland’s presidents and other political leaders, and around the monument to Finland’s Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1867–1951).

  As you approach Hietaniemi Cemetery, the first thing that you’ll notice is that you can’t understand the street signs and the billboards at all (Plate 2.1). In almost every other European country, even if you don’t know the language, you’ll be able to recognize some words, because most European languages belong to the Indo-European language family that includes English, and all Indo-European languages share many word roots. Even in Lithuania and Poland and Iceland you’ll be able to recognize some words on street signs and billboards. But Finnish words will mostly be unrecognizable to you, because Finnish is one of the few languages in Europe that is totally unrelated to the Indo-European language family.

  The next thing that will strike you at Hietaniemi Cemetery is the simplicity and beauty of its design. Finland is world-famous for its architects and decorators, who know how to produce beautiful effects in simple ways. On my first visit to Finland, I remember being invited into the living room of one of my host’s homes, and immediately thinking to myself, “This is the most beautiful room that I’ve ever seen!” On reflection, I then wondered why I found it so beautiful, because the room was a nearly-empty cubicle with just a few pieces of simple furniture. But the materials and form of the room, and those few pieces of furniture, were typically Finnish in their simplicity and beauty.

  You may then be shocked by the number of dead Finnish soldiers buried or remembered at Hietaniemi. I counted more than 3,000 named tombstones of soldiers whose bodies had been recovered, arranged in curving row upon row. Setting off that cemetery section with named tombstones was a wall about four feet high and several hundred feet long, divided into 55 panels filled with the names of more soldiers—I counted 715—who were listed as “missing,” because their bodies could not be recovered and brought back. Still another collective monument with no names on it recalls all the uncounted Finnish soldiers who died in enemy prisons. But all of those dead soldiers at Hietaniemi were just from Helsinki; similar sections are devoted to dead soldiers in every town and parish cemetery in Finland. You’ll be starting to realize that lots of Finns must have been killed in war.

  As you walk among Hietaniemi’s gravestones, you’ll be struck by the writing on them. Again, you won’t be able to understand much of the writing, because it is in Finnish. But most gravestones anywhere, in any language, record the name of the dead person, the person’s birthdate and birthplace, and the date and place of death. That format is easy to recognize on the gravestones even in that Finnish cemetery. You’ll notice that all of the dates of death are between 1939 and 1944, during World War Two. The majority of the dates of birth are in the 1920’s and 1910’s, which means that most of those soldiers died while in their 20’s, as you’d expect. But you’ll be surprised to see that there also were many soldiers killed in their 50’s, or while still young teenagers. For instance, Johan Viktor Pahlsten’s gravestone records that he was born on August 4, 1885 and was killed on August 15, 1941, 11 days after his 56th birthday. Klara Lappalainen was born on July 30, 1888; she was killed on October 19, 1943 at the age of 55. At the other extreme, the schoolboy Lauri Martti Hämäläinen was born on July 22, 1929, volunteered to fight, and was killed on June 15, 1943 at the age of 13, five weeks short of his 14th birthday. Why was Finland calling up as soldiers not just the usual 20-year-olds, but also men and women in their 50’s plus young teenagers (Plate 2.2)?

  As you read the dates and places of death recorded on the gravestones, you’ll notice that deaths were concentrated in a few time periods and locations. The largest number of deaths occurred from late February to early March of 1940, then in August 1941, and then again in June and August of 1944. Many of the places of death are recorded as Viipuri, or at several sites that a Finnish friend can identify for you as being near Viipuri, such as Syväri, Kannas, and Ihantola. That will make you wonder: what was the big deal about Viipuri, and why did so many Finns get killed there within such short time spans?

  The explanation is that Viipuri used to be the second-largest city of Finland until it was ceded to the Soviet Union, along with one-tenth of the total area of Finland, after a ferocious war in the winter of 1939–1940, plus a second war from 1941 to 1944. In October 1939 the Soviet Union made territorial demands on four Baltic countries: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finland was the only country that refused those demands, despite the Soviet Union having an enormous army and a population almost 50 times larger than that of Finland. The Finns nevertheless put up such a fierce resistance that they succeeded in preserving their independence, even though their nation’s survival remained in grave doubt through a series of crises lasting a decade. The heaviest casualties were incurred during the three peak periods evidenced by the tombstones, as the Soviet army closed in on Viipuri in February–March 1940, then as the Finns recaptured Viipuri in August 1941, and finally as the Soviet army advanced again upon Viipuri in the summer of 1944 (Plates 2.3, 2.4).

  Finland’s death toll in its war against the Soviet Union was nearly 100,000, mostly men. To modern Americans and Japanese and non-Finnish Europeans, who remember the nearly instantaneous death tolls of 100,000 each in the bombings of single cities (Hiroshima and Hamburg and Tokyo), and the total war deaths of around 20 million each suffered by the Soviet Union and China during World War Two, Finland’s death toll of just 100,000 over the course of five years may seem modest. But it represented 2
½% of Finland’s then-total population of 3,700,000, and 5% of its males. That proportion is the same as if 9,000,000 Americans were to be killed in a war today: almost 10 times the total number of American deaths in all the wars of our 240-year history. My most recent visit to Hietaniemi Cemetery was on Sunday, May 14, 2017. Even though the last death commemorated in Hietaniemi’s military section had occurred more than 70 years previously (in 1944), I saw fresh flowers on many graves, and families walking among the graves. I stopped to chat with a family of four, of whom the oldest was a man who appeared to be in his 40’s. That meant that the fallen soldier whose grave that family was visiting couldn’t have been their parent, but must have been their grandparent or great-grandparent. When I commented to the man on the continued visits, remembrance, and fresh flowers, he explained, “Every Finnish family lost family members then.”

  My first visit to Finland was in the summer of 1959. That was only 15 years after the end of Finland’s war with the Soviet Union, and only four years after the Soviet Union had evacuated its military base on Finnish soil on the outskirts of Helsinki. My Finnish hosts were veterans, widows, and children of the war against the Soviet Union, plus Finnish soldiers on active duty. They recounted to me their own life stories and their country’s recent history. I learned enough of the wonderful Finnish language to make my way around as a tourist, to appreciate how the language contributes to Finland’s sense of uniqueness, and to precipitate my own life crisis that I described in the previous chapter. For those of you readers who haven’t had the good fortune to visit Finland, some features of my book’s framework of crisis and change to keep in mind as you read the following account include: the strength and origins of Finnish national identity; Finns’ ultra-realistic assessment of their country’s geopolitical situation; the resulting paradoxical combination of selective changes that I mentioned in my opening paragraph; and Finland’s lack of freedom of choice, lack of help received from allies at crucial moments, and lack of available successful models.

  Finland identifies with Scandinavia and is considered part of Scandinavia. Many Finns are blue-eyed blonds, like Swedes and Norwegians. Genetically, Finns are in effect 75% Scandinavian like Swedes and Norwegians, and only 25% invaders from the east. But geography, language, and culture make Finns different from other Scandinavians, and they are proud of those differences. As for geography, descriptions of Finland by Finns reiterate two themes: “We are a small country,” and “Our geography will never change.” By the latter phrase, Finns mean that Finland’s land border with Russia (or with Russia’s previous incarnation as the Soviet Union) is longer than that of any other European country. Finland is in effect a buffer zone between Russia and the rest of Scandinavia.

  Out of the nearly 100 native languages of Europe, all are related members of the Indo-European language family except for the isolated Basque language and four others. Those four are Finnish, the closely related Estonian language, and the distantly related Hungarian and Lapp (Saami) languages, all of which belong to the Finno-Ugric language family. Finnish is a beautiful language, and the focus of Finland’s national pride and identity. Finland’s national epic poem, the Kalevala, holds an even bigger place in Finland’s national consciousness than do the plays of Shakespeare for English-speakers. To outsiders, Finnish is not only a beautiful language with a singing quality, but also a very difficult one to learn. One thing that makes it difficult is its vocabulary, because its words don’t have familiar Indo-European roots. Instead, most Finnish words have to be memorized one by one.

  The other things that make Finnish difficult are its sounds and its grammar. The letter k is very common in Finnish: of the 200 pages of my Finnish-to-English dictionary, 31 pages are for words beginning with k. (Try savoring these lines from the Kalevala: “Kullervo, Kalervon poika, sinisukka äijön lapsi, hivus keltainen, korea, kengän kauto kaunokainen.”) I have nothing against k’s—but, alas, Finnish, unlike English, has double consonants (like kk) pronounced differently from single consonants (like k). That was the feature of Finnish pronunciation that made it hardest for my tolerant Finnish hosts to understand me on the few occasions when I gave short speeches in Finnish. The consequences of failing to pronounce single and double consonants distinctly can be serious. For instance, the Finnish verb meaning “to meet” is “tapaa” with a single p, while the verb “to kill” is “tappaa” with a double p. Hence if you ask a Finn to meet you but you mistakenly double the p, you may end up dead.

  Finnish also has what are called short vowels and long vowels. For instance, the word for border is “raja” with a short first a, but the word for leg or arm is “raaja” with a long first a, and that caused me to be misunderstood when I was near the border of a Finnish national park and mistakenly lengthened the first a in my attempt to talk about the border. Three Finnish vowels, a and o and u, exist in two forms, pronounced either in the back or in the front of the mouth, and written, respectively, as a and ä, o and ö, and u and y. Within a single word, all three of those vowels must either be back vowels or else front vowels; that’s termed vowel harmony. For example, the Finnish word for “night,” which I had frequent occasion to use in saying “good night,” has only front vowels (“yötä”), while the word for “riverbed” has only back vowels (“uoma”).

  If you find yourself confused by the four cases of the German language or the six cases of the Latin language, you’ll be horrified to know that the Finnish language has 15 cases, many of which replace prepositions in English. One of the most delightful hours of my first visit to Finland came when a Finnish soldier, who spoke no English and could communicate with me only in Finnish, taught me the six Finnish locative cases (replacing the English prepositions on, off, onto, in, out of, into) by pointing to a table (“pöytä”) on which (“pöydällä”: vowel harmony!) was a cup and in which (“pöydässä”) was a nail, and by moving the cup onto (“pöydälle”) and off of (“pöydältä”) the table, and driving the nail into (“pöytään”) and out of (“pöydästä”) the table.

  Among the other cases, the two that foreigners find most confusing are the accusative and the partitive cases. In Latin and German, which lack a partitive case, all direct objects are expressed with the accusative case: “I hit the ball” in English is “ich schlage den Ball” in German. But in Finnish, whenever you use a direct object, you have to decide whether your verb is doing something to the whole object (requiring the accusative case) or to only a part of the object (requiring the partitive case). It may be easy to decide whether you are hitting the whole ball or hitting only a part of the ball. But it’s harder to decide whether to use the accusative case or the partitive case in Finnish when you have an abstract noun. For example, if you have an idea, the Finnish language requires you to decide whether you are having the whole idea or only part of the idea, because that determines whether it is correct to use the accusative case or the partitive case. One of my Finnish hosts in 1959 was a Swedish Finn whose home language was Swedish but who was fluent in Finnish. Nevertheless, he couldn’t get a job from any government agency in Finland, because all Finnish government jobs require passing exams in both the Finnish and the Swedish languages. My friend told me that if, in the 1950’s, you made only a single mistake in choosing between the accusative case and the partitive case, you flunked the exam and couldn’t get a government job.

  All of those features contribute to making the Finnish language distinctive, beautiful, a source of national pride, and spoken by almost no one other than Finns themselves. The Finnish language formed the core of the Finnish national identity for which so many Finns were willing to die in their war against the Soviet Union.

  Other central pieces of Finland’s national identity are its music composers, its architects and designers, and its long-distance runners. The Finnish musician Jean Sibelius is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Finnish architects and interior designers are renowned worldwide. (American readers will think of the St. Louis Arch, Dulles Ai
rport outside Washington, and the TWA terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport, all of them designed by the Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen.) After World War One, when many new countries (including Finland) were created by the victorious Allies, Finland stood out because of Sibelius and Finland’s most famous record-setting long-distance runner, Paavo Nurmi, nicknamed the Flying Finn. In the 1924 Olympic Games he won and set an Olympic record in the 1,500-meter race, then again in the 5,000-meter race an hour later; then he won the 10,000-meter cross-country race two days later; then he won the 3,000-meter race on the next day. He held the world record in the mile for eight years. That gave rise to the saying that Nurmi and other Finnish runners “ran Finland onto the world map.” All of those achievements also contributed to Finns’ awareness of their distinctiveness, their national identity, and their willingness to fight the Soviets against overwhelming odds.

  Speakers of a proto-Finnish language arrived in Finland in prehistorical times, several thousand years ago. In historical times, i.e., after the first detailed written accounts of Finland began to be recorded around AD 1100, possession of Finland was contested between Sweden and Russia. Finland remained mostly under Swedish control until it was annexed by Russia in 1809. For most of the 19th century, Russia’s tsars let Finland have much autonomy, its own parliament, its own administration, and its own currency, and they didn’t impose the Russian language. But after Nicholas II became tsar in 1894 and appointed as governor a nasty man called Bobrikov (assassinated by a Finn in 1904), Russian rule became oppressive. Hence towards the end of World War One, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in late 1917, Finland declared its independence.