I arrive in Helsinki on June 18 for a six-week stay. I’m close to the end of a book I’ve been working on for more than a year, and I want a bolt-hole where I can complete a draft. I choose Helsinki because I’ve not been there before, because I know no one there, and because I don’t know any Finnish. I’ll be able, I think, to write for half of each day and explore the city for the other half. I hope, too, for light. Helsinki at the summer solstice has only a few hours between sunset and sunrise, and even those are reputed to be radiant, tinged with indigo. For the rest of the day, the light should be clear and intense. For reasons I can’t quite formulate, these seem like good conditions for bringing a book to completion.
Less than a week after I move into the apartment I’ve rented in Helsinki’s Kallio neighborhood, it appears that Russia might be about to collapse into civil war. Mercenary troops under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who have been fighting for Russia in Ukraine, are on the road to Moscow. The threat to the Putin regime seems real enough that heavy machinery is deployed to break up Moscow’s perimeter roads so as to make the entry of armored vehicles into that city more difficult. Some Russian panjandrums, perhaps including Putin himself, appear to leave the city.
This would have been exciting enough had I been at home in America, but in Helsinki it’s especially interesting because the city is only a little more than one hundred miles from the Russian border, and because Russia has been a large and mostly malign presence in Finland’s past. The territory we now call Finland was, from 1809 to 1917, a Grand Duchy of Imperial Russia. Finnish independence in 1917 was accompanied by violence and intertwined with the conflict between Reds and Whites following the Russian revolution. There was a bloody war between independent Finland and Soviet Russia between 1939 and 1940; and although Finland succeeded in maintaining independence from Soviet Russia then and after, doing so required compromises. The territorial expansions of Putin’s Russia, most recently the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, have intensified the sense of threat and uncertainty on the part of those countries that border Russia—and Finland has the longest land border with Russia of any European country.
I am exercised, then, by the events of June 23 and 24. The Finnish authorities make reassuring noises: there is, they say, no sign of threat to Finnish territorial integrity, and Finland has no stake in whatever is going on in Russia. Events play out, puzzlingly: Prigozhin’s troops retreat; some deal is done; the Putin regime stands. Late on June 23, I ask the clerk (thirtyish, much tattooed) in the store where I’ve been buying my groceries what he thinks of events in Russia that day. He replies, “I have no care for Russia; Russians can go fuck themselves.” It’s hard for me to know how representative his view is. But certainly the city is behaving as usual: the midsummer festival is that same weekend, and the internal uncertainties of Putin’s Russia do not, so far as I can tell, affect the celebrations at all.
The disturbance in Russia happens as the war in Ukraine continues, a war begun by Russian aggression and sustained in large part by American dollars and equipment. This war seems to have been the principal reason why Finland finally sought full membership in NATO in 2022 and received it in April 2023. For decades before that Finns had been ambivalent about NATO, and sometimes strongly opposed to joining it. That ambivalence belongs to a strong Finnish commitment to a heavily armed neutrality during the Cold War. But that began to change following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the invasion of Ukraine has completed the change: Finns now support full membership in NATO by a significant majority.
The U.S. government’s delight at Finland’s joining NATO is publicly signaled at the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, and then sealed by President Biden’s visit to Helsinki on July 12 and 13, immediately following that summit. This is during the fourth week of my time in Helsinki. I catch, by accident, the tail of the presidential motorcade into the city late on the twelfth, and then seek out a prime spot for viewing the motorcade back out to the airport the following day. The route is lined with police and squads of unbearably young Finnish soldiers; a helicopter tracks it above; near the central railway station, where I’m watching, hundreds of locals and tourists raise their cell phones in a quasi-liturgical gesture of commemoration. We are silent before the spectacle of the fifty-two-vehicle motorcade (I counted). I think I see Biden himself, waving from inside the heavily armored limousine they call “the beast,” but it’s difficult to be sure, and perhaps my imagination is working overtime.
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