Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
foreign relations, especially with the Soviet
Union. In the Paris peace treaty, Finland lost
about 10% of her surface area, more than 10%
of her industrial and agricultural resources, the
country's second biggest city, Viipuri (Vyborg),
the Petsamo corridor to the Arctic Ocean, and
the tourist islands in the eastern Gulf of Finland.
Further, besides the financial and material repa-
rations paid to the Soviet Union, Finland had to
resettle more than 400,000 inhabitants from the
lost region into a 'mutilated' Finland.
Former Finnish villages, towns (mostly
destroyed), cultural monuments and cemeteries
were left beyond the new border. All these rem-
nants have become tourism attractions for the
generation that left the region and their off-
spring. Nowadays one of the more important
types of tourism to Russia from Finland is com-
prised of 'nostalgia tours' to the lost region of
Karelia. The battlefields of the war have become
resources for military tourism, where especially
war veterans and military historians like to visit
(e.g. the Mannerheim line).
An agreement for mutual cooperation was
concluded with the Soviet Union in 1947, and it
flavoured Finnish-Soviet policy for the next
40 years, a situation that produced the pejora-
tive term 'Finlandisation'. Bilateral trade was
based on annual barter agreements. Soviet exports
to Finland consisted especially of raw materials,
such as fossil energy resources (oil and natural
gas), timber and chemicals. Finland provided
manufactured goods, particularly machinery
products and consumption goods. A special fea-
ture of the barter trade was huge construction
projects.
Tourism was, as in Estonia, strictly con-
trolled, consisting of official delegation visits,
cultural exchanges, and ordinary Finns visiting
St Petersburg as cultural tourist groups - often
motivated by cheap vodka. After the collapse of
the Soviet Union, tourism from Finland slowed
down quite a lot, partly because of uncertainty
and lack of organization. The biggest former
Soviet tour operators owned by the government
or labour unions were split and privatized, and
some 10,000 SMTEs were created in Russia, in
an initially wholly unregulated environment.
Finland's accession to the EU in 1995
changed the instruments of tourism develop-
ment on both sides of the border. Russian
subjects
development projects. Finland, beside her own
'neighbourhood' development funding for
adjacent Russian regions, now also had at her
disposal EU initiatives such as INTERREG for
cross-border cooperation. In the EU, Finland
started to advocate a Northern Dimension pro-
gramme with a strong emphasis on European
Russian policy in the sectors of energy, security,
environment, legislation and health care. Finnish
direct investment in Russia had begun imme-
diately after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mobility across the Finnish-Russian border
has intensified during the last decade. Tourism
from Russia has become more important in
Finnish international tourism than the country's
neighbours. Finns are slowly returning to
St Petersburg, not so much for vodka anymore,
but for cultural and architectural attractions, and
to Russian Karelia as a destination for nostalgia
and military tourists.
Beside tourism, there is emigration from
Russia to Finland. One group of these emigrants
are the 'returnees', the offspring of Finnish Russian
orthodox families who had to move to Russia
from Finland under Swedish rule in the 17th
century. Among the emigrants there are also
members of 'original' Finno-Ugrian tribes living
in Russia. A third group consists of offspring of
the Finns who moved to the Soviet Union after
the 1917 revolution. Ethnic Russians are also
among the newcomers to Finland for family or
employment reasons.
Reflection on Transformations and
EU Enlargement in the Baltic Sea Rim
There are five major implications of the fall of
communism and successive EU enlargement to
be addressed here.
First, the Baltic Sea has become almost an
'inland sea' of the EU. With the break-up of the
Soviet Union and empire, Russia lost the major-
ity of its most effective international harbours
and, consequently, the Gulf of Finland has become
an important logistical corridor for Russian oil,
gas and other bulk exports (Peltonen, 2004,
pp. 101-102). The growing importance of this
Gulf and the whole of the Baltic Sea in Russian
international logistics also has repercussions for
environmental considerations and, for example,
received
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