Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
LENIN IN FINLAND
One man who spent plenty of time in Finland was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, father of the Rus-
sian Revolution. Having had a Finnish cellmate during his exile in Siberia, he then regu-
larly visited the country for conferences of the Social Democratic Party, meeting Stalin
for the first time at one of them. Lenin lived near Helsinki in 1907 before he was forced to
flee the Russian Empire. In a Hollywood-style escape, he jumped off a moving train to
avoid tsarist agents, and was then sheltered in Turku, before being moved to remote is-
land communities in the southwest. Lenin found shelter on Parainen, but fearing capture,
he walked across thin ice with a local guide to Nauvo (there's a famous painting of this in
the Hermitage in St Petersburg), from where he finally jumped on a steamer to Stock-
holm.
Lenin entered Finland again via Tornio in 1917. After the abortive first revolution, he lived
in a tent for a while in Iljitsevo, before going back to Russia and his date with destiny.
Lenin, even before having visited Finland, had agitated for Finnish independence, a con-
viction which he maintained. In December 1917, he signed the declaration of Finnish inde-
pendence; without his support, it is doubtful that the nation would have been born at that
time.
You can learn more about Lenin in Finland at the Lenin-Museo in Tampere.
The Cold War
The year of the Helsinki Olympics, 1952, was also the year that Finland completed paying
its heavy war reparations to the Soviet Union. Mostly paid in machinery and ships, they in
fact had a positive effect, as they established the heavy engineering industry that eventu-
ally stabilised the Finnish postwar economy.
Finnish society changed profoundly during this period. In the 1940s the population was
still predominantly agricultural, but the privations of the war, which sent people to the
towns and cities in search of work, as well as the influx of nearly half a million Karelian
refugees, sparked an acute housing crisis. Old wooden town centres were demolished to
make way for apartment blocks, and new suburbs appeared almost overnight around Hel-
sinki; conversely, areas in the north and east lost most of their young people (often half
their population) to domestic emigration.
From the end of the war until the early 1990s, the overriding political issue was a famil-
iar one: balance between East and West. Stalin's 'friendship and cooperation' treaty of
