ClubOrlov: Communities that abide: Finland

ClubOrlov

[This week we continue the series with an article on Finland, by Eerik Wissenz. Few people know that before Russia came to exist as a country, and for many centuries after, communities of Finns were widely distributed over what is now Russian Federation territory, surviving mostly by hunting and fishing, and not making much of an impact. The Finnish way of relating to the land, which Eerik describes in this article, is nothing new: it is at least a thousand years old.

I have a strong personal connection to Finland, having grown up in Karelia, on Finnish territory which came to be annexed by the USSR during the winter of 1939-40. Due to a disasterous misreading of the operetta-like Finnish politics of the period, in which self-styled “communists” and “socialists” battled self-styled “fascists” over numerous pints of beer, Stalin had become frightened by the possibility that the real Fascists (i.e., German Nazi) troops would use Finnish territory to put themselves within artillery range of Leningrad (which they later did anyway). The war was a disaster for both sides.

Now, over 70 years later, peace reigns and a curious reversal has taken place. Every year, thousands of Russians stream across the border into Finland (a five-hour drive from St. Petersburg) and pay quite a lot of money to enjoy what Karelia once offered them for the price of a cheap railway ticket. Karelia has been fenced in, the remainder of it trashed, and the few resorts to which the public can still gain access are outrageously priced. The place where I grew up, called Kellomäki before the war and renamed Komarovo afterwards, used to consist of piny woods filled with clusters of cottages, many of them unfenced, and people walked diagonally across the woods on footpaths that snaked between the cottages rather than taking the long way along the streets. Now Komarovo is crisscrossed by tunnel-like paved streets that run between endless, featureless fences that one can't see through or over. Walk beyond the walls and into the surrounding unfenced woods, and you will find them full of trash and construction debris. This is the new Russia: over the course of Western-inspired economic liberalization and privatization during the 1990s the Russian commons has been savaged. And the places that most resemble the one where I grew up are now across the border, in the supposedly “capitalist” Finland.

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