Russia - or the Soviet Union - is portrayed in three new novels published in autumn 2004, either as historical surroundings or a central factor in the narrative. Fictional Finns cross the border - with illusions or with a mission. Jarmo Papinniemi takes a critical look.

The intertwined history of Finland and Russia is a history of contradictions. Finland has fought many wars with its eastern neighbour and lost territory. After the Second World War and the Finnish Continuation War, which ended in 1944, came a period of official 'friendship and cooperation' with the Soviet Union, during which many benefited politically and perhaps even more economically.
     But during the tenure of president Urho Kekkonen (1956-1981), many also fell silent or were silenced: criticism of official foreign policy was hardly even possible. After 1991, critique of the Soviet Union and Russia, as well as reassessment and criticism of Urho Kekkonen's person and significance has been lively. Russia and the Soviet Union also make a strong showing in new Finnish literature.

Raija Oranen (born 1948), an author of popular television series and historical novels, reckons with her own past in her novel Kohtauspaikka Marinad ('Rendezvous Marinad', Teos, 2004). She belonged to the vocal youth movement that in the 1970s was agitating for the communist revolution in Finland. The novel's main character recounts that she chose communism because, according to her observation, 'the most interesting, gifted, knowledgeable, insightful and attractive people in all parties belong to the left-wing.'
     Oranen works through the Finnish -Soviet Union trauma with the help of irony. She depicts the youth who were swept up by communism as misled idealists who believed that 'the achievements of the Soviet Union were lovely, although they were less significant than the West's; nevertheless, they were the achievements of socialism. Even the carpet in a Soviet Union train was special, different from other rugs - it was a socialist carpet.'
     The novel's vantage point in history is the year 1991, when the world followed the collapse of the Soviet Union via live television broadcasts. It is at this moment that the main character also discovers that her ex-husband has been a Soviet agent. The main character's moral bewilderment is followed by a struggle which she inevitably wins: the author afflicts this man who had believed in the communist revolution with a crushing illness that takes him to his grave as the Soviet Union crumbles under the weight of its own impossibility.
     Moralising and circumstantially unavoidable hindsight also intermingle with the irony Oranen directs at herself. In terms of its internal attitudes, her novel is as strictly aligned with the spirit of our time as can be: the Finnish communist leaders who clung fast to their orthodoxy were precisely that stupid, the youth who believed in them precisely that naïve; the achievements of the Soviet union were precisely that illusory, the game behind the scenes precisely that dirty. The novel leaves the reader with the feeling that in the end the author's purpose in describing all of this filth is an attempt to purge herself of everything that she herself once believed.

Secret agents and espionage are also a central topic of Jari Tervo's novel Myyrä ('The mole', WSOY, 2004). Previously an author of contemporary comic novels, Tervo (born 1959) has taken up one of the great themes of recent history. At the centre of Myyrä is a president who greatly resembles Urho Kekkonen, ruling Finland from the 1950s to the 1980s. As a youth, the real Kekkonen worked in the State Police; according to Tervo, throughout his whole life the president was above all an espionage man and only secondarily a statesman.
     The novel demonstrates the accepted fact that during the Kekkonen era, foreign and domestic politics did not exist separately; but rather, in all matters the powers that be had to take into consideration what they believed Moscow was thinking. The Finnish president is nevertheless depicted not as the Kremlin's puppet, but as a leading player who could look even Joseph Stalin in the eyes.
     Through the Stalin character, Tervo delves deeply into Russianness, which does not seem to include a very high value for human life. 'Killing your own citizens is not wise politics,' a genial Stalin tells the future Finnish president. He of course admits that he has caused the deaths of tens of millions of Soviet citizens, but it happened by accident. 'I'm not a mass murderer for the simple reason that in that case, there is no rhyme or reason to it,' explains the cynical Stalin.
     Tervo takes the reader close to the Soviet ruler, on his trips to the bathroom and to the sources of his melancholy. We are taken just as close to the Finnish president, who is consumed by his isolation, in order to convey the same message: a ruler is also a person, endowed with the strengths and weaknesses of a person. Those weaknesses then cause suffering for the ruler's subjects, because the sycophants who establish themselves close to the power centre are not capable of telling the ruler 'no.'
     One direct result of Stalin's whims are the prison camps, whose inhuman conditions Tervo describes in his novel. The depiction of the camps is made cruelly ironic by a situation in which a devout communist defects to the Soviet Union in hopes of a better life, only to find that the quota of people to be sent to the camps from that area has yet to be filled. The eager newcomer is hustled onto the bed of the lorry without further ado.
     Tervo's novel is much more substantial in terms of its literary merits that Raija Oranen's. His view of humanity and the intricacies of history is enormously more multifaceted. Tervo's hindsight is also more substantial than Oranen's: he focuses it on the whole society from the top to the bottom, not just on one age group. Tervo condemns all of Finland for shutting its eyes during the 1970s; he compares Finns to a baker who works next to a concentration camp, who smells the stench of burning bodies, but who carries on regardless, baking his bread and selling it to the camp without asking any questions.

The degree of cruelty varies, but bureaucracy and absurdity are standing themes in Finnish depictions of Russia and the Soviet Union. We also run into them in Kari Hotakainen's Iisakin kirkko ('St Isaac's Cathedral', WSOY, 2004).
     Hotakainen's satiric family-and-home novel Juoksuhaudantie ('The Trench Road', WSOY, 2002; see Books from Finland 2/2003) won both the Finlandia Literature Prize (2002) and the Nordic Council Literature Prize (2004). Iisakin kirkko is thinner than its predecessor, but thematically grand; in it the author contemplates God, death and Russia.
     The aged main character searches St Petersburg for his born-again Christian son in order to convince him that there is no God. On the way we encounter senseless bureaucracy and the strange characters that one can expect in a Finnish novel about Russia. On the other hand, we also encounter beauty, nostalgia and experiences of the holy, which are also part of our conception of Russia.
     In the novel, the author also wags his finger at all those who draw conclusions about Russia too hastily. A Leningrad police chief gives western journalists a piece of his mind: 'As soon as a couple of brightly-painted kiosks and some western cars show up on the street, they start to write that communism is dead.… Their conclusions are silk ribbons from which they weave a cloth and cover the whole city. My Leningrad is now their St Petersburg.'
     Leningrad, now St Petersburg again, a city built on a swamp and overflowing with mythical qualities, provides a vivid backdrop for the meeting of father and son. Perhaps a relationship with God is such a complicated matter that the author had to turn to the soil of mystical Russia in order to deal with it. The Finland that Hotakainen (born 1957) describes is full of concrete issues and objects, but in Russia there is space for spirituality.
     The father and son's encounter ends with the victory of the spirit over matter. The father gives in; not of course to the possibility that God exists, but instead to the possibility that a person can have spiritual experiences and still get along.

According to the oft-repeated cliché, it is impossible for an outsider to understand Russia and Russianness. The Finns have known the culture of their Slavic neighbour sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the time period and border lines. These novels nevertheless have in common that their characters have formed their own views of Russia and the Soviet Union, which do not endure the test of reality; Mother Russia is full of surprises and mysteries that do not submit to explanation.

Translated by Owen Witesman