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  The sidewalks of Helsinki are covered in slippery brown sludge. Almost twenty inches of snow fell here last week, but now the thaw has set in. Huge chunks of ice regularly come sliding off the roofs. The Finns seem not to notice. They waddle like ducks down the slick streets. A kindergarten class comes by. In their thick woollen caps, their colourful snow trousers and body warmers, the children look like little Martians. Along the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a few people are swimming in the icy water. They have chopped a hole in the ice and splash around in it, a terrible thing to behold, but the spectators are enthusiastic: ‘The water here is always four degrees above zero, and even at twenty below it's an amazing feeling. All your rheumatism and head colds just vanish into the sea.’

  A little further along is Café Ursula, a circular pavilion with a view of the frozen water and the snowy islands. In the misty distance, two fishermen are sitting beside a hole in the ice. I have an appointment with the writer Claes Andersson, until recently Finland's minister of culture and an old acquaintance of Lars-Olof Franzén. ‘We are eternally beholden to Lenin, because he was the first Russian leader to recognise our independence,’ Andersson says. ‘But we have never been interested in his Bolshevism.’

  He talks about the Finns’ own civil war, the bloody conflict of 1918 between the Red farmers and workers and the White conservatives. The Whites won, and countless Reds died. The Finns were reunified only by the Soviet invasion of November 1939. The Russians, who felt that the Finnish border was much too close (thirty kilometres) to the city that was now Leningrad, had demanded an exchange of territories. Although the Russian Army was many times greater, the invasion at first made little progress. In the vast woods and on the frozen lakes, no less than three Russian division were eliminated. The Finns, being expert skiers, were at home in the snow and the woods, but ultimately they lacked the force needed to repel the invaders. Reinforcement from the international community arrived too late, and the country capitulated in March 1940. Huge parts of Finland's territory had to be ceded, one in every eight Finns fell under Soviet rule. ‘Despite all the promises, we were left to our own devices again and again,’ Andersson says. ‘For a long time after that, this country was very bitter.’

  For years the Finns lived on the margin between the Soviet Union and the West. Today they embrace the euro, although that has yet to arrive in Helsinki. ‘We consciously dragged Finland into the European Union,’ Andersson tells me. ‘We had suffered for too long under the status of a small country, with a minor, defenceless currency, dependent on the whims of the superpowers.’ Andersson had opposed EU membership at first. ‘As a minister, I was personally involved in all those negotiations. They were even more boring and bureaucratic than I'd expected. But still, at one point I started to realise how useful it could be. If this is the price one pays to arrive at a compromise, and to avoid international conflicts in the future, then so be it, I reckoned. For me, Europe became more and more of a project for peace.’

  But don't the introverted Finns have the same misgivings about Europe as the Swedes? ‘The Swedes see themselves as a wealthy, healthy, independent state. They were always at the head of the class. We survived two violent wars, we know what it is to suffer, we were completely dependent on the Russians. We know that we have to act, that we have to make sacrifices. Nothing has ever happened to the Swedes. They've always had the feeling that they can do whatever they want. That feeling makes all the difference.’

  Meanwhile, in these March days of 1999, the Finns are calmly and composedly manoeuvring their way towards their national elections; all is well, and everyone wants to keep it that way. Everywhere one sees posters showing serious-looking men and women, the same fresh faces you see on the city councils of provincial Dutch towns. The candidates are worried about day-care centres, health care, about Finland's young people and two per cent of the population that is not Finnish. ‘Finland for the Finns’, one sees that here as well. On 1 January, 1999, Finland had precisely 1,272 asylum seekers and almost no illegal immigrants – yet still the country is home to at least 80,000 non-Finns. That is a source of great concern for many political parties.

  That evening I attend the jubilee concert of the Helsingen Sotainvalidirpurin Vejeskuro, the Helsinki Veterans’ Chorus, directed by Tapio Tutu, Arvo Kuikka and Erik Ahonius. The auditorium is full of wives and widows, the members of the chorus wear an average of three medals, the members of the executive committee walk around in big sashes. For the rest, it could just as easily be a musical evening in the northern Dutch town of Dokkum … except for the language. Finnish is not just incomprehensible, it is a heavily encrypted version of at least three incomprehensible languages rolled into one: Swedish, Hungarian, Estonian, etc., incomprehensibility to the umpteenth degree. And, at the same time, it is a joy to listen to. Clearly, this must be a very lovely language.

  The members of the chorus look to be retired teachers and attorneys, and probably are just that. But these are also the same men in white who courageously defied the Soviet Union in winter 1939–40. They provided a merciless demonstration of how ineffective the Red Army was: with their millions, the Soviets only barely succeeded in defeating 200,000 Finns. The Russian debacle in Finland made Hitler highly optimistic when he sent his troops to the East. That was a fatal mistake.

  Now the veterans have started singing in dark, melancholy voices. The first song sounds like ‘My Country ‘tis of Thee’. The second one sounds like Verdi's ‘Slave Chorus’. The third one seems to be a Finnish variation of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. And the next seven numbers are highly reminiscent of the old hymns of the Dutch Reformed Church.

  During the interval, I exchange a few words with Colonel Milos Syltamaa (b.1921). The oldest member of the chorus is ninety-two, the average age is seventy-nine. ‘Every year our chorus shrinks a little, that's the way it goes. That's right, we all fought hard. Against the Germans, too, you bet. We did quite well. Our forests aren't at all like the parks they have down there!’

  Our conversation is interrupted by a committee member in a sash. They are taking up the collection. And then comes a new song.

  I want to hear an outsider's opinion, so I arrange to talk to the Palestinian Amayya Abu-Hanna. ‘Let's meet under the clock at Stockmann's,’ she said on the phone. ‘You'll recognise me right away. I'll be the only person who isn't blonde.’ Stockmann's department store is a household name here. It is more than just the Harrods of Helsinki. Stockmann's is a miniature Finland, and Finland is the 1950s, 1960s and 1990s in one.

  At the moment, Stockmann's is changing fast, Amayya assures me. ‘There's a café in the basement now; ten years ago that would have been unthinkable. Back then, there were only a couple of grindingly boring clubs in the whole city.’ She takes me to the magazine section, which is largely reserved for publications about cooking and interior decorating. ‘That's become all the rage. Finnish chairs used to come in only one or two colours, and the only thing the Finns ate were potatoes and sausage. Now we even have a Thai restaurant. Everyone talks about “the city”. Young people are forever boasting about being true “Hessalinen”, and not farmers from the countryside’. The lingerie department on another floor has quadrupled in size in the last year. ‘Even sex is now seen as a source of pleasure, not just a way to make little Finns.’

  Amayya Abu-Hanna is little and slender, she has short black hair and dark, lively eyes. She has lived in Finland for almost twenty years, and until recently she was one of the best known Finnish TV anchorwomen. It took her – ‘Yes, of course, I fell in love with a Finn’ – quite a while to acclimatise. ‘It can be awfully grey and overcast here for months on end, with lots of rain and wet snow. You know the story of Jonah and the whale? Well, that's how I felt during those first winters. I even had to learn how to walk all over again, in the snow, bowlegged, bent over. What's more, everything I'd been taught at home about right and wrong turned out to be precisely the opposite here. Here, for example, “peace” means silence, quiet, no other peo
ple, deep in the woods. To me, peace is something that is actually all about other people, it's something social, the opposite of war. Curiosity and ambition were always seen at home as something good, but not for the Finns. In my view, a concept like “equality” had to do with honesty. But for them it's “not standing out”. They even have a negative term for “colourful”, something like “eye-bashing”.’

  She reads to me from Stockmann's spring catalogue. ‘“Dress like the rest; after all, don't you have better things to do?” Where else could you sell clothes with a slogan like that?’ Amayya was in politics for a while as well. ‘That's when I discovered the good sides of this country. People mean what they say, for example. That was refreshing to me. I expected a great deal of corruption. Not a bit of it. Everything was squeaky clean.’

  For the moment, Amayya is unemployed. ‘It all became too much. I had no problem working as a journalist, but as soon as my face appeared on TV, all hell broke loose. Threats, a letter bomb, I even had to move out of my house. No blacks, no Russians – in other words, no whores – in our living rooms! I was replaced by a real blonde Finnish woman. And then everyone pretended as though it had never happened.’

  Friday evenings are an ordeal for her. This highly disciplined country has one escape valve: alcohol. Screaming, urinating in the street: if a person is drunk, they can get away with all of that. ‘When Friday evening comes they scream at everyone with dark skin, every drunk who comes along grabs at my hair and shouts: “What are you doing here, you're black!” Or: “Hey, babushka!” Or: “Hey, are you circumcised?”’

  ‘Racism’, however, is not a word Amayya uses lightly. ‘I'm still quite proud of the producer who took a chance on me. Where else in Europe would you see a TV anchorwoman with dark skin and a foreign accent? This has always been a tight-knit, homogeneous society. But they still have someone here like Lola Odusoga, an eloquent Finnish girl whose father came from the Ivory Coast. In 1996 she was the most popular Miss Finland of all time, a calm, hardworking kid from the countryside close to Turku, very sweet, and black as ebony.

  ‘The Finns actually remind me of the Bedouins, a people completely shaped by geographical extremes,’ Amayya says.‘They consider themselves unique, more than unique. Women play a major role. A lot of them have children without getting married. You sense that Christianity is only a thin veneer here, it's clearly something that's been imposed. Their pride comes from knowing that they can survive under extreme conditions. And just like the Bedouins, they feel threatened when other people think they can do that as well. It's understandable, really: the greater the isolation people live in, the more afraid they are when the world opens up.’

  The next day I take the Sibelius Express through the white coniferous forest to St Petersburg. We cross huge plains with no trace of human existence. Sometimes, after a few kilometres, there will be a wooden farmhouse with its windows lit up. After an hour, the gangways between the carriages are covered in powder snow, even the corridors are dusted white here and there. In the dining car they're serving salmon and mashed potatoes, twenty people at one big table, eating what the cook has to offer.

  Between Finland and Russia is an old-fashioned border with watch-towers, passport stamps and serious men. After that comes a debatable zone: do the telegraph poles here actually look a bit shoddier, the wooden houses just a little less neat? The snow still masks the differences. But half an hour later the train slowly pulls into a grey city. Men are fishing on the frozen river; behind them are towers with golden domes; in front of the station dozens of old women all try to sell their one jar of pickles, or two bottles of vodka, or a knitted sweater. Now we really have crossed the border, the only border that counts.

  ‘Everyone in our group sat glued to the windows,’ Nadezhda Krupskaya recalled. A few soldiers had boarded the train. Little Robert was sitting on the lap of a Russian war veteran, his arms around the man's neck. The man shared his raisin bread with him. The soldiers gave Lenin a few back copies of Pravda, Zinovyev reported, ‘he shook his head and threw up his hands in despair.’

  The group got off the train in Petrograd, at Finland Station. By then, according to the Russian calendar, it was 3 April. Nadezhda had been worried: if they arrived so late, how would they ever find a hansom cab to take them to where they were staying? They had no idea what awaited them.

  In those first weeks following the revolution it was customary to give all homecoming exiles a great welcome, and the Bolsheviks had gone all out for their leader. Even the Mensheviks took part in the celebration. Huge triumphal arches had been set up on the platforms. Banners bearing ‘every revolutionary slogan one could imagine’ hung above the honour guards from the various army units.‘The crowd in front of Finland Station blocked the entire square, you could barely move, and the trams were almost unable to get through,’ recalled the journalist Nikolai Suchanov, editor of Gorky's Letopis (Chronicle). The Ulyanovs were led into what had once been the czar's private waiting room. Military bands played the ‘Marsellaise’; the soldiers had not had enough time to practise the ‘Internationale’. Lenin made a couple of short speeches. Suchanov was able to catch only a few words: ‘Scandalous imperialistic massacre … lies and deception … capitalist pirates’. The crowd was ecstatic.

  The Bolsheviks had set up their headquarters in Kshesinskaya Palace, the enormous villa Czar Nicholas II had built for his mistress, the ballerina Matilda Kshesinsky. (‘I'm not a capitalist! I worked hard for this!’ was what she shouted at the first Bolshevik intruders.) A banquet had been laid out in the huge halls and passageways, but Lenin hardly had a chance to eat. Everyone wanted to talk to him. Only past midnight did he begin his big speech.

  For two full hours, he drilled his followers on the new party line. ‘I'll never forget that harangue,’ Suchanov wrote. ‘It amazed and shocked not only me, an apostate who was there by chance, but also all the true believers.’ Lenin launched a ferocious attack on the new leaders, calling them ‘opportunists’ and ‘betrayers of the revolution’, and that alone, Suchanov noted, ‘caused the heads of his listeners to spin’. After all, these ‘mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie’ were former revolutionaries and had all, like Lenin, spent years in exile. Until Lenin's arrival, the Bolsheviks of Petrograd had enthusiastically supported the provisional government as well. For didn't the revolution belong to everyone?

  Yet Lenin's opinions could not have come as a complete surprise. In the first telegrams and letters he sent after the revolution, he – unafflicted by any knowledge of the local situation – had already given strict instructions to the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg: give no support to the provisional government, arm the workers, all power to the soviets! His comrades had found these positions so unrealistic that only excerpts from those letters had been made public.

  Suddenly, however, yet another wild idea had been added to the list; namely, that the transition from the ‘bourgeois democracy’ to the ‘socialist revolution’ had to take place within a few months. When he left Zurich, Lenin had said that Russia was a ‘country of farmers’, ‘one of the most backward countries in Europe’. A place where socialism could not ‘immediately triumph’. Somewhere along the way, he must have changed his mind.

  As soon as he arrived in Petrograd, Lenin began talking about the need for a ‘second revolution’, in order not to ‘become a slave to capitalism’. All power was ‘immediately’ to be placed in the hands of the soviets. This, less than one month after the fall of the czar, sounded the death knell for the provisional government. It also constituted a definitive break with the Mensheviks and the other revolutionary groups. Lenin's sudden change of course clashed with almost all the revolutionary theories, which assumed that a long period would be needed between the ‘civil revolution’ and the ‘proletarian revolution’. That was held to be particularly true of less developed countries such as Russia. The slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ seemed less than practical too. Those councils, after all, had always been little more than loose configurations
of contentious committees for the organisation of workers’ strikes, and could hardly be expected to assume governmental power immediately.

  The day after his arrival, Lenin launched the April Theses, the new programme he had worked on during his train journey: no support for the provisional government; withdrawal from the war; a complete break with capitalism; the expropriation of all private lands; the nationalisation of the banks; the dismantling of the army and the police corps and the establishment of a republic of soviets, led by farmers and workers. His vision clashed so dramatically with the prevailing mood in Petrograd that even many Bolsheviks felt that Lenin had lost touch with reality. He had been in exile too long. ‘Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin,’ Gorky wrote at the time. ‘He doesn't know the common people. He has never lived among them.’

  Lenin ultimately emerged as the winner of the revolution. But, as the historian Richard Pipes rightly explains, that was not because of his huge support or astute vision. The Bolshevik's success lay in their cocksureness. They established bonds with precisely those groups from which the socialist parties in Western Europe had alienated themselves: farmers and soldiers. Against all the odds, they seized power at exactly the right moment. And they had powerful allies: Berlin, gold German marks and the hard winds of world war.

  A number of mysteries still surround Lenin's return to Russia. What made him change his mind during the train journey through Germany and Sweden? Some historians point to the strikingly long stop – of at least half a day – that Lenin's ‘sealed train’ made in Berlin. They suspect that, in the course of that stop, Lenin was in contact with several top German officials concerning the strategy to be pursued. It is a wild assumption, for an escapade like that does not match up with Lenin's extreme caution on precisely this point: in Stockholm, after all, he refused to meet with or even see his old comrade Parvoes.