Word: finland
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...editorial in Pravda last Friday was as unsubtle as it was intrusive. It noted that Finland (pop. 4.8 million) must choose a new President in January to succeed Urho Kekkonen, 81, who stepped down from the office last month after 25 years, for reasons of ill health. Then the Soviet Communist Party's official newspaper baldly proclaimed its own favorite candidate for Kekkonen's job: Ahti Karjalainen, 58, acting president of the Bank of Finland, a member of Kekkonen's Center Party and a onetime protege of the ex-President...
...graceless Soviet nudging provided a stark example of the workings of "Finlandization," the pejorative term for Finland's deferential relationship with the colossus next door. Kekkonen, who energetically supported the policy, called it "active neutrality." But to many Westerners, it has come to signify abject neutrality-or what happens to a lightly armed, nonaligned country in close proximity to the Soviet Union. According to some worst-case scenarios, all of Western Europe would be prone to Finlandization if it unilaterally scrapped the protection of its own and U.S. nuclear arms...
...Finland's case, neutrality means following Moscow's lead in foreign affairs. Helsinki has responded warmly to the latest Soviet drive for a nuclear-free zone in Scandinavia. Finnish diplomats were conspicuously silent at the United Nations when that organization condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soviet human rights abuses at home are never criticized publicly in Finland, even though Helsinki was the site of the 1975 international conference that finally wrote human rights observance into accords between the Soviet Union and the West...
...Finland's economic relationship with the U.S.S.R. is complex, intimate and highly profitable for the Finns. Under special trade treaties drawn up every five years, Finno-Soviet economic ties have taken on an almost mercantilistic flavor. About two-thirds of Finland's oil conies from the Soviet Union, which in turn provides Finland with its largest export market. This year the U.S.S.R. is expected to take 24.6% of all Finnish exports. Under a special agreement, Finland pays for its Soviet oil not with money but with manufactured goods, machinery and construction services. As one result, Finland...
...tried to encourage Finns to place lighted candles in their windows as a pacifist gesture, the project fizzled. Explained a Finnish journalist: "We only put candles in our windows for one thing, to demonstrate our independence from Russia on Independence Day" (Dec. 6; for a century ending in 1917 Finland was a grand duchy of imperial Russia...