Word: finlander
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When Britain set out to counter the six-nation European Common Market with a European free-trade area of its own-knitting together the Scandinavian countries, Portugal, Switzerland and Austria-Finland badly wanted to join to make this Outer Seven an Outer Eight. But President Urho Kekkonen, a longtime neutralist who stoutly insists that Finland's future must be based on Soviet-Finnish "friendship," said nothing doing. Russia, Kekkonen argued, would be displeased if Finland participated in a non-Communist trade bloc...
...July, when the Outer Seven put into effect its first mutual 20% tariff reduction, the effect on Finnish trade was instant and disastrous. In Britain, Finland's best market, Finnish lumber and paper exporters ran into big trouble from Swedish and Norwegian competition, had to drop prices by as much as $5.60 a ton. Kekkonen, never very popular, was soon in bad political trouble. Last week Nikita Khrushchev decided the time had come to drop in and give him a hand...
Finnish political parties said and did about Finland's ties to Moscow-and then released the speech. Having thus made Finland out to be almost a Kremlin satrapy, Khrushchev next praised Kekkonen as a friend of Russia with such tactless lavishness that even Kekkonen squirmed...
Screwing up his pride at a return Soviet embassy luncheon. President Kekkonen toasted Soviet-Finnish friendship but said that domestically, Finland would never forsake democracy, "even if the whole of the rest of Europe went Communist." Callously ignoring the presence of Hertta Kuusinen, Finland's Communist battle-axe (whose father is a member of the Soviet Party Secretariat in Moscow), Khrushchev amicably agreed: "I am sure nobody wants Communism here...
Helsinki, Finland...