Word: finlandized
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Many of this week's visitors (see SPORT) were as interested in seeing how Finland, in the role of little David, stands off the big Goliath on its right, as in watching slim young men in gym suits do the running broad jump. They saw little in Helsinki to remind them of a menace ever present. As in West Berlin, the people who live closest to danger are calmest about it. Less than a dozen miles from spotless, gleaming Helsinki itself, Russian guns firmly emplaced on Finnish soil are ready, if necessary, to reduce the pale architectural spectrum...
Porkkala is the name of a 150-sq. mi. enclave just west of Helsinki (see map) that Finland was forced to "lease" to Stalin by the Russian-dictated peace treaty of 1947. There on Finnish soil, behind a secrecy no Finn is al lowed to penetrate, the Russians maintain a division of troops and train their long-range guns on the water lanes to Leningrad. The Russians allow Finnish trains from Helsinki to Turku to pass through Porkkala, but Russian locomotives (actually U.S.-made, sent under lend-lease) pull them, and the windows are sealed with sheet steel...
...dependence." "Dollar-Type." A nation of northern ostriches? Far from it. The Finns are not stupidly hiding their eyes from their future, but they are determined not to fall into another fight with a powerful and predatory next-door neighbor 66 times their size (in area, Finland is the sixth largest country in Europe; in population it is the third smallest). Under popular, 81-year-old President Juho Kusti Paasikivi and able, unpopular Agrarian Premier Urho Kekkonen, the Finns have learned to walk the nerve-racking path of independence like tight-rope walkers...
...free Finland, editorial writers may say what they like about Russia, but they carefully think before saying it. The cafe arguer may damn Stalin to his heart's content, but he makes a joke instead. Finland's President proclaims publicly in the bleak tones of a bank examiner: "Our relations with Russia are friendly." In private he says wistfully, "Finland is a Western nation." Finland refused Marshall Plan aid on the ground that that would be entering an alliance against Russia, but it accepted a U.S. loan. When a newsman remarked that this was a pretty fine distinction...
Died. Mauno Pekkala, 62, postwar Premier of Finland (1946-48), who negotiated the hated mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union; of pneumonia following a stroke; in Helsinki. He won national recognition for his work as acting director (1937-44) of the state forest service, less favorable notice for his latter-day fellow-traveling with the Reds...