Word: porkkala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Finnish equivalent before he entered politics, served twice as Finnish Premier (1918, 1944-46) before running for President. In 1955 he made his seventh official journey to the Kremlin1, negotiated a 20-year mutual defense pact, wangled a promise that Russia would withdraw from its Finnish naval base at Porkkala. Patriot Paasikivi's coldly realistic view of his country's situation: Finland "is too small and dangerously located to afford a foreign policy directed against Russia...
When the Russians recently agreed to dismantle their naval base at Porkkala and return the area to Finland, their immediate aim was to persuade the Finns to elect a pro-Russian successor to old (85) President Juho Paasikivi, who is the only non-Communist chief of state to hold the Soviet Order of Lenin. Last week the newly chosen Electoral College picked pliable Premier Urho Kekkonen, 55, who has stood close behind Paasikivi in tiny, democratic Finland's enforced dealings with the Russian Communists...
...their 56 votes. Though all Finns agree that they have to stay on good terms with their powerful neighbors, Kekkonen's frank campaign for a be-sweet-to-the-Russians policy galled the stubbornly independent souls of many Finns. Kekkonen maintained that a policy of appeasement won Porkkala back, and might yet persuade the Russians to hand over the "lost province" of Karelia. Porkkala, twelve miles southwest of Helsinki, was returned with great ceremony by the Russians last month...
...Urho Kekkonen when they stepped from the Russian plane that had brought them from Helsinki. But two days later it was Bulganin, pale but smiling, who informed the Finnish Premier that because of the "friendly relationship existing between Fmland and the Soviet Union," Russia had decided to return the Porkkala base to the Finns and pull all Russian troops out of their country...
...Porkkala is a 150-sq.-mi. enclave just southwest of Helsinki that Finland was forced to "lease" to the Soviets at the time of the 1944 armistice. There, behind a secrecy no Finn was allowed to penetrate, the Russians destroyed the homes of nearly 8,000 Finns and installed coast guns, jets and some 20,000 troops. Later they allowed trains to cross the peninsula, so long as steel shutters were drawn over windows. Heavy explosions in the area shook windows in Helsinki several times a week until recently. One night last week explosions were heard briefly again...