Word: porkkala
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...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...
...itself, Russian guns firmly emplaced on Finnish soil are ready, if necessary, to reduce the pale architectural spectrum of Finland's capital to rubble. "Please don't write about that," a Finnish civil servant told a TIME correspondent in Helsinki last week. "We in Finland never mention Porkkala...
...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...
...course the Russians, though soothed by the fact that all of Finland's wartime anti-Russian leaders are in jail, or otherwise out of action, can still be annoying. Recently the Finns asked Moscow to let them run five trains a day in each direction across the Porkkala Peninsula (leased to Russia for 50 years as a naval base), which would cut three hours from the time required by the roundabout route to the north. Moscow agreed-if the trains were sealed, if they could be inspected by Red officials on entering and leaving the leased area...
...Venezia Giulia and small Adriatic islands to Yugoslavia; Briga-Tenda and other border areas to France; Dodecanese Islands to Greece; all African colonies, which Big Four will dispose of within one year. Petsamo province and southern Karelia to Russia, which also gets a lease on the naval base at Porkkala-Udd, commanding the Gulf of Finland...