Finland has more than 50,000 lakes. In summer, Finns go there to let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes or take a sauna (there are thousands of wooden cabins next to the lakes). In winter they practice fishing. They pierce the ice with a giant barb, throw a line with a hook into the water and sit on a folding chair to wait.
Helsinki is the easternmost of the Nordic capitals and has a magnificent art nouveau railway station that looks like something out of Gotham City. If you also want to know something about the soft Finnish character, go see Fallen Leaves, a recent film about love between simple people by Aki Kaurismäki.
The Finns are practical and have emerged successfully from the worst moments in their history. Their problem has always been Russia. Helsinki is six hours from Saint Petersburg. And the metropolitan area of this Russian city alone has more population than Finland (5.5 million).
After centuries of Swedish sovereignty, Finland was annexed in 1808 by the Tsarist Empire. It declared independence in 1917, taking advantage of the chaos of the Russian revolution. The Soviets insisted on invading it again in 1939 and again between 1941 and 1944. Finland survived as a state but at the price of neutrality monitored by the Soviet security services. Praised as an imaginative formula for surviving alongside the empire, few Finns today feel nostalgic for that period known as “Finlandization,” which ended with the end of the Soviet Union.
The fall of the Soviet Union left Finland without its largest market and plunged it into a terrifying recession. The country was reborn as an innovative economy admired by half the world. They were the great years of Finnish globalization, summarized in the rise and fall (1998-2011) of Nokia, the world leader in mobile phones.
This Sunday Finland elected conservative Alexander Stubb as president. He will lead a new stage in the country's history, this time as the youngest member of NATO, which it entered in April 2023 increasingly concerned about the new Russian expansionism. Finland shares a 1,340 kilometer border with Russia, where Moscow practices a peculiar hybrid war: it does not stop sending asylum seekers to pressure the Finns.
