And the next station will be... Tali-Ihantala

A few years ago, the battle that determined the outcome of the Continuation War was largely unknown to Finns

print this

By Ilkka Malmberg
     
      First things first. I’ll step up to defend Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen.
      Columnist Tommy Lindgren (Helsingin Sanomat, 23.1.) Criticised the PM for the fact that he did not intend to go to see the new drama adaptation of Väinö Linna’s WorldWar II novel "The Unkown Soldier" (Tuntematon sotilas) at the National Theatre.
      What really got under Lindgren's skin was that Vanhanen said he would nevertheless be going to see Åke Lindman’s film Tali-Ihantala [about the decisive battle at the end of the Continuation War in 1944], which Lindgren described disparagingly as “a heroic depiction of events”.
     
Lindgren was ready to criticise Vanhanen for having an opinion on a theatrical production he had not seen.
      Has Lindgren himself been to see Tali-Ihantala?
      It would be hard to imagine him watching it in the movie theatre, as it would be hard to envisage others of our intelligentsia doing so.
     
But it is interesting to see how the war drags on, and how we still like to talk about it.
      Generally there are those people who say let’s get into the present and we’ve spent too long already ruminating on the war.
      Then again, there are those who believe it is only now that we have actually started to talk properly about it.
      On the left, in particular, there has been a traditional wish to put a stop to the endless jawing about the age-old war - and to bring out and even older one: the Civil War of 1918.
     
Times have changed completely. In 1988, I accompanied an elderly female relative to a Winter War reunion occasion.
      I peeked in at the door after dropping her off. There were around a hundred old people in there.
      The previous year, Helvi Hämäläinen - an authoress who had been out of the public eye for decades - won the Finlandia Fiction Prize with a volume that dwelt heavily on the Winter War.
      It seemed a very strange choice of subject.
      The anthology of poems by Hämäläinen had a telling title: Sukupolveni unta - “The Dreams of My Generation”.
     
At the beginning of 1989 I made a trip to Rantasalmi, in the east of the country, covering a story.
      I asked schoolkids in the local upper secondary school whether they were aware that 58 young men from their particular parish died in the Winter War [on an island named Petäjäsaari in Lake Ladoga] in the space of a few short hours in March 1940.
      Only a few had heard of the catastrophe that had hit their village nearly fifty years earlier.
      At the time, Rantasalmi was very publicly celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Parkumäki (1789), one girl told me rather bitingly.
      In that battle, the Swedish-Finnish troops of King Gustv II of Sweden routed a Russian force.
     
Then again, in 1989, Finland was that sort of country. The history textbooks would tell you in great detail about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, but not a word about Tali-Ihantala. The events of 1944 were covered in a sentence or a footnote.
      Still, it was that same year, 1989, that altered everything.
      The Soviet Union was already teetering precariously. By the end of the 50th anniversary year after the Winter War, everybody knew Finland had gone through that conflict.
      Before then, there were those that thought the term meant simply “warfare conducted under winter conditions”.
     
It didn’t take long before the grumbling started.
      If I remember aright, it was the journalist, writer, and translator Tuula-Liina Varis who was the first to complain that we had Winter War coming out of every possible media orifice.
      The same thing happened with 1944. The pendulum swung crazily from one extreme to the other, with everywhichkind of ceremonies and publications.
      Before very long the term torjuntavoitto (a defensive victory in which one lost in formal terms, but where the opposition failed to secure its aims) was out in the wild.
      And Tali-Ihantala was no longer a completely unfamiliar pair of words.
     
Last year we had this new "Unknown Soldier" production, and now we have Lindman’s bio of the Battle of Tali-Ihantala.
      Is it good, or bad - I don’t know, since I haven’t seen the movie.
      But 172,135 others had by the time of writing this.
     
And this year we will be starting to relive the spring of 1918. Actually it already started in June 2006, with the production of Linna’s Täällä pohjantähden alla (a dramatisation of his novel trilogy "Under the North Star") at the open-air summer theatre on Suomenlinna.
      A good many have only now found Linna’s seminal fictional study of Finland between 1880 and the 1950s.
     
This newspaper’s weekly supplement Nyt recently asked a bunch of Finnish celebs about 1918, and it turned out that a few of them had not heard of it.
      Singer and Idols contestant Anna Abreu commented: "Why should we get stuck in the past, when you can think of the future? It is because of getting bogged down in history that we haven't yet found an understanding of how to feed kids in Africa."
      A refreshing way of thinking, but to my mind everyone living in Lahti should know what happened - mass executions, this time of 200 women belonging to the Red faction - on the site of the present ski stadium in 1918.
      And every resident of Helsinki ought to be aware of what sort of catastrophe took place close to the little Diana Park in Erottaja in 1942, when a lone Soviet bomber dropped its load on lines of people leaving and entering two theatres, and 48 civilians died in an instant.
     
If this were Paris, we’d have a whole litany of metro stations named after battles from the past, like their Bir-Hakeim, and Austerlitz, and Alésia, and Stalingrad.
      Thank goodness we don’t.
      Of course Tali-Ihantala might be suitable for one of those new Espoo stations. Or Kollaa - Kollå, perhaps, after the holding action there in 1939 and 1940.
      People who cling to the past, deserve all they get.
      Anna Abreu might just be right.
      Or then what about historian Mirkka Lappalainen?
      She’s worried about the fact that our schools are neglecting the study of the 17th and 18th century.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.2.2008


Links:
  Tali-Ihantala (Wikipedia)
  Väinö Linna (Wikipedia)
  Kollaa (Winter War, Wikipedia)

ILKKA MALMBERG / Helsingin Sanomat
ilkka.malmberg@hs.fi