Back to the USSR
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Roosa Uoti
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Juuso Juvonen
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Kalle Freese
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By Anu Nousiainen
How is one to explain the Soviet Union to someone who was born at about the time that the country was splitting apart?
In the early morning of August 19th, 1991 the news agency TASS announced that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had fallen ill. In reality, Gorbachov's conservative opponents were holding him under house arrest in his holiday home in the Crimea.
The conservatives declared a state of emergency in the Soviet Union. Tanks rolled into the centre of Moscow. The situation seemed ominous. In Finland people were transfixed, listening to each news broadcast that came.
The sense of relief was tremendous when the coup collapsed two days later. What ensued was a revolution: reformers who supported Russia's President Boris Yeltsin began dismantling the Soviet system. The Communist Party was abolished.
At that time the Soviet Union had been a fact of life for Finland for 74 years. There had been trade with the east: goods had been delivered, and a mining community had been built by a Finnish company in Kostamuksha, on the Russian side of the border. Finnish tourists visited Leningrad and Tallinn, guzzling cheap alcohol, exchanging nylon stockings and shampoo for massive bundles of roubles - even selling the shoes off their feet.
At breakfast in their hotels, these vodka tourists gawked at the slices of pork fat in front of them, and felt more prosperous - and above all, free.
Real life was on this side of the Iron Curtain. Soviet chocolate that was brought as a gift was left uneaten. For Finnish children of the 1970s, its sweet, musty odour was the smell that identified the Soviet Union.
Then the hated, feared, and secretive neighbour collapsed.
Finnish children born in 1991 were the first to be born during the three quarters of a century of Finnish independence who did not have a personal tie to the Soviet Union.
This year they are turning 15, and are in the ninth grade of Finnish comprehensive school. They can speak foreign languages, and many have travelled abroad, but few of them have been to Russia.
Do they have any conception of the Soviet Union? Can they understand that a short time ago it was right there, next to us, mighty, with its red stars, its five-year plans, and its nuclear submarines?
Can they sense the same chilly feeling?
The small white headphones belonging to Roosa Uoti's mp3 player stick out from underneath her Burberry scarf as she walks into a Russian restaurant in central Helsinki along with Kalle Freese and Juuso Juvonen. Roosa and Juuso are both 15 years old, and Kalle's 15th birthday is coming soon. They go to school in the Helsinki district of Lauttasaari and their parents were not communists in their youth. Of the three, Juuso has the closest relative to have been a war veteran - a great uncle. None of the three has ever been to Russia.
As the intention is to talk about the Soviet Union, translator and Russia expert Jukka Mallinen has been invited to join the group. He studied Russian literature at Moscow University from 1972 to 1978. He also headed the Finnish Institute in St. Petersburg, and was involved in trade with the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s.
In recent years Mallinen has translated the works of numerous Russian modern authors: Viktor Yerofeyev, Anna Politkovskaya, Mikhail Berg... He is also the chairman of the Finnish PEN organisation, dedicated to freedom of speech.
It is hard to imagine a place more foreign to Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso than the Soviet Union and Russia. For Mallinen, they have been his whole life.
But let's see how Mallinen can manage, as Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso have some questions for him. Could it be that the Soviet Union is something that cannot be explained?
Mallinen wants to start with the jokes that were told in the Soviet Union.
"The Soviet Union was a massive totalitarian system. People let off steam by telling jokes. Almost everyone told them - everyone who was dissatisfied, and everybody was", he explains.
Here is one example: a man comes into a clinic and asks to see an eye and ear doctor. The old lady receptionist says that there is no such thing. There is either an eye doctor or an ear, nose, and throat doctor. The man will not give up. He wants an eye and ear doctor, because he has a strange condition: he constantly hears one thing and sees the opposite.
Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso laugh. The message has gone through. Mallinen appears to be satisfied. "Then there are these kind: What is a sardine? A whale that has experienced socialism."
They all laugh.
Even Kalle has a joke - about the thick smoke drifting into Finland from Russia:
"Russia is giving Karelia back to us in the form of smoke particles."
"Pretty good. This is exactly how Soviet humour used to work. People reacted to current issues", Mallinen says enthusiastically.
The starters arrive. Best to eat well, because now it is time to dive deeper into the reality of the Soviet Union.
"Is it true that people had to wait for two years to get a pair of shoes?" Juuso asks.
Mallinen tries to explain aspects of the Soviet economy. "There were different phases. When goods were rationed after the war, times were fairly good, in a way. If you had a shoe coupon, you were pretty sure to get a pair of shoes in less than two years."
During the time of Leonid Brezhnev, consumers could not get anything for their roubles. Goods disappeared under the table, and into closed distribution systems. Ordinary shops appeared to be empty. You had to know the merchants and hand out bribes.
Moscow, the capital, was a display window for consumer goods. There was a joke about that: in socialism distribution was arranged so that all goods were sent to Moscow, from where they distributed themselves around the country. "When people came to Moscow they had huge suitcases with them. People brought fruit from Central Asia and the Caucasus as camels might."
Life largely consisted of bartering goods and services. And there was the queueing. Housewives went to their jobs in the morning and queued for the rest of the day. In industry this led to a practice in which factories had their own stores.
Kalle says that his mother once visited the Soviet Union on a Friendship City tour. A department store that the Finnish guests visited was first emptied of other customers before they were allowed inside.
"Extra goods were probably brought into the store, which the local people were not allowed to see", Mallinen ponders.
"What about cars? Were there any available for the ordinary people?" Kalle asks.
"Yes there were. Moskviches for instance. When Germany lost the war, the Opel production line was moved from the occupation zone in Germany to the Soviet Union. There were long waiting lists for cars, and separate lists for the factory workers. Many held on to their jobs just to stay on the car waiting lists."
There was also a market for used cars, where there was no need to queue. Therefore, a used car cost many times more than a new one. Naturally, the payment was under the table.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, about a fifth of the approximately five million residents of Leningrad lived in shared apartments - kommunalkas.
"I've heard about them. People lived in really crowded conditions", Juuso said.
"In the Soviet Union there was actually a constant shortage of housing. Money was spent on the war industry. Considering that the country was supposed to have been a workers' paradise, surprisingly little was spent on social services", Mallinen notes.
Nikita Khrushchev launched the construction of Soviet suburbs in the 1950s. Kalle has seen such places while on holiday in Budapest and East Berlin. "A huge, grey mass: barren and distressing."
"You have to understand that when a worker's family got to move out of a kommunalka and into a small two-room apartment in a suburb, and got a private kitchen and toilet, this was a huge boost in their standard of living", Mallinen points out.
Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso are interested to know how tabs were kept on the people: "When you walked on the street, could you see that it was a terrible state?"
"Watching over others was probably the main profession of a million people", Mallinen estimates. He adds that ordinary people were also made to keep watch over each other, but not as systematically as in East Germany. The Soviet security service, the KGB, turned the entire country into "a frightened herd of dishonourable tattle-tales", as author Mikhail Berg writes in his book Letter to the President, which Mallinen just finished translating.
Juuso: "Were newspapers ever clipped?"
Mallinen: "Oh, no! Newspapers were censored well in advance. If someone wanted to censor mail coming in from Finland, the letter never arrived. Blues News always came to me at the university."
The discussion turns to the subject of school. Mallinen tells them about an acquaintance who got a bad grade in Russian simply because he said that his favourite authors were Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov. The correct answer would have been Maxim Gorki, of course.
Mallinen said that the Soviet Union was above all an ideological society. The explanation for everything was that this is what Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao taught.
Schoolchildren soon figured out what was permissible to say and what was not. "In a way, the Soviet Union was a fundamentalist society: best to follow the rules, or burn at the stake", Mallinen notes.
But even in a fundamentalist society it was possible for individuals to set up a nest for themselves, if they focused on their own affairs. There is private space, and public space. There were jokes about this as well.
"Life just went by there. You didn't have to do much, and still you lived to some degree", Kalle realises.
Mallinen nods. "Apparently the Soviets were much happier than modern Finns. They were not stressed out, they didn't have to work. In a way, life was fairly carefree, if you didn't have too many expectations."
Political resistance was a completely different matter, and Mallinen has always been especially interested in it. This salesman involved in trade with the Soviet Union would get out of his suit in the evening and put on a pair of jeans and disappear into poets' cellars. It was the world of the samizdat underground publications - the dark side of the controlled society.
"The dissidents have made an impression on me. In the Soviet Union it was said that it is better to be a dead lion than a live sheep. Is this true?" Mallinen asks provocatively.
Juuso sinks his knife into his chicken Kiev, dripping with butter, and looks confused. "It depends on the situation a bit. If life is so rotten that one really would rather be dead, then I guess that one would put up a fight, even if one would die."
Mallinen continues his questioning: "Do you know anything about Soviet dissidents? What are dissidents?"
Kalle: "They oppose the system."
Mallinen: "That's right! They went against the system, and then they were sent to Siberia or exiled to the West, but they were also world-famous, and won Nobel prizes. How about Alexandr Solzhenytsin and Andrei Sakharov?
Roosa: "I've heard something about them."
Juuso: "I haven't".
"There was Yuri Gagarin and the Gulags", Mallinen says. "So what made the Soviet Union disintegrate, since it was so powerful?"
Kalle ponders: "Everything developed in other places, and nothing moved forward in the Soviet Union. There was no avoiding influences from other places. People got something new and showed it to others, and it spread."
Mallinen appears to be deep in thought. "When Gorbachev began his policy of reform, perestroika, the Stalinists were staunchly opposed. They wanted the opposite - a restoration of discipline. Perhaps the Soviet Union collapsed because of liberalism."
Mallinen asks Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso to compare the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
"They were quite similar systems, only the ideology was different", Juuso says right away. Mallinen agrees: there was national socialism, and there was socialism.
"There is talk about the terrible massacres committed by the Germans, but the Soviets killed just as many people. Now everyone knows that these things happened, but people still don't talk about it", Juuso says with amazement.
Kalle asks if Finns in the 1980s knew that there were prison camps in the Soviet Union. "Yes, they did - it had come out much earlier. After all, we had memoirs of Finns, such as Unto Parvilahti, who had experienced them first hand. Solzhenytsin's Gulag Archipelago was published in Finnish in 1974 - in Sweden: no Finnish publisher would touch it."
Mallinen looks across at Kalle's shirt, which he put on for this specific occasion. It has a large red star on it.
"It would be hard to imagine that someone would wear a swastika, but this star, is it the same thing?"
Kalle responds. "Well, it is a little bit different."
"In what way?"
"The Soviet Union is in fashion. I'm sure that they sell CCCP shirts on market places in St. Petersburg - Soviet nostalgia. They are over it themselves", Kalle suggests.
"Nazi Germany was a terrible system. Everyone denounces it immediately, but not the Soviet Union", Mallinen says.
Kalle mentions Che Guevara shirts. "People wear them, even though they do not even know what he did. But the picture is cool, and he has a cool beard, so it is a symbol of youthful rebellion."
Mallinen says that many young people in Russia have no inhibitions about using Nazi symbols. The West has Soviet retro fashion, in Russia, there is Nazi retro fashion.
Oh, yes, modern Russia. Mallinen subtly changes the subject as the waiter brings tea and jam to the table.
"Do you think that things are better in Russia now than they used to be?" Juuso asks.
"I feel that the most important thing is freedom, so there is no doubt that things are better now. But at the same time, things in Russia are moving toward authoritarianism again. The Russians say that everything has changed, and nothing has changed."
Roosa, Kalle, and Juuso listen silently. Yeltsin's period was chaotic, but it is remembered in Russia as a time of freedom. Now they have Vladimir Putin, and things are going well for Russia, but not so well for the Russians. In Finland Putin is not criticised much. MP Heidi Hautala was sharply criticised when she lambasted the current state of Russian democracy in a special session of Parliament.
"Both of them, the Soviet Union and Russia, seem to be so remote, even though they are right next door", Roosa ponders. "Finns have been brought up to hate the Russians, although it is said that people in Finland were - what was the word - Finlandised."
It's time to get back to school. Physics class is about to start.
"Now I really would be interested to visit Russia", Roosa says.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 27.8.2006
ANU NOUSIAINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anu.nousiainen@hs.fi
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| 29.8.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 Back to the USSR |
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