COLUMN: Astahov came to mark his territory

By Olli Kivinen
     
      In recent weeks and months we have seen a few ripples on the surface of relations between Finland and Russia; little wavelets that call into question the broad smiles of state leaders' photo opportunities and the bland assurances of friendship between the two countries.
      The greatest focus of attention has been the action of the Russian children's affairs ombudsman Pavel Astahov in Turku, over the taking into foster care of the child of a Finnish father and Russian mother in February of this year.
     
However, the picture would not be complete without reference to the comments of the Russian Ambassador to Norway and the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, seen as the mouthpiece of the Russian Ministry of Defence.
      Both came out with erroneous remarks about the Winter War that smacked of old-time Soviet propaganda.
      Then there were the sizeable Russian military exercises arranged last autumn close to the north-western border, which did not mesh very comfortably with modern European table-manners.
     
All the same, the most significant of the wrinkles was Astahov's flying visit to Turku to sort out the dispute involving a mixed Finnish-Russian family.
      As the Finnish Broadcasting Company's foreign correspondent Jarmo Mäkelä recently noted, Astahov naturally did not have any legal authority whatsoever for his actions in a foreign country.
      Nevertheless, he issued statements that were like gasoline for the anti-Finnish blaze being whipped up in the Russian media over the foster-care incident.
      The Finnish child welfare authorities, meanwhile, were completely unable to respond to the accusations because of the confidentiality rules they must adhere to.
     
According to Astahov, violations of the rights of Russian families living in Finland have been increasing all the time.
      In an open letter to the Governor of St. Petersburg Valentina Matviyenko, Astahov demanded that she bring up the issues in discussions with President Tarja Halonen, "in order that the cordial long-term relations between the two countries are not interrupted".
      In other words, Astahov hooked together a child custody dispute and the Finnish head of state.
      Still, he is no ordinary civil servant after all - Astahov is a graduate of the same KGB academy that produced Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin.
     
Recently in Russia, the search has been on for suitable hostile images for domestic consumption, and it has thrown all manner of oddities into the media spotlight.
      Astahov's behaviour must be seen in the context of this: a new politico-social doctrine in Russia, one that includes the protection of the interests of ex-pat Russian minorities abroad, if necessary by force of arms.
      Leaning on the tenets of international law, no country on earth enjoys these sort of rights.
     
One clear objective of the new doctrine is to exert pressure on neighbouring countries and bring an element of fear into play.
      We have been lulled into believing that this bluster coming out of Moscow is reserved for those new states that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union after 1990.
      This is not altogether true, and the old "sphere of influence" ideology has not vanished from Moscow handbooks.
      Pavel Astahov quite clearly came to mark out his territory: if some Russian living in Finland feels he or she is not getting justice out of the Finnish system, then he or she should turn to the Kremlin for help.
      And just as J.K. Paasikivi [7th President of Finland and the architect of Finland's foreign policy after the Second World War] noted dryly, the Kremlin is no assize court.
     
Russia's Ambassador to Norway Sergei Andreyev, for his part, answered to articles on Finland's wars in an Oslo diplomatic journal.
      He concentrated all his energy on bringing out the collaboration between Finland and [Nazi] Germany.
      When examining the Winter War of 1939-40, he first wrote of the "political realities" in a situation where war against Germany was a foregone conclusion for the Soviet Union.
      Andreyev sticks to the Soviet version of events and forgets the fact that at the time in late 1939 the USSR and Germany were joined in cooperation, and in truth the ink was barely dry on the signatures to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
      This non-aggression treaty also included a protocol dividing Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with Finland, the Baltics, and half of Poland left in the Soviet camp.
Andreyev writes that the Soviet Union had from 1938 onwards made Finland several proposals concerning political guarantees and exchanges of territory, but that Helsinki had stubbornly rejected all of them.
      Hence "the defensive line around Leningrad had to be moved further to the west in long and bloody battles".
      If this had not happened, he suggests, then the Germans would probably have taken Leningrad in the first few days of Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
     
Here, too, something has been forgotten. Finland was not by any manner of means planning to wage war in 1939, but had in fact hopelessly neglected the building up of its armed forces.
      The Continuation War of 1941-44 was just that, a continuation of round one.
      Andreyev also fails to consider that the entire Continuation War would not have happened were it not for the Soviet Union's having invaded Finland in November 1939.
      In an article that places the past into the present Andreyev takes issue with the paper's views on Stalin and argues that: "the worship of Stalin and his actions is no better and no worse than demonising him and declaring that everything he did was malevolent and negative".
     
The writings of the Russian military journal Krasnaya Zvezda adhere to the same rules as those governing Andreyev.
      If the writer of something like this is a layman or the publisher a colourful commercial newspaper, then the pieces are covered by the same normal freedom of expression norms, but when it is an ambassador or a military periodical that is behind it, one can rest assured that material such as this does not bubble up completely out of nowhere.
      Ultimately, it is a question of a large country's difficulties in coming to grips honestly with its own past.
     
Last week offered an interesting point of comparison, when Russia and Poland looked back - in circumstances made doubly tragic by Saturday's air crash in Smolensk - on the massacre of Polish nationals in Katyn Forest in April 1940.
      Russia's current leadership has not completely rejected the allure of historical revisionism, but its attitude to such matters depends on the other side in the argument.
     
At the first memorial ceremony, before the plane carrying the Polish President and nearly a hundred other politicians and high-ranking army officers came down short of the runway in Smolensk, Vladimir Putin did not specifically apologise for the bloodbath in Katyn, in which Stalin eliminated more than 22,000 Polish officers and patriots after having annexed half of Poland in accordance with the terms of Molotov-Ribbentrop.
      All the same, Putin did come a good way towards accepting the Polish view of past events.
     
Just this meeting at the graveside and the well-chosen words served to indicate that there are differences in Moscow's approach.
      In the case of a mid-ranking NATO and European Union member such as Poland, for instance, which has also seen its economy growing even in these recessionary times, and which clings doggedly to its own interpretations of what went down in Europe 70 years ago, the Russian response is different from that given to smaller players such as Finland.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.4.2010
     
     
The author is an independent columnist writing for Helsingin Sanomat


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Suffer the little children... (30.3.2010)
  Finnish assessment: Russian furore over foster care dispute mainly for domestic consumption (26.3.2010)
  Foster care dispute in Turku goes international (17.3.2010)

See also:
  Russian newspaper lashes out at HS article speculating on new Winter War (23.3.2010)
  Large Russian military exercise in Baltic Sea area involves tens of thousands of troops (20.8.2009)