No socialist paradise for Finnish defector family
Finnish businessman links long lost relatives and friends as hobby
By Maria Mustranta
A year ago, Tampere resident Hilkka Tikkanen, 79, received a strange letter. It was from Helsinki entrepreneur Timo Laakso, whom Tikkanen had never heard of. Laakso said that Tikkanen’s cousin Silvia-Ida Tikkanen, who was last heard of in the 1930s, now lives somewhere in Ukraine. Ida, now 87 years old, goes by the name of Zinaida, and is seeking contact with her relatives.
“It certainly does seem strange, after not knowing if she or any member of their family is still alive”, Tikkanen says by telephone from Tampere.
Hilkka Tikkanen certainly did remember Zinaida and her family. In the early part of the 20th century the Tikkanens were a family of railway builders, with leftist political sympathies, even though politics was not discussed much in the families.
Hilkka’s uncle - Zindan’s father - was a communist. When the party was banned in Finland in 1930, the uncle decided to defect with his wife and two children to the Soviet Union.
Nothing was heard of them since.
“When my father was still alive my brother tried to look for them”, Hilkka Tikkanen says.
Hilkka’s father would have liked to know if his brother was still alive. However, no information was forthcoming from the Soviet Union of the time.
Only now did Hilkka Tikkanen get an answer to the riddle that has bothered her family for decades. The letter sent by Timo Laakso includes Zinaida’s account of what had happened to the family after the defection to the Soviet union.
The story was also of interest to a Russian television channel, which wanted to tell the story on Ukrainian television.
Timo Laakso, who contacted Hilkka, has an unusual hobby. He helps Finns and citizens of the former Soviet Union search for missing relatives on both sides of the border.
One wall of Laakso’s home in Herttoniemi in the east of Helsinki is obscured by a shelf filled with files containing information on searches that have been concluded, and others that are still going on.
“That is just a small part”, Laakso says.
He has many more files in storage, as Laakso has managed to search for, and to find hundreds of people.
“Emigrants from the time of the tsars, classmates who have moved to Finland, Ingrians, Karelian refugees from the 1920s, children left in Finland by Russian prisoners of war, genetic material left by Finnish construction workers in the Soviet Union”, Laakso says of the various people he has searched for.
“I have thought that there might actually be nobody else who would know how to help these people.”
Laakso’s hobby started in 1987 when he read in a Salvation Army magazine about Estonians who were looking for their relatives in Finland. Laakso, who was interested in genealogy already as a child, who had history as a hobby, and could speak Russian, thought that he might be able to help, so he contacted the Salvation Army.
His first case was an Estonian woman, whose son had travelled to Finland in 1943 and disappeared.
Laakso’s investigations led to Sweden. It turned out that the son had died in 1984, and left an inheritance that is quite large by Soviet standards. The Swedish state returned the money to the mother, who used it to take care of her health, and live in comfort almost until the age of 100.
Stories like these are also of interest in Russia, where it is much more difficult to search for lost loved ones than in Finland or the other Nordic Countries, which have centralised population registers - something which Russia lacks.
Ten years ago Laakso heard about the Russian television programme Zhdi Menya, where people would search for their lost loved ones. He contacted the producers, and now he helps them by dealing with cases involving Finland and Sweden.
The Zhdi Menya website has 2.5 million e-mail enquiries, where people search for lost loved ones. The producers of the programme do not have the time to search for the relatives; contact is usually established when someone sees an enquiry on television or on line. The most interesting stories end up on the programme, where a studio audience is told about stories of the searchers, and poignant moments of reunification are seen.
In Russia, Zhdi Menya has 35 million viewers every week.
The programme is so popular that it is able to tackle subjects which are considered sensitive in Russia, where problems of freedom of speech continue to exist.
In one programme, a Russian soldier was brought into the studio. With the help of the programme he had re-established contact with an elderly Chechen woman. He had been injured in a battle in Chechnya and the woman had saved his life by keeping him in her home and nursing him back to health.
How is something like this possible?
Laakso suspects that the answer lies in the Slavic soul.
“People there are much more emotional then here. Even burly men cry”, Laakso says.
Perhaps the stories on Zhdi Menya have moved even the men of the Russian security service enough to make them turn a blind eye to what the producers do.
Laakso has no illusions. He is sure that both the web pages of the programme, as well as his own investigations are under surveillance.
It was through Zhdi Menya that Laakso received the request for help from Zinaida Tikkanen. Laakso has handled similar cases before.
Between 12,000 and 15,000 Finns defected to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They were inspired to leave by the economic hard times of the Great Depression, as well as ideological reasons. Right-wing terror was at its peak in Finland, and a leftist background could make it more difficult to get a job. Some of the defectors later managed to get back to Finland.
What is exceptional in Tikkanen’s case was that one of the people involved is still alive, and of the age that she remembers the flight across the border. Perhaps this is why the producers of Zhdi Menya wanted to tell the Tikkanen story on television.
“I don’t want to go there”, Helena Tikkanen tought at first when Laakso said that the Finnish relatives should go to Moscow to appear on television. However, her cousin Riitta Kumpula from Kirkkonummi managed to turn Tikkanen’s head around. So the women travelled to Moscow in July.
A visit to the studio would have been too difficult for Zinaida, and Tikkanen was shown material that had been shot in Ukraine. But the Finnish cousins did meet Zinaida’s 65-year-old daughter Vera Vladimirovna who attended the taping.
During their brief meeting, there was unfortunately not much time to talk, considering that everything had to go through an interpreter. However, Vladimirovna bore a striking resemblance to Riitta Kumpula’s and Hilkka Tikkanen’s aunt Miina.
“It was a touching moment”, Hilkka Tikkanen says.
So what happened to Zinaida’s family in the 1930s? Zinaida said in a letter she sent to Laaksonen that the family crossed the border illegally with the help of a guide from Nurmes to Repola on the other side of the border. From there they travelled to Petrozavodsk.
There the parents were imprisoned for six months for the purpose of verification of their identities. The children were put in a foster home. Zinaida was eight years old at the time and her brother Vilho was ten.
“At that time we did not speak any Russian. We only spoke Finnish” Zinaida wrote.
After his release, her father studied construction and the family settled on the shore of the White Sea in a town that was called Sorokka at the time. Now it is called Belomorsk.
Worse was to come. In the purges of dictator Josif Stalin in the 1930s, the Party and the state sought to be cleansed of untrustworthy material. Suspicions of espionage and counter-revolutionary activities were also levelled at Finnish defectors.
One day in the summer of 1937 Zinaida’s father did not come home from work.
“Mother repeatedly went to the NKVD to ask about my father, and by doing so, she sealed her own fate”, Zinaida wrote. The NKVD was the Ministry of the Interior, which also included the secret police.
Zinaida’s father was executed in April 1938 as an enemy of the people. Her mother was sentenced the following autumn to ten years imprisonment for counter-revolutionary agitation. The sentence ruined her health, and she died soon after her release.
When the Second World War broke out, the Soviet Army sent the 20-year-old Vilho to the front. Zinaida lost touch with him. She received one letter from her brother in 1942. There was no return address, and she heard nothing of Vilho since then.
Life was hard after my parents died”, Zinaida wrote to Laakso. She want to dental school in 1940, but did not finish her studies. All of the other students on her course died in the war.
In 1942 Zinaida married the captain of a steamship of the Soviet army, and they got their daughter Veral. Her husband died of typhus soon after that.
Zinda swore on his grave that she would never marry again. Although the attractive woman had many admirers, she kept her promise.
“I worked hard so that my daughter and I would make it through the war”, Zinaida wrote.
After her husband’s death Zinaida moved to Abkhazia where her friends lived, and worked at a factory. The home was so poor that tea boxes were used as a table.
Her fortunes improved in the decades that followed the war. Zinaida became a bookkeeper, and life was easier. In 1977 she moved to Ukraine, to the city of Nikolayev. Her parents were rehabilitated, and declared innocent in 1989.
In spite of her hard life, Zinaida does not seem to be bitter about the fate of her parents. In her letter she does not complain, or blame anyone.
Now she has two granddaughters and three great granddaughters. She has her house, her health, and a good pension.
The Tikkanens’ story will be aired on Ukrainian television before the end of the year, and after that, the broadcast will also be available on the Internet.
Hilkka Tikkanen has been in contact with Zinaida by telephone after the programme was produced. The cousins chatted in Finnish, although it was a bit difficult, as Zinaida has not spoken her mother tongue for 60 years. Hilkka Tikkanen spoke of her trip to Moscow and asked Zinaida about how things were going. It is possible that she might travel to Ukraine to meet her cousin.
After they reconnected, Tikkanen was left with the feeling that the fate of Zinaida’s brother Vilho still weighs upon her. In spite of many attempts, Zinaida has not found any more information about Vilho even after the war. Zinaida kept her surname even after marrying, so that her brother might be able to find her some day.
And if not the brother, then perhaps a child of the brother might be alive? Perhaps someone will watch Zhdi Menya and realise that Vera is a cousin?
However, after the call to Ukraine, Laakso sends e-mail saying that he has finally learned the man’s fate. During the war Vilho Tikkanen was sent to the “work army” in Chelyabinsk.
“On January 10th, 1942 the State Defence Committee of the Soviet Union issued Decision 1123, under which Germans were removed from the Soviet Army and on October 14th, 1942 the decision was extended to the Finns. The Finns were an enemy nation, and for that reason, Finns, Germans, and others could be used in forced labour. The concept “work army” was quite euphemistic. It was actually a concentration camp, where at least 635 Finns were killed”, Laakso writes.
Vilho Tikkanen died in Chelyabinsk on April 15th, 1943.
Laakso does not call Zinaida, because in the East, bad news is customarily delivered in person.
“I gave this sad information to Vera, who can tell it to Zinaida”, he says.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.12.2009
MARIA MUSTRANTA / Helsingin Sanomat
maria.mustranta@hs.fi
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| 15.12.2009 - THIS WEEK |
 No socialist paradise for Finnish defector family |
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