Finland Winter Quotes

Finland’s crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union’s massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential allies and sustained heavy losses, but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its independence against the Soviet Union, whose population outnumbered Finland’s by 40 to 1. I spent a summer in Finland 20 years later, hosted by veterans and widows and orphans of the Winter War. The war’s legacy was conspicuous selective change that made Finland an unprecedented mosaic, a mixture of contrasting elements: an affluent small liberal democracy, pursuing a foreign policy of doing everything possible to earn the trust of the impoverished giant reactionary Soviet dictatorship. That policy was considered shameful and denounced as “Finlandization” by many non-Finns who failed to understand the historical reasons for its adoption. One of the most intense moments of my summer in Finland unfolded when I ignorantly expressed similar views to a Winter War veteran, who replied by politely explaining to me the bitter lessons that Finns had learned from being denied help by other nations.

The Soviet propaganda apparatus continued to crank out shrill, contorted documents attempting to convince whoever was listening that Finland was the real aggressor, that the Kuusinen government was legitimate, and the Mannerheim/Tanner/Ryti regime was enslaving the workers, etc.

There’s a definite depressive streak in Finns, more so than in their western neighbours. While they aren’t among Europe’s biggest drinkers per capita, the incidence of alcoholism is high. The winter darkness can strain even the most optimistic soul – seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is significant here and suicide levels are higher than the comfortable standard of living would predict. The melancholic trend is reflected in Finns’ love of darkly themed music and lyrics of lost love

Right by the Arctic Circle, the city of Rovaniemi is a key draw for visitors, with various Santa Claus attractions (the red-suited saint officially resides here) and numerous tours and activities, ranging from reindeer-farm visits to snowmobiling safaris, dog sledding with huskies and various high-adrenaline adventures. Rovaniemi has a small ski area, but the best skiing is at Pyhä-Luosto. Elsewhere you can hike, take an ice-breaker cruise, stay in a winter snow castle and go berry picking in summer.

Each February/March the entire country takes a "ski week". The schools shut down, parents take off work, dogs go to the in-laws, and Finland's middle and upper classes go on holiday. But not all at once. They can't have the entire country gandala-ing up to Lapland at one time (AVALANCHES!). So the country takes turns. The best region goes first: Southern Finland. Then the second best: Central Finland. Then the reindeer herders and forest people take a week off from unemployment and go last: Northern Finland.

Finns have a deep and abiding love of their country’s forests and lakes. In July Finland is one of the world’s most relaxing, joyful places to be – a reason Finns traditionally have not been big travellers. After the long winter, why miss the best their country has to offer? Finns head en masse for the mökki (summer cottage) from midsummer until the end of the July holidays. Most Finns of any age could forage in a forest for an hour at the right time of year and emerge with a feast of fresh berries, wild mushrooms and probably a fish or two. City-dwelling Finns are far more in touch with nature than most of their European equivalents.

Finland is not Scandinavia, nor is it Russia. Nevertheless, Finnish tradition owes something to both cultures. But the modern Finn is staunchly independent. The long struggle for emancipation and the battle to survive in a harsh environment have engendered an ordered society that solves its own problems in its own way. They have also given birth to the Finnish trait of sisu, often translated as ‘guts’, or the resilience to survive prolonged hardship. Even if all looks lost, a Finn with sisu will fight – or swim, or run, or work – valiantly until the final defeat. This trait is valued highly, with the country’s heroic resistance against the Red Army in the Winter War usually thought of as the ultimate example.

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Finland does have some nature-oriented day cares—and they are not just about drawing trees and having the children read Emerson. “They spend their whole day outdoors,” says Lehtimäki. “Even when it’s winter—it can be minus twenty-five [Celsius] and so cold.” Parents are advised to dress their children in many layers, according to Finnish news coverage of one such day care. It also suggests that the three- to five-year-olds are made to run around if they complain: “If children feel cold, the adults activate them.” During fall and spring, they have “tent weeks” when they sleep outside in the forest.

Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic.

God forgives, the Finns do not.’ This

A national obsession with a particular sport does not occur in a vacuum. Something lights the match. In the early twentieth century, Finland was a poor, nonindustrialized country where many people worked outdoors and got around on foot and (during the winter) on cross-country skis. These fertile conditions produced Hannes Kolehmainen, who won three gold medals in running events at the 1912 Olympics. Kolehmainen’s triumphs ignited an intense running craze in his home country. Every Finnish boy wanted to be the next Olympic hero. The result was a quarter-century of Finnish dominance of distance running, a dynasty that produced a number of athletes whose performances far surpassed those of the man who’d started it all. Ultimately, the passionate and widespread participation in running that Hannes Kolehmainen inspired had a much stronger impact on the performance of Finland’s top runners than did the conditions of poverty, lack of industrialization, and human-powered transportation that produced the first great Finnish runner. Sociologist

Since we cannot move Leningrad ... then we must move the border.

we concentrate our army into an enormous fist. The very fact that such a fist exists will prevent the enemy from dispersing his forces in a war of manoeuvre, he will not be given any opportunity to loosen the close ‘interlinking’ of his army; on the contrary, he will be forced to concentrate, to go over to the defence on as restricted an area as possible. In other words, we get conditions of a frontal war, we force the enemy to accept our view of the character of the war.

There were few more unlikely candidates in 1611 for Great Power status than Sweden. Even with its satrapy of Finland, the total population numbered no more than 1.3 million. They lived on the northern edge of Europe in an impoverished, barren, half-frozen country with almost no industry to speak of. So poor was Sweden that by winter’s end peasants were often reduced to eating tree bark to survive. It was a society, writes historian Michael Roberts, “which was half-isolated, culturally retarded, and still in all essentials mediaeval.

For it was axiomatic to a certain type of twentieth-century Social Democrat that a badly-equipped and therefore ineffective army was somehow less immoral than one that did its job well. It was further held that due to this deliberate oversight, an inevitably slavish dependence upon multilateral institutions would somehow take up the resultant political slack. The heavy cost of this point of view is seldom borne, either directly or immediately, by its proponents; one thinks like a sovereign nation-state, or one does not. When the wheels fall off the wagon of policy, the armed services often pay the price.

For the moment we have not informed the Finnish people of them, as we have not wished to make the negotiations more difficult through public discussion.

If the Germans come’, Marshal Smigly-Rydz9 had stated only a month before, in August 1939, ‘we lose our freedom. If the Russians come, we lose our souls.

This process of mental contortion is to be seen at most conferences between Communist and non-Communist powers. Disarmament to one means one thing, to the other another thing; so also does peace. While to the non-Communist peace is a state of international harmony, to the Communist it is a state of international discord ... Communists hold that peace and war are reciprocal terms for a conflict which can only end when Marxian Beatitude is established; since their final aim is pacific, they are peace lovers.

I was fortunate to grow up in a place where snowfall was abundant, exclusion from private property was frowned upon, and outside my door were thousands of acres of forested hills to explore. By the time I was ten my feet were as big as my mother's, and I pinched her leather cross-country ski boots and a set of wooden skis and poles from Finland that had stood neglected in the cellar for years. I never had any instruction in Nordic skiing technique, but as soon as I pushed off it was obvious that this was an easier way to move about in the winter woods. To this day I have a hard time thinking of skiing as a sport and have felt self-conscious the few times I've skied in prepared tracks among the athletic and sleek-suited crowd that frequents Nordic centers. For me skiing is just the way you walk when there's snow on the ground. It's walking in cursive, and I love to walk.

Whole divisions entered Finland with no worthwhile intelligence estimates of their opposition, guided by hopelessly inaccurate maps, yet fully burdened with truckloads of propaganda material including reams of posters and brass bands.

You understand how it is here, the weather?’ The elderly Norwegian in a Charlie Brown earflap hat was the first pedestrian I had encountered since leaving Kirkenes, a little port hunkered pluckily up in Europe’s furthest top-right corner. On his third and loudest attempt, he had at last penetrated a howling blizzard and the many thermal layers that swaddled my head. It was a disappointing response to my own snood-muffled enquiry: the distance to Näätämö, across the border in Finland, the European Union’s northernmost settlement and the only place for hours around that offered an overnight alternative to a hunched and lonely death in the sub-Polar darkness. My understanding of how it was there, the weather, had, I felt, been pretty solid for a graduate from the No Shit Sherlock School of Climate Studies: our conversation was taking place 400km above the Arctic Circle, in winter. Nonetheless, this knowledge base had broadened memorably over the previous eighteen hours, and in ways that left the tiny exposed parts of my face encrusted with frozen tears of pain and terror. I nodded feebly, expending around 8 per cent of my physical reserves. ‘So why you are WITH BICYCLE?

Finland alone, in danger of death—superb, sublime Finland—shows what free men can do. —Winston Churchill, January 1940

To maximize Finland’s bargaining power, the military strategy would be to hold on to every inch of Finnish soil and to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy—to present Stalin with such a butcher’s bill that he, too, would be eager for negotiations.

Young as the Morning, Old as the Sea" "I wanna lay by a lake in Norway, I I wanna walk through Swedish fields of green I wanna see the forests of Finland, I I wanna sail on a boat on the Baltic sea I wanna feel the Russian winter, I I wanna go to my Polish grandmother's home I wanna see Hungarian lanterns, I I wanna walk on a road that leads to Rome I wanna be free as the winds that blow past me Clear as the air that I breath Young as the morning And old as the sea I wanna lose myself in the Scottish highlands The west coast of Ireland The Cornish breeze I wanna rest my bones in the Spanish sunshine The Italian coastline is calling me To be free as the birds that fly past me Light as the fish in the sea To be wise as the mountains And tall as the trees I wanna be sunny and bright as a sunrise Happy and full as the moon I'm fleeting like fireworks fading too soon

Young as the Morning, Old as the Sea" "I wanna lay by a lake in Norway, I I wanna walk through Swedish fields of green I wanna see the forests of Finland, I I wanna sail on a boat on the Baltic sea I wanna feel the Russian winter, I I wanna go to my Polish grandmother's home I wanna see Hungarian lanterns, I I wanna walk on a road that leads to Rome I wanna be free as the winds that blow past me Clear as the air that I breath Young as the morning And old as the sea I wanna lose myself in the Scottish highlands The west coast of Ireland The Cornish breeze I wanna rest my bones in the Spanish sunshine The Italian coastline is calling me To be free as the birds that fly past me Light as the fish in the sea To be wise as the mountains And tall as the trees I wanna be sunny and bright as a sunrise Happy and full as the moon I'm fleeting like fireworks fading too soon

You don’t make a journey like that alone. You make it with a lot of love and sacrifice. That’s probably why I was searching the stands for my father after we won the gold medal against Finland. It was a moment that was begging to be shared.

During the winter of 1939-40, the Soviet Union attacked Finland and met with stiff resistance. Yet Finland was no match for the massive attacking troops of the enemy. They eventually ceded some territory - the second largest city Vyborg and a few islands in the Gulf of Finland. The war ended in March 1940.

In the Vienna Folklore Museum is a yellowing wooden goat head on a pole. It has flapping black ears, short, curved horns, wide black eyes and an enormous, gaping, snapping mouth, lined with sharp little rows of carved wooden teeth. The jaw is rigged so that it snaps closed when the performer, holding the pole and hidden beneath a sheet, pulls on a thin piece of string dangling from the back of the monster’s head. This creature is called a Habergeiß, a name almost certainly related to goats (‘geiß’ is the Austrian for ‘goat’) and it can be found prowling the streets and snapping at the unwary in Bavarian towns over Epiphany.ix Over in Poland there’s the Turon, another horned, shaggy monster head with a clacking jaw that’s held on a pole by a performer under a sheet. The Turon is led on a rope house to house, where its escort sings carols and the Turon jumps and claps his jaw, chasing the householders. In Romania there are the Corlata, monsters who appear at the end of the year led by groups visiting houses, and are made from (you’ll never guess) a horned, wooden head – a stag’s, this time – with a clacking jaw, held on a pole by a performer who hides under a sheet (although the sheet that covers the Corlata can often be extremely brightly patterned – one photograph from 2010 shows it covered in brilliant flowers). In North-East Germany there’s the Klapperbock (the snapping buck), in the Italian Tyrol there are the Schanppvieh – snapbeasts (although these normally appeared at Carnival rather than Christmas). In Switzerland there’s the Schnabelgeiß, the ‘beak goat’, which looks like all the other goat monsters except that the snout narrows to a point, to take the form of a beak. In Finland and Sweden there are the Nuuttipukki, more stags who bother householders, this time on St Knut’s Day, on 13 January (hence their name). And we’ve already come across the Finnish Julebukk – the Yule goat – another goat monster portrayed by a performer hiding under a sheet, this time made of animal hides. In some parts of Lithuania and Silesia, meanwhile, there was the Schimmelreiter – the grey rider – which came with a new innovation. As in Britain, this monster was a horse, with a snapping head that was often a horse’s skull held on a pole, but this one was played by multiple people and could be ridden.x It starts to feel like you can’t go to Europe over the Christmas period without being snapped at by an animal head on a pole, held by a performer lurking under a cloth.