Cold War

Amid the growing uneasiness which grips the world, an almost unnoticed change is taking place in Finland this year. Without riches of the mid-east or the explosiveness of Berlin, the nation whose defense against Russia electrified the world twenty years ago is slowly slipping into the Russian Orbit.

A highly specialized country depending mainly on exports of fish and timber to balance its foreign trade, Finland is peculiarly susceptible to economic pressure from the Soviet Union, for Russia supplies more than half the Finnish foreign markets, and holds many of their foreign loans. The effects that this pressure can have became graphically clear last fall.

The Russians chose to express their displeasure with Conservative Premier Karl Fagerholm by withdrawing their ambassador from Helsinki and cutting off both loans and trade. Fagerholm's government quickly fell, and the Agrarian Party took over. Two weeks later, Finnnish President Kekkonen went to Leningrad for a conference with Khrushchev.

Kekkonen returned saying he had not realized how bad Finno-Russian relations had become. "I am sure that all reasonable Finns will join me in saying that we cannot have spells of cold. Finland must naturally take into account that vital interests require our neighbor to trust us." Apparently Khrushchev had applied pressure against the free Finnish press, and despite Finnish constitutional guarantee of press freedom, Kekkonen said. "Without restraint and responsibility on the part of the press, our relations will never achieve that degree of confidence our interest deserves."

Kekkonnen is in a precarious position. His people like the Americans and tend to call the Russians "smelly barbarians," but, as he puts it, "Relations with the West depend on how she handles relations with the East." The West, he says, tends to regard loans from Rusisa as treason, but without them Finland will not survive. When Finnish ties with the West grow stronger, as they did last fall, Russia exerts economic pressure.

The Finns still joke about their position; "We are a bee in the pants of the Soviet Union; they outnumber us fifty to one, but we put up a better fight." But, lacking the economic independence of Poland and Yugoslavia, they cannot make a break with Russia. The path they tread is narrow indeed.