From Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Jared Diamond, 2019) pp87-91
The concrete pay-offs from Finland’s adherence to the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line have consisted of what the Soviet Union (and, today, Russia) has and hasn’t done to Finland during the past 70 years. It hasn’t invaded Finland. It didn’t engineer a take-over of Finland by the Finnish Communist Party when that party existed. It did reduce the amount and extend the period of the war reparations that Finland owed and paid off to the Soviet Union. In 1955 it did evacuate its naval base and did withdraw its artillery on the Finnish coast at Porkkala, just 10 miles from Helsinki. It did tolerate Finland’s increasing its trade with the West and decreasing its trade with the Soviet Union, Finland’s association with the EEC (European Economic Community), and Finland’s joining EFTA (the European Free Trade Association). It was fully within the Soviet Union’s power to do, not to do, or to forbid most of those things. The Soviet Union would never have behaved as it did if it had not trusted and felt secure with Finland and with Finland’s leaders.
In its foreign relations Finland constantly walked a tightrope between developing its relations with the West and retaining Soviet trust. To establish that trust immediately after the Continuation War in 1944, Finland fulfilled on time all the conditions of its armistice and subsequent peace treaty with the Soviet Union. That meant driving German troops out of Finlan,. conducting war crimes trials against Finland’s own wartime leaders, legalizing the Finnish Communist Party and bringing it into the government while preventing it from taking over Finland, and punctually paying its war reparations to the Soviet Union, even though that involved individual Finns contributing their jewelry and gold wedding rings.
In expanding its Western involvement, Finland made efforts to reduce chronic Soviet suspicion that Finland might become economically integrated into the West. For instance, Finland found it prudent to refuse the U.S.’s offer of badly needed Marshall Plan aid. While reaching agreements with or joining the Western European associations BBC and EFTA, Finland simultaneously made agreements with Eastern European communist countries, guaranteed most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union, and promised the Soviet Union the same trade concessions that Finland was making to its EEC partners.
At the same time as Western countries were Finland’s major trade partners, Finland became the Soviet Union’s second-leading Western trade partner (after West Germany). Container shipments through Finland were a major route for Western goods to be imported into the Soviet Union. Finland’s own exports to the Soviet Union included ships, ice-breakers, consumer goods, and materials to build entire hospitals, hotels, and industrial towns. For the Soviet Union, Finland was its major source of Western technology and its major window onto the West. The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.
Because Soviet leaders trusted Presidents Paasikivi and Kekkonen, Finland chose not to turn over its presidents as in a normal democracy but maintained those two in office for a total of 35 years. Paasikivi served as president for 10 years until just before his death at age 86, while his successor Kekkonen served for 25 years until failing health compelled him to resign at age 81. When Kekkonen visited Brezhnev in 1973 at the time of Finland’s negotiations with the EEC, Kekkonen defused Brezhnev’s concerns by giving Brezhnev his personal word that Finland’s EEC relationship wouldn’t affect Finland’s relationship with Russia. Finland’s parliament then enabled Kekkonen to fuliill that promise, by adopting an emergency law to extend his term for another four years, thereby postponing the presidential election scheduled for 1974.
Finland’s government and press avoided criticizing the Soviet Union and practiced voluntary self-censorship not normally associated with democracies. For example, when other countries condemned the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet war against Afghanistan, the Finnish government and press remained silent. A Finnish publishing house cancelled its plans to publish Solzhenitsyn’s novel Gulag Archipelago for fear of offending Soviet sensitivities. When a Finnish newspaper in 1971 did offend the Soviet Union by stating (truthfully) that the Baltic Republics were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, a Soviet newspaper denounced that statement as a bourgeois attempt to disrupt neighborly relations between Finland and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet foreign minister warned Finland that the Soviet Union expected the Finnish government to prevent such incidents in the future. The Finnish government obliged by calling on the Finnish press to exercise more “responsibility,” i.e., to self-censor such potentially offensive statements.
Finland’s tightrope act served to combine independence from the Soviet Union with economic growth. In this respect, too, Finland as a small country has had to face realities: today’s 6 million Finns will never develop the economic advantages of scale enjoyed by 90 million Germans or 330 million Americans. Finland will never succeed in economic spheres dependent on a low standard of living and the resulting ability to pay workers the low wages still widespread outside Europe and North America. By world standards, Finland will always have few workers, who will always expect high wages. Hence Finland has had to make full use of in available workforce and to develop industries earning high profits. In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well, unlike the 11.5. school system, which now educates some people well but more people poorly. Finland has egalitarian, high-quality public school with few private schools. Astonishingly to rich Americans, even those few Finnish private schools receive the same level of funding from the government as do public schools, and are not permitted to increase their funding by charging tuition, collecting fees, or raising endowments! While U.S. schoolteachers have low social status and are drawn predominantly from the lower-performing ranks of college students, Finnish schoolteachers go through a very competitive selection process, are drawn from the brightest high school and university students, enjoy high status (even more than university teachers!), are well paid, all have advanced degrees, and have lots of autonomy in how they teach. As a result, Finnish students score at or near the top of world national rankings in literacy, math and problem-solving abilities. Finland gets the best out of its women as well as out of its men: it was the second country in the world (after New Zealand) to extend the vote to women, and its president happened to be a woman at the time of one of my visits. Finland even gets the best out of its police: again astonishingly to Americans, Finnish police have to have a university bachelor’s degree, are trusted by 96% of Finns, and almost never use their guns. Last year, Finnish police on duty fired only six shots, five of them just warning shots: that’s fewer than an average week of police gunshots in my city of Los Angeles. That strong focus on education yields a productive workforce.
Finland has the world’s highest percentage of engineers in its population. It is a world leader in technology. Its exports account for nearly half of its GDP (gross domestic product), and its main exports are now high-tech -heavy machinery and manufactured goods instead of timber and other conventional forest products as was the case before World War TWO. Finland has become a world leader in the development of new high-tech products from its forests. such as electricity generation, fertilizers, textile fibers to replace wool and copper, and even guitars. Finland’s combined private and government investment in research and development equals 3.5% of its GDP, almost double the level of other European Union countries, and (along with the percentage of its GDP spent on education) close to the highest in the world. The result of that excellent educational system and those high investments in research and development is that, within just half-a-century, Finland went from being a poor country to being one of the richest in the world. Its average per-capita income is now equal to that of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, all of which have populations 10 times that of Finland and have been rich for a long time.
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