Order yours here!

Those aren’t precisely the first words an exhausted Redford-hunter wishes to hear–no less after spending twelve hours on three progressively smaller and shakier aircraft, the last belonging to an airline with a safety record for which it has been nicknamed “Crashcade” [Cascade] Airlines.

To be sure, I consoled myself as we headed towards the Moscow, Idaho Best Western, this wouldn’t be the first time the media-phobic Kid has canceled a speaking engagement. But, I cursed to myself a moment later, it doesn’t make sense.

For this wasn’t to be just another speaking engagement–even for Robert Redford. The stellar actor-activist had been booked at Washington State University’s Performing Arts Coliseum as the third annual President’s Convocation Speaker, a Big Event designed for Big Names–like Redford’s–not to mention an excellent device for injecting some pomp and circumstance into Homecoming Weekend, which this year also promised an eagerly awaited Pac-10 football game between the 18th ranked up-and-coming Washington State Cougars and the despised UCLA Bruins.

The thousands of glossy, ecologically colored posters featuring Redford’s reflective figure silhouetted against a rangeland setting that had been plastered across the adjoining Washington State and University of Idaho campuses in anticipation of Redford’s Rap from the Mount–”ROBERT REDFORD/Looking Toward a Balanced Future”–had already become collectors’ items. At the very least, a cancellation would put a crimp in a lot of Cougars’ weekends.

More significantly–at least, from Redford’s point of view–the convocation speech and the news conference scheduled for afterwards had also been designed to serve as a sort of elaborate dedication ceremony for his rumor-enshrouded Institute of Resource Management, the progressive environmental think thank and graduate student endowment program to bestow on the two Northwestern campuses earlier in the year after a long screening process. With the formal start of I.R.M. now twice-delayed by fund-raising problems–where was the $5 million Redford had confidently promised he would bring in the previous spring?–a major public appearance by its founder appeared to be vital to maintain the project’s momentum and sustain the community’s faith in him–not to mention the 20 novice resource managers who had already been recruited. This was one media event the “male Garbo” would have to attend if he was really serious about the thing. Or was he?

The local press, for its part, smelled blood. “Redford Flies into Hornet’s Nest,” bayed the headline in the Spokane “Spokesman-Review” on the day the Mountain Man on environmental politics was scheduled to meet the Mob–and the press.

Nevertheless, it was not until I breakfasted with Hope Moore, the executive director of the Institute, on the morning of the appointed day that I learned, to my relief, that her mysterious boss had arrived by private jet the previous night.

The President’s Convocation Speaker had yet to take his seat amongst the various academic and quasi-academic dignitaries arranged onstage inside the Washington State Coliseum when the first of several preliminary orators stepped up to the microphone. Scattered boos–very much like those heard at baseball games as the day’s umpires are announced–wafted through the rafters of the Astrodome-like Coliseum as the names of the State University Board of Regents were read aloud. Television crewmen tested and readied their equipment. Despite little prior publicity, the vibrations emitted by Redford’s name had been powerful enough to attract more than 100 Northwestern newshawks to the Convocation–not to mention a restless crowd of 5,500 aborigines, anxious for their first look at the Great White Father who had chosen to bestow his Institute (and his vibes) on them.

I flipped through the accompanying press kit, brimming over with press releases enlarging upon the tangible reasons for Redford’s otherwise Inscrutable Providence. “For the past five years, Robert Redford has had the idea of putting together a program directed toward educating resource managers skilled in balanced development,” one flacksheet informed me. “The University of Idaho and Washington State University are uniquely qualified and ideally located to carry out the objectives of the Institute. Only eight miles apart, their proximity, nationally recognized facilities and faculties, and a long history of cooperation ensure unified and outstanding interdisciplinary programs.”

A sudden cheer rang out. I looked up to see the Man of the Hour emerge from the bowels of the Coliseum looking somewhat uncomfortable in cap and gown and what appeared to be two-toned cowboy boots.

“All of us are familiar with Robert Redford’s work as an actor,” President Glen Terrell hummed as scenes from “Butch Cassidy”, “The Sting”, “The Way We Were”, et al., momentarily flickered across thousands of mental movie screens. A look to the side showed that Redford seemed to be blushing.

“But it is not as an actor that Mr. Redford comes to speak to us today,” Terrell twanged on. (“Aw shucks,” someone in the press section wisecracked.)

“It is, rather, as a man devoted to reconciling the motives of environmental preservation and resource development. This commitment pervades every aspect of his life,” the berobed MC explained.

“Most important [sic], it is reflected in his initiation of the Institute for Resource Management… The interdisciplinary curriculum will provide broad experience… For our speaker, the Institute is a fulfillment of a dream…”

Several visibly impatient co-eds wrapped around the railing of the rear mezzanine appeared to be preparing a fusillade of presidential spitballs as Terrell finally boomed:

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE JOIN ME IN WELCOMING THAT MAN…ROBERT REDFORD.’”

Downstage, The Washington State Chamber Ensemble instantaneously swung into action, getting off a fiery cannonade of Sousa before being drowned out by the swelling cloud of cheers, squeals and camera shutters.

“Thank you,” said the Man of the Hour as he stood at the podium, seemingly oblivious to the blinding wash of strobes breaking across his face–and then, in a gesture that immediately elicited another delighted cheer from the crowd, Redford removed his mortarboard, revealing that famous red hair. “I’ve only been in one of these outfits before,” he said apologetically (referring to the honorary doctorate received from Williams College in 1976), “and I didn’t have to say anything–thank God.” Sympathetic chuckles rippled through the audience.

“It all boils down to the important choice of what to develop for our survival and what to preserve. And that is not a choice to be guessed at.”

Hence Redford’s field-grown theory of balanced development. Hence the Institute for Resource Management. It sounded pretty good. It sounded too good.

Along the way, Redford laced up this folksy account of the genesis of I.R.M. with a disclaimer of omniscience–”I think we’re all environmentalists. Anybody who’s interested in how we’re going to get to the future is.”

“So I’m happy to be here,” he said, looking mischievous again,” and I’d like to close by saying I understand that WSU is 5 zip.” “Yea!” “And to show you how serious I am about this commitment here–I was born and raised about a mile from the UCLA campus–and I’d like to state that I hope you make it 6 zip.” “Yea!!!”

The Great White Father quickly exited, accompanied by a watchful state trooper and a flock of beaming trustees. It has been a good speech–and a great performance. From what I heard, the excited students leaving the Coliseum seemed to be in agreement that Redford was a real nice guy–”He Seems To Be a Real Nice Guy” read one of the story headings in the next day’s “Daily Evergreen”–and that he knew what he was talking about.

His handling of the press conference was less masterful. Redford’s demeanor quickly became defensive as he was peppered with question about the fund-raising situation. The aviator glasses which he had donned in the meantime seemed to make him look colder, less friendly, less nice.

Gone was the casual, if somewhat glib, eloquence displayed in his speech. Most of his answers to the welter of queries were evasive, rambling and wooden. Clearly, the Great Man considered the news conference a nuisance to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Both parties appeared relieved when the Washington State News Director adjourned the stalemate and Redford stalked out with various other directors of the Institute.

Outside the Coliseum, another more welcome nuisance presented itself as Redford’s station wagon was momentarily mobbed by a crowd of fans straining for a close-up of their Once and Future Hero. A giant pastel portrait of Redford was thrust in front of the window for his signature; normally Redford doesn’t sign autographs. This time, however, he did, rolling down his window and quickly scribbling the cherished two words.

A moment later, he was gone.

??????????????????????????

“My education was there. My education was traveling. My education was meeting people. But it sure as hell wasn’t in the classroom because in those days, in the ’50s and the late ’40s, the Los Angeles educational system was pathetic. There was no incentive.
You didn’t have those wonderful teachers that made you run to class. You didn’t have those wonderful teachers that inspired you to break your back for them. I was only inspired to cut class. I was only inspired to crawl out windows, or to look out windows. To get out there where it was happening. It wasn’t happening in the classroom.”

I was curious why someone who had been so turned off by his own educational experience would invest such faith in education:

“I didn’t feel like I started to really learn anything in my life until I left school. I squandered my first year at Colorado, just squandered it–drank it away–partied it away–because I wasn’t inspired. Whereas now, 29 years later, education is better, and I’m now beginning to see what was possible. I just feel badly that I didn’t have it. So I’ve developed something of an obsession to learn and provide that opportunity for my own kids. I feel very strongly about education. I think one of the reasons I’m propelled in that direction is that I had such a poor one.”

Sensitive to the charge that he was a “solar slummer,” Redford asserted that his appreciation for and knowledge of Nature’s ways had been earned–not bought:

“One thing I have learned about having money–if somebody says, ‘Well yeah, you can afford it. You’ve got a ski area and so forth. It’s easy for you to talk about solar energy. You know you can afford a big house. You can afford to live in the mountains or in the city.’
One thing you learn, if you have money, you also learn what money can’t buy–and Nature is something that very often one can’t buy an appreciation of–it’s something that can’t be bought. And so there’s a value gained there. There is a positive to all that.”

If his respect for Nature had been initiated via painting and climbing, the self-styled anthropologist emphasized it had been certified via his contact with the Southwestern Indians, particularly the Hopis. There was a contagious awe in Redford’s voice as he spoke of his favorite tribe:

“Now you can go through these villages, you can go into the Three Mesas and feel that people are living in abject poverty and wonder how they exist and no one would truly want to live that way themselves. You start to look at how long they’ve been there. That’s the oldest inhabited city in the country. It dates back to 1100 A.D., things of that sort. You have no water, no electricity.
And these people are living up there, and the more you get into their culture, the more you understand the rituals and their dances and their ceremonies, the more impressive it becomes to me that their respect for Nature has been the mainstay of their ability to stay alive. There seems to be no reason: they defy gravity. The Hopi Indians defy defy gravity, with just a handful of tribal members staying alive in these Three Mesas that are threatened by mineral development all the way around, mineral development. How do they stay alive? How have they succeeded in not being taken over by outside interests? Well, I believe it’s a steadfast and almost mystical knowledge and use of Nature.”

It seemed legitimate to ask whether Redford had ever ingested peyote or any of the other mind-expanding herbs for which the Indians of the Southwest were once famous–or infamous. He admitted that he had, but in the same breath emphasized that:

“The Hopis have no use for hallucinogens at all. And I find them the most mystical, the most mysterious, the most magical of tribes.
It just points up the fact that you don’t really need that. And in the ’60s when it was fashionable to go get high with the Indians and to adopt their way of life and get on a mind-expansion trip, I found it radical chic and I found it too much of a trendy thing as opposed to what is to me a deeper experience which is just getting with those people and having that experience without it.”

“Now if the drug is part of the experience, that’s perfectly fine. I think it’s very hard to become an Indian,” Redford said, warming to the subject. “I remember being at a Sundance where the males and females had two separate branches of ceremony. There was a tepee ceremony where several peyote buttons were consumed by the women during the course of 24 to 36 hours. And the men are in a tepee that’s open at the top and performing a dance around a pole to exorcise poor health, to exorcise diseases of various kinds, ailments of various kinds–and it’s without food and without water and there’s dancing. So you hallucinate by dehydration, you hallucinate by chanting, you hallucinate by repetition, and you sweat–it’s a sweat ceremony. The sun is over 100 degrees, and the only rest that you get is when the squaws would come in with peppermint bars and you would lay down and they will cover you with peppermint bars which is cool and refreshing and you would cool off your body temperature to keep you from dehydrating or dying, or your body temperature can get way too high. It cool you down so that when you’re moderate again you get back up and start dancing and this goes on and on and on. And does not stop. Well, it has the same effect.”

Redford’s secretary called up to remind him that our final hour was over. But he was enjoying himself now.

“You can hallucinate without drugs. If we sit here long enough and I chant with you and we just tap our feet and I have a drum and I’m steady enough and I’m strong enough in my mind of what I’m thinking and what I feel, I believe we’re going to hallucinate, or one of us will.”

It was an intriguing suggestion.

“But the Indians have a whole different view about it. It’s sacred. It’s spiritual. They don’t do it to go get high and go into town and buzz the shit out of the town or to get crazy with each other. They do it because it’s a spiritual knowledge situation.

“I found a more important value to being with the Indians, accepting and knowing the fact that you could never be an Indian, you could never be completely of them, but you could be with them and begin to absorb some of their ways and some of their processes and find out what meaning they have for you as a Western person,
as a Caucasian or non-Indian and apply it to your own self.”

As far as getting high was concerned, Redford pointed out:

“My time in college was a booze generation…I certainly did my share of that…But I have no interest in hallucinogens or things like that anymore because I can get so high–I mean this sounds arrogant but it’s just a fact–that I’ve been so high most of my life on living that I haven’t felt the need… I’ve tried it all at one time or another and found it wanting… because there’s nothing that I’ve ever taken or used
and experimented that’s gotten me to a place where I can’t get myself.”

R.R. also asserted that his ecophilosophy had been shaped by his study of the Mormon Church. I mentioned seeing an article in “The Salt Lake City Tribune” in which Redford had praised a recent condemnation of the Reagan Administration’s plan to base the MX missle system in Utah as a reconfirmation of the Church’s ecotheological doctrine of divine stewardship.

“Yes, divine stewardship. I’m fascinated with the Mormon Church and I’m fascinated with its beginnings and what it’s trying to do. I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s become more businessoriented and that it’s lost its balance a little bit.

“But I go back to the tenets of the Church and various documents and I find fabulous statements in balance. And one is the statement regarding divine stewardship, said by Brigham Young himself and the elders of the Church which founded that valley, where they talked specifically about what had to be developed for their survival and what had to be preserved for their spirit and their psyche. I think it’s a masterful statement that’s gotten tremendously imbalanced in the last hundred years. I’m fascinated by how the one end of that two pronged statement has completely overwhelmed the other, so that anyone who tries to speak about the other is considered a radical environmentalist trying to stop progress, considered in a negative light, Just reminding the Church of its own statement on one hand has become something of a negative. But I’m fascinated by that.”

Did Redford consider his own theory of balanced development as being an act of divine stewardship?

“Yes, I’d like to think that,” he said after a long pause.

I also mentioned having seen an article in which Redford asserted that he operated in “cycles.”

“Yes. I burn hot and cool.”

What cycle was he in now?

“Reflective,” he answered softly. “Pull back cycle.”

“Now there are some things I can’t pull back on…things that were started years and years ago and are now about to take fruit–like I.R.M.–and the Sundance Institute–they have to be taken care of. But personally, for me, I’m in a reflective place at the moment where I feel the best thing for me is not to charge out with anything…”

“So,” he said after a pause, “as a result, I’m not doing a movie now. I’m not…I’m waiting. I believe in rhythm and when it’s right you do it and when it isn’t you don’t push up against it.”

And how did he get recharged, I asked?

“No magic key to it. It happens when it happens. I go when I feel a return of energy, I go. I don’t think a lot about it…and I’m not an achiever to the degree that I make lists for myself on what to achieve and what to succeed at. I’m not goal-oriented. I resist the use of the word ‘goal’, because goal has termination in it, and I believe there’s always more. So, I don’t like to think of goals or plateaus. I just like to just do. And when I get tired I stop. If I’m not tired I just keep going.”

I had a hunch. If he wasn’t goal-oriented, was he, say, image-oriented?

“No…shit…” Redford said immediately with impatience.

I clarified what I meant.

“Oh I see, I’m sorry. Oh very much so,” he said, sitting up in his chair. “I had a picture in my mind of what Sundance was going to look like, when we built our house. I would go up and sit on the knoll–it was just this raw patch of weed, sage and scrubble, and look out from the knoll and imagine the
house that was going to be there and imagine the meadow that was going to be planted and imagined alfalfa and imagined the deer coming over the meadow that you would come back–that had been flushed out from overhunting, and imagined the migratory birds that would come in when I put in the pond that I imagined, and I would imagine a ski life in there and what it was going to look like. So pictures, I’ve always kind of dealt with that. When I see a picture then I just kind of go to make the picture. And that’s sort of the way I operate. An idea becomes a picture. So that the Resource Management Institute is a solid picture in my mind about how people are going to go and work. Yes, I guess that I operate off–I visualize an idea and then kind of try to paint it.

Turning to the future now, I also mentioned having seen an article in which Redford had been quoted to the effect that he and his wife had gotten into farming because of their anxiety over a future famine. “Was that an accurate quote?”, I asked, as I waited for his assistant to beat down and toss me out onto Fifth Avenue.

“Oh, that was several years ago. Yes, my wife and I got a little farm. We have about 50 acres down in a valley in Utah to put in crops as a hedge against the future. In our view it seemed that if we were going to be heading towards more and more dependence on electrical companies or more dependence on government subsidies, and if the cost of fuel, the cost of food, the cost of everything would keep going up, that maybe we ought to do something to start setting an example as to how that dependence can be reduced: grow your own food and put your own technology on your rooftop to get your own power.”

Yes, he was a “survivalist,” but not in the sense it was currently taken to mean.

“I am optimistic,” he emphasized. “I wouldn’t be making these moves if I wasn’t. If I was a total cynic, I would just pull in my wings and retreat to the safety of whatever I can afford to make myself comfortable and say the hell with everybody else. Why would I be spending this kind of energy and time and money to try to start something like an institute, racing around the country, trying to make things happen, if I wasn’t ultimately optimistic. If I was a pessimist, or a survivalist in the way that you’re talking about–well, I’m all set up to be the perfect survivalist, I’m up in the mountains, I can life there by myself…and tuck in my wings and say, ‘I’m sorry. This is not my station.”

“But,” he snapped, just before I snapped off my tape recorder, “it is.”

Diving into the 8th

You must be joking, I replied.

“No, I’m quite serious,” he said, as we bumped along the dirt road.

A call to Helsinki and my old friend Matti Koivo of Finn Facts confirmed it. “My” president, the right honorable George Bush, then in the midst of preparing the American response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait had indeed decided to have a meeting with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in order to clear signals with the Russian leader for the anticipated action, soon to be known as The Gulf War.

Matti seemed very excited about the affair on the phone. “It’s really a big deal for us,” he said. “I must say,” he added with a laugh, “you really have timed your return to Finland very well!”

I’ll be damned, I said to myself, putting down the receiver. My knack for being in Finland when a news story of international import took place—not something that occurred every day—had struck yet again. Thirteen years before, I had happened to be in Helsinki during Finland’s first airplane hijacking. Now I had arrived just in time for Finland’s first superpower summit.

A summit. The leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries under the same roof.

Imagine that.

For his part, Gunnar was rather indifferent about the affair—as if the bilateral confabulation was something taking place in a different universe, rather than in the capital of the country to which this anomalous, self-governing, Swedish speaking “province” putatively belonged, and but a hop, skip and jump away from Mariehamn. But then again, as I had already gathered during the two days I had spent blissfully wandering around the archipelago, that was very much the way the 20,000 some odd inhabitants perceived anything–particularly anything that happened on the Finnish-speaking mainland.

Aland, to use one of the Alanders’ favorite words, was away. And that’s the way they wanted to keep it. In fact, Alanders were so proud of their distance from Helsinki in every way shape and form that lately they had spawned their own nascent independence movement, a phenomenon I had hoped to investigate during the leisurely week I had planned traversing this quixotic world within a world. There would be no time for that now.

Obviously, I would have to go. It wasn’t every day, after all, that I had a chance to attend a summit.

First, however, I intended to enjoy myself. As it happened, I also wished to be away. After years of toiling on my first book, a very difficult unauthorized biography of Rod Serling, the creator of the cult American tv show, “The Twilight Zone”—a project which at one point had been so stressful that I had had to make a visit to the emergency room of Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles with a nascent heart attack, and which had only just been accepted for publication—I had decided to get as far away from the United States and The Twilight Zone and all that by rewarding myself with a two week working vacation to Finland, beginning with a long sortie in those same, mysterious, far flung islands I had flown over on my last trip to Finland in 1977.

Then I could return to the mainland at my leisure and see what the Finns were up to these days.

The summit changed that. After all, a story is a story…

***

And so 72 hours later, after my all too short Bjorko respite–during which I nearly drowned myself after I impetuously decided to row to the small island opposite my house, forgot which side of the island I had left my boat, and, in the leafy hall of mirrors that is Bjorko, started swimming in the wrong direction (but that is another story)—I found myself rising, along with the nine hundred other journalists in attendance at Finlandia Hall as the sober-faced American and Soviet foreign ministers, Baker and Shevardnadze, respectively took the stage, followed by a grinning George Bush and a somewhat more subdued Mikhail Gorbachev, to answer questions about their epochal pow wow.

Behind them, on guidons on each side of the stage, were arrayed two sets of flags, the American stars and stripes and the Soviet hammer and sickle on the outside, and in the middle, the proud white and blue banner of Finland.

To be sure, the Finnish hosts of this extraordinary “emergency” summit—the second that Bush and Gorbachev had held since the onset of the Iraqi crisis–could not have been more pleased, or pleased with themselves. With only three days to prepare, the shortest time ever for such an event, and the first time since the 1975 Helsinki Accords that Finland had played host to a meeting of such magnitiude, the government had clearly done a spot on job of getting ready for the Big Show. Every journalist who attended the summit had a contact person from the Foreign Ministry assigned to him or her; a perfectly stacked bunch of literature about the summit, as well as Finland; invitations to attend an array of briefings, and a brand new map of Helsinki. This was Finland’s chance to shine, the government knew it, and so it did.

At the same time, and even more importantly, this fortuitous event also provided the recognition and validation for Finland’s much-vaunted policy of “active neutrality,” and thus help Helsinki banish the ghost of Finlandization. In fact, it was at the summit that the Soviet leader first explicitly endorsed Finnish neutrality. This in itself was a watershed event for the “special relationship.” Hallelujah! Little wonder that the Finnish diplomats I met at Finlandia Hall looked pleased with themselves. Was this not what they had been working for all these years?

Privately, however, many if not most of those same palpably upbeat officials were very worried. The Soviet Union, thanks in considerable part to the ministrations of Gorbachev was now in an active state of dissolution, and with it both the Soviet economy and the special economic relationship with Finland. Russia was still Finland’s most favored customer, but the customer had palpably less money to spend.

Already, by the time I had checked back into the Klaus Kurki, the same place that had been my first base thirteen years before, the amount of trade the Russians transacted with the Finns had dwindled to less than 10% of Finnish exports, and, in light of the increasing chaos on the other side of the Iron Curtain, there didn’t appear to be much prospect of that increasing. Much was made of Gorbachev’s querulous visage during the summit, as well as the amount of time he spent hidden away at the Russian embassy, presumably dealing with his mounting domestic troubles which would shortly lead to the outright break-up of the USSR.

All well and good that Gorbachev endorsed Finnish neutrality, but how much good did that do, Finns wondered, if he was not in charge of his own government and people?

Rumors circulated of an impending invasion from the East, not by the Red Army, but by the impoverished Russian peoples themselves…

However, as anyone who is familiar with the history of Berlin during the 1920s knows, an uncertain time can also be an exhilarating time, especially for an inquiring cultural journalist. Finland’s mental and cultural boundaries were becoming blurred, but many people, especially artists and young people, less concerned than their elders with putting bread on the table—and less frightened about the Russian hordes putatively about to descend on them—found that suddenly Helsinki was an interesting place to be. The terra firma beneath Finland was palpably cracking open, and through those cracks there now emerged an arresting and enticing skein of art forms, new thinking and new phenomena.

Other developments, such as the loosening-up of Finland’s alcohol licensing laws and procedures, the legacy of the once powerful Finnish temperance movement—which had formerly required purchasers of alcohol to carry around a tiresome “alcohol card” on which every purchase was stamped and had had inhibited the growth of Helsinki nightlife, contributed to the new “liberated” atmosphere.

Finland, I could see was freeing up and breaking away. Suddenly, Helsinki, the same, rather dour place that Bertolt Brecht had once derided as “a city that was silent in two languages”—was a cool place. That I discovered, was the real story. And I had arrived just in time to cover it. It also didn’t hurt that I liked to hang out. Indeed, you might say that I had an advanced degree in that subject, having already “taught” a course in this nebulous activity ten years before.

***

And here you will permit me a slight autobiographical digression into my own nocturnal back pages.

To be sure, ten years before I had parlayed my affinity for hanging out into a subcareer of sorts, when I “taught” a course in this recondite subject under the auspices of an adult education “school,” or at least an American version of the same called the Network for Learning, whose instructors “taught” their courses, which ranged from the serious, e.g., “Introductory Non Fiction Writing” to the not so serious, e.g., “How to Meet Manhattan Singles,” and which were advertised via the school’s free catalog, which was distributed via curbside newsstands. The aspiring adult educator wrote the description himself. In return the “school,” agreed to advertise the course and collect the stated fee, which it split with its “faculty,” who ranged from bona fide academics to aspiring Martha Stewarts to outright charlatans. Here was adult education, do it yourself style.

My “course,” a nocturnal walking tour of New York, was based in part on an acid trip I took in 1970 with some of my fellow spaced-out Cornellians in which I used the my innate leadership skills to lead them safely across Cornell’s Bavarian-like campus and culminated with the survivors, i.e., those who didn’t fall into the school’s scenic gorges, massed on the top bench of the school’s football stadium waiting for the sun to rise.*
“Hanging Out: A Nighthawk’s Guide to New York,” I hopefully called my offering.

Not that I actually expected to offer it: the deal was that at least ten “students” had to register for a course before the “school” greenlit.

In truth, as I told the vice president of the Network when I met him one night at Trax, a once great now defunct New York underground movie theater-turned-nightclub owned by a friend of mine where I spent a great deal of the late 1970s practicing my advanced skills in hanging out, I was interested in teaching something along the lines of “Introduction to Non-Fiction.” Sorry, the NFL official informed me, the school’s roster of writing instructors was full. However, he offered, there was room for someone to help conduct a tour of the Upper East Side’s better restaurants. “Restaurant hopping,” he called it (I think). Right, I sighed, as if I knew anything about restaurants. Just my cup of tea. Of course, he said, I was free to embellish the course description.

*In the event, as my fellow tripsters and I belatedly discovered after sitting on the same bench until past noon, and wondering where the sun had gone, it rose behind the stadium.

And so I did. What if, it occurred to me the next morning in a moment of caffeinated
Inspiration at my favorite Upper East Side coffee shop, if I turned the “hopping” part of the Network’s rather pedestrian “restaurant hopping” concept into a kind of all night “trip tour” of New York—but without the hallucinogens: a guided walk on the wild side, as it were (and in the crack-infested, pre-Giuliani New York City of 1980 the word wild still very much applied)? Nay, a veritable course in hanging out, as it were?

Anyway, here is the imaginative description I wound up with—- arguably the most inspired paragraph I have ever invented:

HANGING OUT: A NIGHTHAWK’S GUIDE TO NEW YORK

You don’t have to be rich or in love to enjoy the late evening or early morning hours in New York. All you need is a little expertise in hanging out. Learn the newest advances in this noctural metropolitan art and meet up with a fellow flock of nighthawks for a Fellinesque evening on the town.
Our moveable feast tentatively includes a get together cocktail party at a Village loft; flocking to a midnight flick; catching the late act at a major New York rock club…

–and now I began to reach…

breakfast at dawn with a mystery celebrity guest and..

Here comes the old acid trip part.

watching the sunrise over the East River. Bring a friend! $40.

Cool idea, eh? Needless to say, after I sent my blurb off to the Network for Learning offices, I didn’t think anything would come of it. And even in the extreme unlikelihood that ten Manhattanites actually registered for this thing, I thought, where would I find a celebrity, or even a quasi-one to have breakfast at dawn with a bunch of complete strangers.

Wrong. Several days later I got a frantic call from the downtown offices of Network for Learning (which I personally was never able to find).

“Guess what Gordon?,” the excited voice on the other end of the line said. “Over three hundred and sixty people have signed up for Hanging Out!”

The power of advertising! Somehow my hyper-suggestive catalog description had struck a nerve with the general pubic. Turns out that there were a lot of people out there in neon wilderness who had an urge to hang out. They just wanted someone to do it with. Much to my delight and astonishment, I had converted my proclivity for and “expertise” in hanging out, as it were, into a job opportunity.

My God, I thought, I really have to do this.

And so I did. To make a long story short, because after all this book is about Helsinki, not New York every other Friday for the following six months I met up with a motley, ifenthusiastic group of twenty five to thirty strangers between the ages of 25 and 75 at a Village loft (kindly lent to me by the open-minded artist father of a friend of mine) at ten o’clock in the evening and shepherded them across the breadth and width of Manhattan island, for a wild and wooly nocturnal odyssey that culminated with the dozen or so hardiest “nighthawks” watching the sunrise over the East River.

And wound up making a nice extra income to boot.

Mind, the novelty aspect of the experience tended to tail off after the first dozen of these all night expeditions, especially once I realized how much plain work was involved in organized hanging out—and believe me, finding ten cabs on a Friday night in New York in order to convey my “students” uptown from the midnight flick to the aforementioned rock club (yes, the one my friend owned), and then another fleet to ferry them across town to the breakfast at dawn with the promised “mystery celebrity guest” is work.

But is was fun. In this way, you might say, I earned my Master’s degree in Hanging Out.

Oh yes, about the mystery celebrity guest. Yes, that was hard. Fortunately, by the time my merry tripsters arrived at the Upper East Side restaurant, conveniently named Rainbow’s End, for our “breakfast at dawn,” along with a number of bemused partiers they had recruited at the rock club, they were having so much fun that they didn’t care so much about that part.

Which was just as well, because oftentimes that part had to go unfilled. Mind I managed to come up with a few “guests” who were open-minded (or insane) enough to show up at 5 A.M. to breakfast with my motley crew, although whether they qualified as celebrities is arguable. For example, there was the ex-girlfriend of mine who was a professional dancer-cum-performance artist with the stage name of “Kat of the Nile” who was good enough to come by one morning and hold forth on her feverish life and times.

Then there were the ones I was able to snag at the rock club, for example the drummer from John Belushi’s house band. He was interesting.

Of course, I didn’t know Matti Pellonpaa yet. Now, he would have been perfect. If ever there was a celebrity who suffered fools gladly, it was Pellonpaa.

***

Flash forward ten years to September 1990 to the main dining room of the fabled Kosmos, where your intrepid correspondent is attempting to conduct an interview with the aforementioned Pellonpaa for The International Herald Tribune.

A few weeks before, as the summit winding to a close and I was looking for a journalistic reason to extend my stay in Helsinki and get a handle of this dramatically changed and fascinating city, I had queried the feature editor of the Paris-based paper with an idea to do a feature story about Aki Kaurismaki, the much-talked about, if reclusive filmmaker whose penultimate film, “Ariel,” had been the sensation of the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.

The editor herself hadn’t heard of Kaurismaki yet—he was still very much under the international radar—but why not? As best as she could recall the paper hadn’t run carried anything about Finnish film since the days of Edvin Laine, and it was time to update her readers.

Loyal Fennophile and Nordic cinema buff that I was, I had already made a point of seeing “Ariel,” the Finnish auteur’s first film to be released in America when it was shown at the Quad, the same Greenwich Village art house where ten years earlier I had taken “my” nighthawks to see the aforementioned “midnight flick.” I believe there were about a dozen people in attendance: the Kaurismaki phenomenon, as such, had yet to catch on (indeed, my attendance at the movie was considered so extraordinary that afterwards I was flagged down by a breathless reporter from Apu for my reaction to the film.)

I loved “Ariel,” with its weird plot about a miner trying to escape his mundane life and the adventures and misadventures that subsequently. There was something very dada about Kaurismaki, and as an old dada hand that was bound to hit in my right spot. I was bemused by the way the director ended his film with his anti-hero, played by the deathless Taisto Kasurinen, fleeing to Mexico, of all places, while an off screen songstress delivered a heartfelt rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Clearly, a man after my own heart.

Too, I was intrigued by Kaurismaki’s depiction of the Kallio district of Helsinki and other areas of the city which were not represented in the literature of the Finnish tourist board.

He also happened to know how to make a film: the editing and photography were spot on. And didn’t he elicit some great performances from his motley crew, including the walrus-faced Pellonpaa? (Who can forget Pellonpaa’s death scene in that film?) Although, as a veteran cineaste and sometime film reviewer I could detect traces of Bresson and Melville in Kaurismaki’s work, clearly he was sui generis.

Clearly, someone worth knowing more about. Someone worth writing about.

But how to get to him? I had been told that Kaurismaki was notoriously mediaphobic. There was no way I could get to talk to him. No way.

What to do? Talk to Pellonpaa, I was told. Then maybe if he likes you.

That appeared easy enough to do—or at least finding Pellonpaa, who had just returned from filming his latest cracked cinematic venture with his boyhood pal, “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” (which personally I had yet to see, but had heard great—and strange—things about).

In those days, Pellonpaa was about as easy to find as Mannerheim’s statue. Everyday I was told, he could be found at the that venerable pillar of the Helsinki intelligentsia, the Kosmos.

“I hope you like to drink,” I was told by my source.

And so there I was several days later at the Kosmos—which struck me as a kind of Finnish version of Elaine’s, the famed Manhattan celebrity hang out, but with palm trees—seated alongside the walrus-faced actor as he whooped it up with a group of his friends and admirers at the famed eatery, guzzling shots of vodka with Pellonpaa, while trying to elicit some memorable quotes from him. Which wasn’t hard at all.

“I am a Communist because I am not a Communist,” the tipsy thespian boomed, to the mixed bemusement and annoyance of the other near by diners, while receiving a steady stream of female fans.

I asked Pellonpaa about his role in “Ariel,” which memorable though it was, was still relatively small, to which the actor responded with feigned outrage. “There are no small roles,” he declaimed, as the studiously-businesslike waiter-cum-monitor assigned to his table deposited another bottle of vodka in front of him. “There are only small actors!”
he continued, turning to me.

During the dangling and increasingly delirious conversation that followed I learned that the 39 year old actor (the same age as me), was seriously devoted to his craft, to Kaurismaki, and to Finland, in about that order. He told me that he attributed that he attributed the his success, as such, to his dual training as an actor and cameraman. “You know, I started off a key grip,” he said.

Nevertheless Pellonpaa assigned the greatest part of his success to Aki’s faith in him. “Who would have thought that I could become a star with this face,” he exclaimed, smiling and pointing at his grizzled visage. Overhearing this, a female admirer seated near by chirped up, “But we love that face!”

Pellonpaa admitted that his success was a relative thing. He still couldn’t afford his own apartment: he was living with a female friend somewhere in an apartment in Tooloo at the moment. That was one of the reasons why he spent so much time hanging out.

Not that he minded the attention. Withal, being with Pellonpaa reminded me a bit of the scene backstage at Trax, my friend’s rock club, when a rock or folk star of high voltage dropped by his office, whereupon clouds of fawning of groupies suddenly appeared.

Clearly, in 1990 Helsinki, Pellonpaa was a rock star, a status that would increase over the next few years as Kaurismaki’s parade of cracked cinematic hits, each featuring Pellonpaa, kept coming.

However, unlike his American counterparts, Pellonpaa put on no airs, nor was capable of the same. Anyway, the management wouldn’t have allowed it.

In short, the interview was a success, witness the fact that following our bibulous te-te-te at the Kosmos, Pellonpaa invited me to tag along with him to his alternate watering hole—cum—hang out, the Elite, where, after being seated at his preferred table at the head of the room, he carried on in much the same vein with another coterie until closing time, consuming several more bottles of vodka in the process.

Thus began a beautiful friendship, and a routine that would last for five years until Pellonpaa’s untimely death in 1995. The first thing I would do after awakening from my post-transatlantic flight coma would be to head to the Kosmos to have a few with Pellonpaa, who often would be seated alone in the foyer, and usually was well into cups when I arrived. Pellonpaa became the Helsinki equivalent of the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. He was always there, he was always on—or sort of on—and after that, well, all off.

Indeed, one could say, Pellonpaa was the quintessential mystery celebrity guest. Sometimes after a night of traveling with him on his little two stop railroad line, I would walk him home to the apartment in Toolo where he was staying. He preferred to say his leave at the corner. Then he would stagger off into the gloaming, a character in his own movie. That was Pellonpaa.

***

What about Kaurismaki?

Oh yes, I got to him, too, eventually, although I had to wait until I was back in New York later that year to actually interview him. Kaurismaki was in town to promote “Leningrad Cowboys,” as well as to present a pair of his older films, “Match Factory Girl” and “I Hired a Contract Killer” at the New York Film Festiva. I got the word from the Finnish Consulate that he had agreed to a short sit down session with me. Apparently the good word that Pellonpaa put in for me also helped.

“Very short,” the consulate added.

“Fine,” I replied, “I’ll take it.”

In the meantime, the fall of the Iron Curtain was in an advanced state. The interview took place the same day that the Berlin Wall came down. A television was broadcasting live images from the epochal event near by as several consulate officials gathered around.

Kaurismaki, dressed in his trademark leather jacket, himself didn’t seem to be overly excited about the development. Then again, the laconic director, the polar opposite of his voluble leading man, wasn’t the type to get very worked up about anything. In his short—indeed very short—conversation with me, he confessed to having a strong nostalgia for Urho Kekkonen.

Did this explain why there was a picture of Kekkonen in virtually of all of his pictures?

“Yes,” he said, taking a slow Bogart-like drag from his cigarette.

But why?

“Because he was a man.” Another drag. “And because every since he”—Kekkonen—had gone—“everything has gone downhill.”

But if that were so then why make films in Finland?

“Because I am Finnish,” he shrugged.

Right, I murmured, dutifully scribbling.

And what would he do if had more money, I asked, dutifully soldiering on.

He thought for a second, took a drag from his cigarette.

“I would make worse films.”

End of interview.

Two months later, my article about Kaurismaki and Pellonpaa, the first article about the Kaurismaki phenomenon to appear in the “Western press” (as it was then called), was published in “The International Herald Tribune.” This in turn led to other assignments from the “Tribune” and other newspapers and magazines to write about the emerging Finnish scene. In this way I stumbled into my new found role as a kind of “broker” for what was new, up and coming, and otherwise of interest in the eastern Baltic. In many ways, it would turn out to be the best job I would ever have in my life.

***

Assisting me in this role were two key players on the scene, Christian Moustgaard, the managing director and grand poo-pah of Radio City, Helsinki’s leading alternative radio station and long-time pillar of the Helsinki underground scene, and his fellow soldier of the night and budding scene maker, Erkki Kallunki, the wild-eyed former bartender and owner of a strange new place on Uudenmaankatu which he had given the generic name of “Baari.”

Then in his 40s, Moustgaard, the son of a Dane who had come to Finland in 1940 to fight in the Talvisota, was already something of a local legend by the time I met him in December, 1990 during my follow on trip to Finland, when I was hot on the beat of the “new” Helsinki.

Actually, it turned out that there had already been an interesting alternative scene in Helsinki at the time of my original visit in 1977. Now Moustgaard helped bring me up to speed. A one-time political radical turned self-styled cultural radical-cum-entrepeneur, Moustgaard had burnished his underground credentials in the early 70s as a lighting director for a group of artistic agents provocateur called the Sperm, whose lead singer, Matti Juhani Kapunen, was jailed for reading “Howl” naked but for the psychedelic images Moustgaard puckishly projected on him. (Shortly afterwards, Kapunen was jailed by the city authorities because of rumors that he had performed sexual intercourse on a piano at Vanha, a venue I would soon become familiar with.)

A decade later, in 1975, the mischievous, music-mad Moustgaard helped found the Live Music Foundation, also known as ELMU, a due-paying organization that sponsored rock concerts and assorted Sperm-like happenings around Helsinki and generally kept the revolutionary flame flickering. What Moustgaard’s camp followers lacked was a proper alternative radio station.

“We had a cause,” Moustgaard somberly told at one of our first meetings. “We felt that we were liberating the air.” Hence Radio City, the city’s first proper rock ‘roll station. Founded as an alternative to the audial strangehold of YLE, none of the major players involved in the Kafkaesque process of obtaining a license had opposed him and his comrades on the assumption that ELMU would produce a punk radio station with but narrow appeal.

They were wrong. Moustgaard’s well-disguised ambition was to create a full-fledged, full-service emporium of the air, somewhat along the lines of New York’s famed WBAI, offering both music, talk and news—only crazier. Within a few months the upstart radio station had over 350,000 listeners. Amongst Moustgaard’s inspired moves was hiring Sake and Mato, the lead singers of the Leningrad Cowboys, formerly known as the Sleepy Sleepers, as hosts of his flagship show, “Pullakuskit,” which the two tended to when they weren’t busy with their new found cinematic duties.

Another one of Moustgaard’s creative moves was siting Radio City in the large warehouse-like structure and one time alcoholics’ refuge on the outskirts of town known as lepakkohuola. I shall never forget my first visit to lepakko one dark December night. Several dozen Radio City staffers were hanging out in the station canteen, which struck me as a kind of cross between an avant garde student union and the bar in “Star Wars,” except that the patrons didn’t have antennae (at least I don’t think they did), immersed in pool, pinball, or smoky reverie.

“Midnight Cowboy,” the Stones’ stand by wafted out of an aged speaker. This was followed, after a prolonged, dramatic silence, by the mordant, Wolfman Jack-like voice of Nyassa, the veteran Radio City disk jockey. In the hallway, a group of local youth were making a ruckus: was that a gun I just heard go off? Or a bottle?

Presiding over this quirky cabaret of the air, ensconced in his small, cozy, poster-bedecked office, occasionally flashing a small, knowing, devilish smile, was Moustgaard.

Moustgaard, in turn, introduced me to fellow noctural entrepreneur, Erkki Kallunki, A native of Lappland, Kallunki had arrived on the scene via stints with the Finnish unit of the UN peacekeeping forces in Lebanon and Namibia, where he seems to have distinguished himself by his flair for obtaining liquor and other recreational substances; and Corona, the raucous bar founded a few years back by the Kaurismaki brothers, where Kallunki had, with Moustgaard’s encouragement, gotten the notion of establishing his own bar-cum-scene.

He had the perfect place for it: Uudenmaankatu, a then uninteresting mostly residential avenue off Mannerheimintie. In the event, Kallunki’s bank had had difficulty seeing its way through to giving the aspiring bar owner a loan for his envisioned saloon, however the hidebound institution was willing to grant the tousle-haired Lapplander him a loan for a car. Kallunki took it.

In this way, Baari, also known as Ekin baari, came into being. “There is a very interesting place I would need to show you,” Moustgaard—who had come to assume the role of The Rabbit in my private Finnish version of “Alice in Wonderland”—said one snowbound evening after I popped by his office at lepakko (taking care to step over the comatose
fan lying outside his door). And so, after picking up Kallunki in Moustgaard’s MG, off we went.

As we entered, a man of indeterminate age was furiously reading what sounded like poetry in the window, while, further back in the dark of the crepuscular hideaway, various patrons were animatedly drinking and conversing, utterly oblivious to the performance taking place several feet away. Darting out from behind the bar, an obviously enthused Kallunki exclaimed, “Isn’t this cool?” “Isn’t this cool?” In the event, because of the exigencies of Helsinki’s still semi-liberated licensing laws, Baari only served beer and wine.

It was cool. In short order Kallunki would found two more establishments within fifty meters of Baari, Bahia and Number 9. In this way, what became known as the “Uudenmaankatu phenomenon” was born.

On subsequent visits Moustgaard turned me on to some of the other diverse scenes that had suddenly popped up. One night he whisked me off to Cantina West, a new spot on Kasarmikatu featuring Tex-Mex food and live bands of varying vintage and quality on each of its straw (and beer) covered floors. Later we ambled down the block to another very different scene that had emerged at a place called Kaarle XII, where would be preppies and yuppies partied it up amidst a scene of well-worn elegance. Suddenly Helsinki had a nightlife.

Or we might just wind up in Moustgaard’s large apartment in Toolo, listening to one of Moustgaard’s five thousand plus records over several tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. Although he liked rock n’ roll well enough, in quiet moments like these he preferred listening to music from the tropics. He was especially fond of bossa nova.

“There is nothing more modern,” he declared, early one morning after one of these customized hanging out sessions, as the last strains of “The Girl From Ipanema” drifted out into the night. “Nothing,” he emphasized.

I couldn’t but agree. Now Moustgaard was the chief nighthawk, and I was the student.

***

Meanwhile, I had also taken my first eye-opening trip across the Gulf of Finland and gotten an up close look at Mr. Gorbachev’s mounting troubles at the same time. “Don’t go,” my Finnish friends told me, when I told them that I wanted to check out what was happening in Eesti. “It’s dangerous over there.” To be sure, I had been curious about Estonia—as well as the complicated relationship between Finland and its linguistic cousin—ever since my first visit in 1977.

And it was dangerous. Recently a Swedish labor leader who had made the mistake of picking up an Estonian girl at a local bar had wound up being murdered.

I received further counsel from Robert Thompson, the highly-informed, if somewhat pompous Baltic correspondent for the Financial Times whom I met one night at the start of my next visit to Helsinki in August, 1991 at a liquid dinner hosted by Matti Koivo. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” Thompson, who liked to call the Baltic his “empire,” declared. “Just don’t stay at the Viru. All of the rooms are bugged.

Ultimately I decided that the best way to see what was happening “on the other side” was to take one of the so-called 24 hour “visa-free” boat trips to Tallinn that a number of shipping companies had begun offering over the past year, as relations with Estonia had loosened up. This arrangement was especially popular with Finnish companies and institutions whose officials or employees wished to combine an on board conference with a spot of Tallinn sightseeing.

“We’ll put you with a nice group of teachers,” the suspiciously glib travel agent I settled on told me “That way you won’t have to worry about finding a place to stay. And you’ll get a nice introduction to Estonia.”

And so I did.

The following day I found myself aboard an aging wooden steamer, nursing a beer and sharing smiles with a jovial group of middle school teachers from Turku, as our boat assiduously chugged its way across the Gulf. The following day, after a fitful night spent in Tallinn harbor, as our boat tossed up and down, we were finally allowed to go ashore, where a bus was waiting to take us to the Old Town.

First we had to pass through customs, where, somewhat unnervingly, the Soviet customs guard ordered us to surrender our passports. We would have them returned to us after our tour of the city, the Russian guard, who clearly would have liked to have been elsewhere, assured us in a robotic voice, which didn’t assure us at all.

Another surprise waited for us after I got off the bus in the center of the Old Town for the beginning of a walking tour. The moment we got off the bus we found ourselves walking by a long line of Estonians offering all manner of Soviet militaria—hats, medals, watches, plus, of course, Russian vodka. Near by, at the entrance to the Rigokatu, the Estonian legislature, we were confronted by another unsettling sight: several dozen massive boulders.

What were those boulders for? we asked our Estonian guide. She shrugged off the question so as not to frighten us. In fact, as we soon figured out, those boulders had been placed there in order to protect the legislature from a possible attack by some of the dozens of Soviet tanks stationed just outside of town. We had timed our day trip to Tallinn to coincide with the day that the legislature intended to declare full independence!

And thus, thoroughly spooked, we set out on our little walking tour of Tallinn, followed close by a desperate-looking young Estonian of ten or eleven brandishing a bottle of vodka and a handful of medals. Our group was also closely shadowed by an Estonian police car, evidently assigned to insure our security.

I recall walking across the main square, Raekoja plats, and seeing the patrons of a café staring at us with hungry eyes. The Raekoja plats of today, with its luxury good stores and teeming restaurants, was far in the future.

Later, we were taken to an auditorium where we supped on cups of thin Russian coffee as a local official nervously greeted our increasingly apprehensive group.

Reboarding the bus, we were taken on a short circumnavigation of Tallinn, as our guide blithely pointed out the varied sights, studiously ignoring a large group of Russian troops milling around.

A short while later–and not a moment too soon–after thankfully receiving our passports back, the boat and its shaken passengers were on their way back to Helsinki.

After we were underway, and as we entered Finnish waters, one of the teachers, clearly stricken with what he had seen, turned to me and said in a querulous voice, “Those are our brothers….we must help them.”

And so, as I would witness, and report, over the decade to come.

The next day the Helsingin Sanomat announced that Estonia had officially declared its independence.

Clearly, there was a lot more happening in this part of the world than I had bargained for.

***

Time: a few minutes before one in the morning.

Date: June 12, 2008.

Place: Joe Bruno Stadium, just outside of Troy, New York.

The game: The New York State sectional championship game between the Cadets of La Salle Institute, a Catholic military school located near Troy, in upstate, and the Columbia Blue Devils.

Inning: the top of the seventh.

The score: tied, 2 to 2.

Attendance: 4,264 rabid La Salle and Columbia fans.

That’s the scene. Now let’s zoom in on the La Salle dugout, where the Cadets, in their now well-soiled blue uniforms, are gathered together on the top step, anxiously watching the action along with their coach, Jesse Braverman, a tightly coiled man of 57. At the moment, the Blue Devils have two runners on base, including the potential go-ahead run, on first and second.

The game, the fifth sectional championship game to be played that evening, and which was further delayed by a lightning storm, is by far the latest game the Cadets have played this season—or any other recent season, for that matter. The Cadets’ star pitcher, a lanky fifteen year old sophomore by the name of Dave Roseboom, has pitched a magnificent game thus far.

Now, however, he is clearly tiring. Roseboom has given up back to back walks to Devils. With one of the Devils’ most dangerous hitters, centerfielder Pat Puentes due up, the momentum of the game—that critical, intangible thing—seems to be tilting towards the Blue Devils. The eyes of hundreds of La Salle fans are fixed on Rosenboom, trying to will the flagging pitcher the strength to power through the crisis and keep the game even as the lanky Puentes steps up to the plate.

Braverman’s eyes, however, are fixed instead on the lead runner, the dangerous Matt Montross, who is taking a healthy lead off second base and those of Chris Dedrick, as the Devils’ formidable coach, standing in the third base coach box. Further zooming in, Braverman, who has 20/20 eyesight—and even better baseball antenna—detects what he later calls “unusual eye activity” between Montross and Dedrick, who is trying to look as casual as possible. However Montrross’s darting eyes give him away.

Time to bushwack the bushwacker. Quickly, Braverman gives his ace the pick-off signal. Successfully picking off a runner from second base is a tricky maneuver for any pitcher, no less a fifteen year old high school hurler, but Braverman has put Roseboom through his paces well. A one-time high school star pitcher himself, Braverman has spent myriad hours in practice with Roseboom and the other La Salle pitchers demonstrating how, in order to take advantage of a potential pick-off situation, a pitcher needs to first raise his front leg with his head looking directly at the batter while exhibiting no change in his normal posture as he delivers the pitch so as not to telegraph his intentions, then when his front knee is at its apex, quickly pirouette around and run directly at the prospective thief, trapping him between the bases, before either tagging himself or tossing it to his third baseman and allowing him to do the honors.

It’s a beautiful move when executed properly, something out of modern dance really, and tonight it is indeed executed beautifully: just as his coach has taught him, Roseboom feints, spins and run directly at the flustered Montross, before tossing the ball to La Salle third baseman Kyle Charron, who tags him out with a resounding thwack!

As the La Salle bench—along with their charged up fans—erupt into startled cheers at the surprise pick off, Braverman allows himself a small private smile. The game isn’t over; not by a long shot. But something has changed; the players, as well as the fans, sense this too, a subtle, almost subliminal yet palpable feeling that the balance of the contest has altered, that the gods of baseball have crossed the field and lined up on La Salle’s side of the field. This sense is confirmed on the very next pitch, when the revivified Roseboom fires a fastball down the middle strikes out Puentes, looking. New game now. More cheers…

THE game continues. The clock is nearing one a.m. now. Still nary a yawn in sight.

Bottom of the seventh now. The score is still tied, 2-2. Undeniably, the momentum is with La Salle now, but as Braverman knows—as everyone who is watching knows—this can change in an instant. Time to score; time to close the deal. Next up: LaSalle’s determined left fielder, Brian Beaury. Braverman feels good about Beaury leading off because he is a patient hitter with a good eye who has led the Cadets in walks over the past season. On the other hand, Columbia’s fireballer, Gaige, gives no indication of tiring. The duel is on. Gaige uncorks. The crowd holds its collective breath.

Three quick pitches later the count stands at one and two. Looks like Beaury is going to be out of there pretty soon. But no, wait. Gaige calmly fires another fastball right down the middle, and Beaury just as calmly fires a bazooka shot up the middle for a clean single. The Cadets have their lead off man on. Dedrick, the Columbia coach, decides to make a pitching change. He signals for his ace pitcher, Austin Chase, to come in to replace Gaige, who, with a shrug, and a nod to his steadfast fans in the stands, trots out to left field. In the event, Gaige is also a powerful hitter. Dedrick doesn’t want to lose his bat in case the Devils manage to survive the inning.

Normally in this situation, Braverman would have the next batter, Lukas Bridenbeck, who is an excellent bunter, bunt Beaury to second. But the Cadet catcher looks uncomfortable taking his first bunt so instead Braverman lets him swing away, whereupon the disappointed youngster proceeds to fly out.

Braverman quickly recalculates. The momentum is shifting again; the wheelspring that had been swinging in La Salle’s favor has suddenly stopped. As the next batter, Cadet second baseman Will Remillard steps into the box, the coach recalculates. By the time Chase is ready to throw, the coach has made his decision: he is going to let Beaury steal. It’s a risk, because if Beaury is thrown out, La Salle will be down to its last out. However, as Braverman knows from his detailed scouting report, the Columbia catcher,
Bridgegroom, throws inconsistently. Quickly, imperceptibly, Braverman gives the sign to Beaury to steal. Then he goes back to his box-cleaning routine.

The game, the twenty eight hundredth some odd game of Braverman’s thirty year long, high school coaching career, continues.

No dunce himself, Dedrick correctly guesses that Beaury is going to steal, calls for Chase to pitch out. He does so. Bridgeroom duly jumps to the side and fires at second base. However, as Braverman had figured and hoped, his throw is off, way off, leaving a grinning Beaury safe on second. Beaury could stay there. He doesn’t. One of the lessons which Braverman has instilled in his devoted players is the necessity of seizing the moment.

Which is exactly what Beaury proceeds to do. As his coach proudly watches on, the fearless left fielder keeps on going, making for third. He makes it. More cheers from the La Salle fans. The pendulum is really swinging La Salle’s way now.

Dedrick, now in emergency mode, pulls his infield in as the Cadet second baseman, Will Remillard, steps into the batter box. For a moment, as he later recounts, Braverman considers calling for a suicide squeeze, another La Salle specialty. But all he needs to do is to take one look at the determined Remillard to know what he is going to do. Braverman decides to let him take his swing, goes back to kicking stones.

A moment—a long moment—later Chase wheels, fires a curveball down the middle at Remillard. Remillard responds with his own lightning, sending the pitch up the middle as his teammate, Beaury, trots home with the winning run. Game to Braverman; championship to La Salle. On the field bedlam breaks out as the exultant La Salle players fall into the familiar victory scrum, where they are soon joined by some equally ecstatic civilian Cadets. Someone—it looks like Roseboom, hard to tell in that hysterical mass—hauls Braverman to his shoulders; the victorious team walks off.

The time: who cares?

A half hour later, a beaming Braverman, his equally happy wife Deb and a friend make their way out of the stadium the to the coach’s car. Braverman prides himself on not gloating, but on this night, this special night, he can’t contain his pride at his boys and their collective achievement. “Did you see that pick off!” he exclaims, giddily.

Did you see that pick off?

The friend, an old acquaintance from elementary school who has witnessed his schoolyard buddy’s extraordinary resurrection has never seen his friend so happy—at least not since sixth grade. It is hard to believe that this is the same man who, having just been dismissed as coach of another of his first championship team after a long, bizarre bureaucratic struggle straight out of Kafka, was the very picture of gloom.

Who said that there are no second acts in American lives?

Did you see the pick off?

And what a second act Jesse Braverman’s Act II has been. Something out of Hollywood, really. “The Braverman Redemption” an Albany baseball writer has called it.

But first, let’s learn a little more about the first, long alternately triumphant and tragic one. For Jesse Braverman has had an extraordinary life, and career, indeed.

Indeed, one for the books, one might say.

*****

RUSSIANS START THEIR INVASION OF FINLAND
PLANES DROP BOMBS ON AIRFIELD AT HELSINKI
WAR STARTS AS U.S. MOVE FOR PEACE IS MADE

—The New York Times, November 30th, 1939

I remember everything quite clearly. My memories are so clear they still torture me sometimes. When it’s cold and snowy, I can picture myself in those trenches like it was yesterday.

—Dr. Eric Malm, who served as a platoon leader with the 10th Finnish Regiment on the Mannerheim Line

What do I remember the most from the war? It was the incompetence of our army, as it could not deal with a handful of Finns in a proper manner and in good time. They [the Finns] showed us how to fight a war.

—Georgi V. Prusakov, Soviet medic who fought the war with 100th Independent Volunteer Ski Battalion

INVADING ARMIES rarely signal their intentions with music, but something like that occurred on the afternoon of November 29th, 1939 at the border village of Alakurtti, in eastern Lapland. The Finnish frontier guards stationed there that day were astonished to see a Soviet military band, in full regalia, suddenly appear out of the gloaming on the forest road leading to the Russian and Finnish customs barriers. Marching right up to the gate, the khaki-adorned orchestra suddenly stood fast.

Then at a signal from the bandmaster, the musicians proceeded to play “The Internationale.” Uncertain how to respond, one of the perplexed Finnish frontier guards called up the commander of the area, Colonel Vila Villamo, a genial warrior who had been commander of the area since the Finnish Civil War twenty years before, and held the receiver out of the window so the former could hear the uninvited Red serenaders.

Upon hearing the old Communist call to arms, the alarmed officer ordered the head guard of the normally sleepy outposts to issue ammunition and stand ready for anything. And so the tense guards did, as the musical berserkers proceeded to play an entire program of Soviet military tunes for the wary guards, and the trees, before disappearing into the twilight once again.

Villamo’s instincts proved sound: the very next morning, the Finns suffered some of their first dead at Alakurtti. By then, the entire country was under attack.

***

THE LONGEST DAY in the history of modern Helsinki began quietly enough. Christian Ilmoni, a student at Helsinki University, was walking down Stenbackinkatu, a quiet residential street in the center of town, when he saw the first Soviet Tupolev SB-2 bombers plummet out of the low cloud covering the dark morning sky. The time was 9 a.m. The raid, the first of three conducted that day by the Red Air Force, marked the first time that Finns, no less anyone in that part of the world, had seen a hostile aircraft at least since the Civil War—let alone an entire squadron of bombing planes (as they were then quaintly called), flying in unison.

It was also the first inkling to Helsinkians that Finland was actually, irrevocably at war with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, something which—despite the rapidly increasing tensions between the two countries over the past few days, including an obviously trumped-up-border incident by the Soviets four days before—many of those, like Ilmoni, who were caught out by the surprise attack could not take in.

Ilmoni, who was on his way to class that morning, happened to be walking past the home of Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the Finnish minister to Sweden and former prime minister—and future president—when he spotted the first Red bomber flying parallel to the street. Seven weeks before, on October 7th, the twenty one year old university student had been amongst the large throng of anxious Helsinkians who had accompanied Paasikivi and his fellow negotiators, Colonel Aladar Paasonen and Minister Counsellor Johan Nykopp to the main Helsinki railway station, as they prepared to board the night train to Moscow, whence Joseph Stalin and Molotov had “invited” them in order to discuss “concrete political questions.” To prove to the Russians that they weren’t in a mood to jump to, the stubborn Finns had decided to take the slow, fifteen hour train to Moscow rather than fly, as their cowed counterparts from the other Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had recently done in response to their respective summonses from the Kremlin.

Nineteen years before, Paasikivi had participated in the negotiations with the three year old Soviet Russian entity, then weary and impoverished after six continuous years of war and revolution, at the historic southern city of. The subsequent treaty—one of two the Bolsheviks grudgingly signed there, one with the triumphant Finns, the other with the no less ebullient Estonians, who had just won their own hard-fought war of independence from Moscow—confirmed the new sixteen hundred kilometer long Soviet-Fenno border, which, as the Finns insisted, mirrored the one they had shared with Russia during bygone Grand Duchy days.

Additionally, in line with Helsinki’s wishes, the Peace of Tartu granted Suomi the valuable, ice-free Arctic port of Petsamo in exchange for a slice of the Karelian Isthmus, the 150 kilometer long, 100 kilometer wide neck of land joining southeastern Finland with northwestern Russia, just as the benevolent Tsar Alexander II had promised his Finnish subjects back in 1860. The steamer carrying Paasikivi and the other exultant Finnish delegates back to Helsinki following that successful conclave, which effectively sealed Finland’s century long quest for independence from Russia, returned to resounding dockside cheers.

That was in 1920. Now, nearly two decades later, the ruddy-faced, sixty nine year old Paasikivi—summoned back from what he had assumed would be his last posting in Stockholm, little thinking that he still had an entire political career ahead of him—prepared to leave to meet with Joseph Stalin, now all-powerful head of a resurgent Soviet Union intent on re-establishing Russian influence in the Baltic basin. Now, in the second month of what would ultimately erupt into the five year cataclysm known as the Second World War, it was, once again, the turn of the communist heirs of Peter the Great and Alexander I to redraw the Baltic map in their favor. Now, as Paasikivi and his anxious four million countrymen knew, as he and his colleagues solemnly boarded the train for Moscow, they held nothing less than the fate of the Finnish nation in his hands.

And yet, anxious though they were, the Finns who flocked to the great train station were not of a mood to appease the Kremlin. Then, as the fateful train pulled out and the avuncular Paasikivi doffed his homburg in farewell, the crowd spontaneously began to sing Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

As Max Jakobson, who witnessed the scene as a sixteen year old youth, would later recall in The Diplomacy of the Winter War, his authoritative account of the convoluted run-up to the warthe serenaders who came to see Paasikivi off, as well as the ones who met his train down the line as it chugged across Karelia, “showed an astonishing, almost unnatural lack of alarm, as if through an undirected, spontaneous, almost organic effort of self-discipline, [they] were silently bracing itself to face some force of nature…They did not sing patriotic songs on behalf of a policy of appeasement.” As Paasikivi told Stalin, “They won’t sing for us if we tell them that we have given away Hanko,” referring to the historic, strategically located Finnish fort-cum-spa situated on the southernmost tip of Finland which the Kremlin adamantly insisted on having back for itself.

Now, after seven weeks of on and off negotiations—which had ultimately foundered over the pivotal issue of Hanko—helped along by a fabricated incident at the border town of Mainila, where the Russians, stealing a page from the Germans, who had used a similar “provocation” as a pretext for their invasion of Poland, arranged for several of their own soldiers to be killed by what they insisted was Finnish artillery fire—Christian Ilmoni thought he saw Paasikivi look out the window, as the covey of bombers flew by. “I wonder what the Old Man must be thinking now?” he wondered, as he recounted that traumatic day, still crystal clear in retrospect, sixty five years later.

At first, the unusually low altitude of the Soviet planes—which had flown undetected across the Gulf of Finland from one of the Soviets’ new, forcibly acquired Estonian air bases—caused some unsuspecting pedestrians to mistake foe for friend. “The planes were flying absurdly low, less than a thousand feet,” Ilmoni recounted. “Some of the people walking near by actually thought they were our own.” “Our own?!” he shouted. “Can’t you see the Red star on the wing?”

Moments latercame several massive explosions, followed by the sound of strafing, mixed with the slow tom-tom of the 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns which had recently been placed at strategic points around the city, belatedly coming into action to meet the surprise attack. Now, instantly, Helsinkians knew the terrible truth. Once again, as had occurred innumerable times over the centuries, through the Swedish-Novgorodian wars of the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s, through the Lesser and Great Wraths of the eighteenth century, through the Finland War of 1808 by which Finland was severed from Sweden and became a Russian grand duchy, Suomi was under attack from the enemy from the East. Once again, the city’s ululating air raid sirens confirmed, the Russian “tyrant” had come—except that this time he had come from the air.

***

MAI-LIS TOIVONEN nee Paavola, a veteran Lotta Svard from the coastal town of Koivisto at the head of Viipuri Bay, who served in the main Finnish women’s auxiliary organization along with 130,000 other Finnish women during the Winter War, also remembered that epochal morning. The seventeen year old Toivonen like so many of her countrywomen, had joined the Lotta Svard in the upsurge of patriotism that swept the nation the prior summer, and she had worked in a canteen during the autumn. Now she was attending her first class of the day in Viipuri, (then Finland’s second largest city, located a mere fifty kilometers away from the border on the Karelian Isthmus,) when the town’s alarm began ringing, signifying the start of the Soviet attack.

Unlike her Helsinki kinsmen, Toivonen had no difficulty identifying the Red bombers. She had already seen plenty of Stalin’s “falcons” (or “eagles”) over the past summer as they engaged in arrant—and unchallenged—overflights of Finnish airspace. “I remember seeing how the Russian planes were flying so arrogantly over our skies. They flew so low one could see the faces of the pilots and the Red stars on their wings. It was very odd. Nevertheless we carried on with our lives as best we could.”

War tensions and Soviet overflights aside, Toivonen remembers, as do so many other of her generation, the summer of ’39, the summer avant les deluge, as being a good summer. Perhaps a bit hot. “It was very hot that summer,” said Toivenen. “I remember swimming a lot.”

The following day, as war clouds continued to gather over northern Europe, and the mobilization continued, Mai-lis redonned the curiously sex-less smock of the Lotta Svard and returned to her canteen work at the Koivisto Civil Guards house. Still, despite the proximity of war, including those “arrogant” Red fighters, Mai-lis, like so many Finns of her sheltered generation who had been fortunate enough to grow up during the peaceful, prosperous Thirties, the attractive teenager couldn’t quite believe that war would actually come.

Then came the morning of November 30th, the Finnish Pearl Harbour and that clanging school alarm, and those droning Red airplanes. Moreover, these Red intruders were dropping bombs.

Moments later, as Viipuri was enshrouded in geysers of smoke and debris thrown up by the Russian bombs, her frightened teacher led Mai-lis and her schoolmates for cover in a stone house across the street.

***

TWENTY FOUR KILOMETERS and a windswept world away, in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, Mai-lis’s fellow auxiliary worker, Anna-Liisa Veijalainen, a member of the Society for the Care of Coastal Soldiers (RSHY), a women’s organization which provided food and entertainment for the thousands of Finnish troops manning the dozens of fortresses along Finland’s southern coast, was asleepin the upstairs room of the canteen hall of Tuppura, a small fortified island at the mouth of the Viipuri archipelago, on the morning of the Russian invasion.

A year before, Anna-Liisa, then a twenty one year old “domestic science” (as home economics was then called) student in Viipuri, had bravely, if somewhat reluctantly, accepted an invitation from the RSHY—whose five thousand odd volunteer workers labored in the shadows of the far better known lottas—to be hostess of Tuppura canteen. Evidently the prior holder of the post, a flighty type, had fled in a panic after the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938 had prompted the increasingly nervous Helsinki government to augment its garrisons on many of its island outposts.

Although the job took some getting used to, Anna-Liisa found that she enjoyed her duties, which entailed making large quantities of coffee and doughnuts for the soldiers and coastguardsmen assigned to Tuppura, as well as otherwise making them comfortable. “Work at the canteen started to feel meaningful,” she wrote in her moving privately-printed 2007 memoir, A Woman at the Front: 1938-45. “We tried as best as we could to create some coziness for the boys, who at that time rarely got leaves, so the ‘war nest’ was the only place they could spend their free time.”

Anna-Liisa also grew fond of the relatively large “war nest” itself, a converted officer’s club, which featured a spacious kitchen, parquet floors, a recreation room with a working gramophone and a relatively au courant pile of records, a quiet room where “her boys” could write letters home before flopping on the couch, and floor to ceiling windows that looked out on the restive, green-blue sea.

Too, she fell in love with Tuppura itself, with its yellow expanse of stonecrop, chives pushing up from every crack, and wild pansies. “And no place,” she adds, “had bigger lilies of the valley than that island. We carried huge bouquets of them and pansies to the tables of our canteen for the boys to admire.”

The main island was connected to Kuningassaari, King Island, so called because Gustavus III, the absolutist (and ultimately assassinated) eighteenth century Swedish sovereign, had once alighted there to survey his rampageous domain. On the rocky tip of the islet there was a lighthouse which guided the large cruise ships that called on Viipuri, which also boasted Finland’s second largest port, as they navigated the treacherous reefs of the surrounding archipelago. To her delight, Anna-Liisa discovered that the adjoining islet also housed a small, elm-enclosed tennis court where she could relax in solitude for a while before crossing the little white bridge that connected Kuningassaari with the main island to return to the cozy canteen, and her appreciative charges.

Like her junior land-based colleague Mai-lis, Anna-Liisa remembers the summer of 1939, by which time she had been serving doughnuts and coffee to the men of Tuppura for nearly a year, as being hot and hectic, as Finland prepared for a possible war with her increasingly bellicose neighbor.

All was relatively quiet until the morning of November 30th, when the storm cloud of Red fighters arrived at Tuppura. It was, she later recalled, Anna-Liisa’s co-worker Hertta Turunen’s turn to go downstairs to heat the stove and boil the coffee for “the boys” that morning. “She barely had time to get downstairs before the kitchen telephone rang, when simultaneously several airplanes roared above the fortress almost at rooftop altitude.

Even under the hair-raising circumstances, however, her co-worker was careful of her manners:

As a girl of good upbringing Hertta took the time to knock on the door before shouting in shock: ‘The aide-de-camp called, we are at war, and Major von Behr [the commander of Tuppura] ordered us to get to the pier in less than an hour and to leave the island.’

Quickly throwing on her clothes, the formidable auxiliary worker promptly called the major back. “I explained to [him] that I simply could not depart in an hour without leaving the entire stock of canteen possessions unguarded. I was responsible for them!”

Shortly afterwards, after throwing the canteen cashbox into a suitcase and otherwise doing her best to secure the premises, as the furious officer stormed down the pier, Anna-Liisa and her two co-workers were physically shoved into a small tug boat for the ride back to Uuraa, the largest of the islands in Viipuri Bay, where the Finns had greater forces and the women would presumably be better protected. Just in case, the self-serious major had told the skipper to make evasive maneuvers if and when the Russian planes returned, “although we found it difficult to see how a small tugboat could manage to evade airplanes on the open sea.” Somehow they did.14

***

EEVA KILPI, the noted Finnish writer, then eleven years of age, and living with her family in the hamlet of Hiitola, two hundred kilometers north of Viipuri in Karelia with her family, was another one of those who experienced the initial attack. “Our house was on the shore of a small lake,” she recalled, “and if I close my eyes I can imagine it is still summer. In Karelia it was always warm and sunny, it seems.”

Like many of her fellow Karelian schoolchildren, Kilpi had heard about the possibility of war, and worried about it. “I used to pray to God to prevent the war. And I remember that I carried the fear of the war inside my child’s heart. We didn’t quite believe it would come, that it would come to Hiitola.”

“But then, when we were eating lunch [that day], suddenly we saw planes coming straight toward our house and father shouted that he should go immediately back to the cellar. And then the bombs started dropping.”

***

MARTHA GELLHORN, the well-known American correspondent had just arrived in Helsinki the previous day to report on the growing tension between Finland and Russia, little suspecting that those tensions were about to explode into full-fledged war. She was getting ready for breakfast in her room on the second floor of the venerable Hotel Kamp, where the foreign press was headquartered, when she heard the first bombs.

The glamorous 36-year-old journalist had already gained international repute for her reports for her home publication, Collier’s from the Spanish Civil where she had met her current paramour novelist Ernest Hemingway, with whom she was then living in Cuba. In November, with German and Russia’s joint annexation of Poland a fait accompli, Gelhorn, desirous of re-establishing her journalistic bona fides, wired her editor, Charles Colebaugh, in New York for a front-line assignment.

To the idealistic Bryn Mawr graduate, whose vivid dispatches about the American depression for the Federal Relief Emergency Administration had brought her to the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the stakes were even higher than they had been in Spain, now that, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, the world’s two greatest totalitarian states were on the same anti-democratic side. “This was the war to save our skins,” Gellhorn wrote. “Now one could only ally one’s mind and heart with the innocents—the various unknown peoples who would be paying for with all they had to love and lose.”

But where were these new innocents? Poland, divvied up between the Germans and the Russians after its valiant, but futile, five week fight was lost. The Western front was tense but quiet, as the French Army, hunkered down in comfort behind the purportedly impregnable Maginot Line. Except for the war at sea, which was beginning to heat up, culminating in the dramatic Battle of the River Plate—the only story that would, briefly, take the world’s attention away from the Soviet-Fenno match-up that winter—and the occasional aerial skirmish between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe over the English Channel, there was no war. There didn’t seem to be a war, just a Phony War, as people called it.

Colebaugh advised Gellhorn to go to Finland. “He thought something might happen there.” Like most Americans, Gellhorn knew as little about Finland as she did about Poland. She didn’t even know where Finland was, but had to look it up on a map. Apparently she hadn’t even heard of Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish track runner and multiple-Olympics hero of the 1920s, then the most famous Finn in the world, except perhaps for Sibelius, the great composer. Gellhorn did some more research. She liked what she found. In addition to being hard working and fiscally responsible and fleet on their feet (and skis), the Finns, she read, were highly literate and talented beyond their numbers, “a good democracy,”—a democracy worth saving.

And so on November 10th, armed with her Underwood typewriter, and a signed letter of introduction from her friend and fan Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn boarded a Belgium-bound Dutch freighter. Pausing a few days in still neutral Belgium, Gellhorn crossed the North Sea again, this time by plane, bound for Stockholm, where she stopped for a day, before finally flying on to Helsinki, arriving on the afternoon of November 29th.

It was not yet three o’clock when Gellhorn’s cab rumbled to a stop in front of the venerable seventy year old hotel, a legacy from Grand Duchy days. As Helsinki is wont at that time of year, the capital was already cold and dark. There was no time to take a tour of the city or get an update from her fellow correspondents, a motley crew of Americans, Britons, and sundry Scandinavians who had been covering the off-again, on-again Soviet-Fenno negotiations for the past month, and who, she could see, were massed downstairs desultorily going through the day’s press communiqués. The storied old hotel and long-time center of Finnish society and watering hole for the Finnish intelligentsia, with its palm-bedecked café, had been requisitioned by the government for use as a press center. On the night of November 29th, perhaps a dozen or so correspondents were in residence there, and had been reduced to filing “local color” features about Finnish dress and cuisine.

Exhausted from her four thousand mile journey, Gellhorn trooped up the stately old hotel’s well-worn carpeted steps to her blackened-out room. Minutes later she was asleep. Then came the bombs. “I’ll be damned,” Gellhorn muttered, as she ran to her window overlooking Esplanadi. Her editor, Colebaugh, it turned out, had been right.

“I saw a huge trimotor [sic] bomber go over at about 1,000 meters,” she wrote Hemingway several days later. “Low and slow, just wandering around.” But this plane was not dropping bombs, but thousands of paper leaflets, which fell on the pavement or caught in the trees of the adjoining pocket park. As the reporter continued to peer outside, dozens of well-dressed Helsinkians, most of whom had been caught out by the raid, began making their way to the vaestosuoja, the crude, timber-lined air raid shelters which had been constructed in the center of the park. Several stooped to pick up the Soviet leaflets.

SOLDIERS! PUT DOWN YOUR ARMS RETURN
HOME AND PROTECT YOURSELF! PREVENT
STARVATION! WE HAVE BREAD!

read one.

And another.

FINNISH COMRADES!

We come to you not as conquerors, but as liberators of the Finnish people from the oppression of capitalists and landlords. We must not shoot each other. At the behest of the imperialists Cajander, Mannerheim, etc. have broken off negotiations and transformed Finland into an armed camp, subjecting the Finnish people to terrible suffering.

Those Helsinkians who bothered to read the pamphlets were stupefied. The undernourished, downtrodden Finland referred to in the crudely written Soviet pamphlets had no relation to the comfortable, well-fed country that they knew. Indeed, the crude agit-prop falling from the skies would have been laughable, if it weren’t for those deadly serious bombs exploding near-by.

“Molotov’s breadbaskets,” an unknown wag had dubbed the explosives. The name stuck.

***

WHILE THE ASTONISHED newspaperwoman was observing the surreal scene outside her window at the Kamp, Herbert Berridge Elliston, the British-born correspondent for the Boston-based The Christian Science Monitor, ran to his. The prior day, the forty four year old Elliston, a veteran of The First World War who had fought in the Royal Horse Artillery, had trooped up to his room, just across from Gellhorn’s, after investigating the contrived frontier incident at Mainila. “I scrambled from bed and looked out,” Elliston wrote in his book, Finland Fights! about the Winter War, which his publisher, Little Brown, rushed to print in late January, 1940 while the Soviet-Fenno conflict was still raging, in response to the passionate interest in the conflict in the U.S.

“…It was a perfect winter morning, with the sun coming out of a blue sky, unflecked save for one cotton wooly ball cloud,” Elliston wrote. “Inside that cloud were Russian planes. Through the trailing steamer of the cloud a couple of planes could be seen in nebulous outline. With its destructive freight, the solitary cloud moved across the heavens like a Spanish galleon in full sail.”

After the two month lull in the West following the fall of Poland, something was finally happening, and Elliston and his excited fellow reporters were right there for the action. “You got the illusion, indeed,” Elliston gushed,

That the clouds must have borne the machines all the way across the Gulf of Finland. Presently the cloud arrived overhead a little to my right. All this time noise continued without cease—the dull detonation of exploding bombs breaking through a continual screech of air raid alarms and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns.

At least the newsman was under no illusions about the objective of the raid. “This was a Blitzkrieg designed to overcome and conquer the Finns from the air. I watched intently,” Elliston continued, “because victory or defeat in this type of diplomacy-war [sic] depends upon the behavior of the people.” Evidently the raid was not having its intended effect. “There was no panic. The people in the park below stayed at the entrance of the bomb shelters and gazed skyward at the Soviet apparition.”

In the Kamp press room, Elliston began making calls, trying to find out more about the surprise Soviet attack. His first impulse was to ring Risto Ryti, the long-time chairman of the Bank of Finland. Elliston had already met Ryti two years before, during a pre-war fact-finding mission to Northern Europe in his capacity as financial editor and columnist for the Monitor. He had been told beforehand that the central banker—who ran unsuccessfully for president that year against the grandfatherly Kyosti Kallio—was one of the best informed men in Europe.

Not that Ryti was of much help. When the reporter reached “Finland’s Alexander Hamilton,” as he admiringly described him, he was just as stumped as anyone by the Soviet attack. The perplexed financier told his journalistic acquaintance that he had heard a rumor that Norway had been given an ultimatum by Moscow to hand over the Arctic port of Narvik.* Had he heard anything about this? Ryti asked the equally puzzled reporter, as bombs crashed and sirens wailed in the background. Well, if he did, asked the polite Ryti, who, unbeknownst to him, would be appointed the following day to steer Finland through the crisis—would Elliston be so kind as to give him a ring?

“Of course,” Elliston said, putting down the phone and shaking his head. “Storm over Europe!” he thought to himself, “What on earth had Stalin started in [this] part of the world? It was the beginning of a wild day.”

***

FOR HIS PART, fifteen year old Harry Matso was too busy shepherding his schoolmates to safety to be afraid. He, too, had been singing his morning prayers—Jewish prayers—when the first Russian raiders dropped their mixed payload of incendiary bombs and propaganda.

As it happened, the school was located five hundred meters away from Hietaniemi, Helsinki’s main cemetery, where the two hundred pupils were quickly evacuated under the supervision of a gymnastics teacher. “Harry,” the teacher told Matso, who was assisting him, after the orderly procession reached its destination, “pull all the children under the trees and behind the tombstones.” The teacher, quite rightly, was concerned that the childrens’ colorful clothing would make them easy targets for the strafing Soviet planes. Then, as a raider whizzed by a few hundred meters overhead, the teacher dove for cover himself, as Matso followed.

When Matso carefully got to his feet, after the all clear sounded a half hour or so later, the youth saw that a house bordering the cemetery had been bombed to bits. A bereaved looking man emerged, carrying the limp body of a young girl, apparently his daughter, one of the ninety six Helsinkians who died on that horrific day.

***

FINNISH PRIME MINISTER A.K. Cajander, the same man who several days before Pravda denounced as “a small beast of prey without sharp teeth and strength but having a cunning lust”—actually a mild-mannered sixty year old botanist who had headed Finland’s Forest and Park Service prior to assuming office in 1937—was preparing to chair an executive session of the Finnish Cabinet in its large, mirror-lined room on the second floor of the main government building, when the first flight of Soviet bombers entered Finnish air space at nine o’clock. In fact, the flight had been timed to coincide with the meeting—one of the few things about the Soviet attack plan that went right.

The purpose of the emergency conclave was to discuss the meaning of the Kremlin’s sudden and surprising decision to break off diplomatic relations the night before, which had been conveyed in a somewhat confusing note that the long-time Finnish minister to Moscow and former Finnish foreign minister Aarno Yrjo-Koskinen, had abruptly been handed ten hours before.* “The only aim of our nation is to safeguard the security of the Soviet Union,” the baffling communiqué, signed by Molotov, stated, “and in particular Leningrad with its population of 3,500,000.”

To be sure, the issue of Leningrad’s vulnerability to the west—the concern which had triggered that call from Boris Yartsev at the Russian embassy asking for consulations with Helsinki the year before—was not an unreasonable concern. After all, the Soviet Union’s second largest city was located very close to the border between the two nations—and the Finns had very close relations with the Kaiser Wilhelm, who had sent an expedition of troops to Helsinki that secured the Whites’ victory during the Civil War, and reasonably good ones with his eventual successor, Adolf Hitler in the past. The Finns could understand that concern—which would be validated in June, 1941 when the Germans used the “Karelian gateway” to invade northwestern Russia. What was confusing was the next part of Molotov’s note.

After accusing the Finnish government of bad faith, the blunt-talking apparatchik—who had replaced his more emollient predecessor, Maxim Litvinov, in May—continued: “We can no longer tolerate the present situation, for which the Finnish government bears full responsibility. Our government has decided it can no longer maintain normal relations with Finland.”

It certainly sounded like a declaration of war. The reports from the border confirmed that Finland was under an attack. On the other hand, Molotov seemed to leave some hope that the rapidly deteriorating situation between the two countries could still be resolved through negotiation, mysteriously stating that his country remained ready to meet Finland “more than halfway about territorial questions,” including the Karelian peninsula, now half-divided between Finland and the U.S.S.R. He also thought he would even be ready to consider the question of “uniting the entire Karelian people and Karelia with their brotherly people, the Finns” (an outcome Molotov wound up ultimately achieving following the cession of Finnish Karelia, and the evacuation westward of virtually the entire population, though doubtless not in the way he envisioned).

To further confuse matters, the démarche reiterated the Soviet’s utmost respect for Finland’s sovereignty and independence.

Did Moscow want war or not? It was hard to figure. The Cabinet debate went back and forth. Then came the explosions of the first Soviet bombs. Now the confusion was over. Now, Cajander and his fellow politicians knew, as they rushed to the window and saw smoke billowing from the city center, Finland was at war.

***

ACTUALLY, THE CABINET was slightly behind the times. In point of fact, Finland and the Soviet Union had been in a state of belligerency since 6:50 that morning, when a goodly proportion of the nearly 2,000 field guns the Soviets had at the start of the war, which they had managed to wheel up to the border without being detected by the laggard Finnish intelligence, unleashed a huge cannonade. The massive barrage, the largest such bombardment since the end of the First World War, was punctuated by the booming reports of the long-range guns of the naval fortress island at Kronstadt, thirty kilometers west of Leningrad, at the head of the Gulf of Finland.

Seconds later, the still, snow-laden frontier became a roiling, roaring, white cauldron, as giant birch trees suddenly turned into twigs. Boulders went flying. The scattered farms and buildings within the fire zone, which had already been hastily evacuated by the government, disintegrated in a cloud of snow and dust. Unfortunately, neither Finnish intelligence, then overseen by an incompetent by the name of Col. Lars Rafael Melander, nor the equally blind civil authorities, who were still not willing to believe that war would actually come, had done a very careful job of the evacuation, resulting in the capture of over 4,000 Finnish civilians.

Then, as green rockets fired up into the black sky, signaling the start of the assault, thousands of Soviet troops, many of them screaming and singing, plunged into the Rajajoki River (the river separating then Finnish Karelia and Russian Karelia, now called the Sestra) holding their weapons over their heads. They were followed by something that most Finns, or Finnish troops, had never seen before: tanks. Evidently the Kremlin meant business.

***

AS HARRY BERNER, then a corporal stationed in the medieval border town of Terijokirecalled: “On November 28th, we had returned to the central barracks in Terijoki from a one week reconnaissance of the area. Then the next morning we were awakened by this gigantic artillery barrage, through which we could hear the big guns at Kronstadt. None of us had ever experienced, or even imagined, anything like it.”

Berner’s unit, like most of the Finnish units that experienced the brunt of the Soviet attack, recovered from its shock soon enough and went into fighting retreat mode. “We were ordered out into the streets to delay the enemy as much as possible,” he says. “I was posted by the general store. Then we saw Russian troops appear on the outskirts of town, as they poured out of the Rajajoki. We exchanged fire. Those were our orders: fight, delay, retreat. Of course, we didn’t have much choice.”

***

THE ATTACK made for inspiring copy by Nikolai Virta, a well-known Soviet writer who had signed on with Pravda as a combat correspondent. Except in tone, Virta’s breathless account essentially squares with Berner’s:

On the stroke of 8 a.m. the signal was flashed and from the south the air was suddenly filled with the whistle of shells, the echo of their detonation, the deeper boom of howitzers and the muffled roar of the heavies. From Kronstadt one heard the distant echo of the great fortress guns. Thirty seconds later the horizon became a sheet of flame. The whole Finnish frontier was ablaze. Then began the rattle of machine guns, answered by those of the Finns. The cannonade continued for thirty minutes along the front of 140 kilometers, eighteen kilometers deep.

Then green rockets shot up, signaling the Red infantry to attack and the troops charged, cheering, toward the frontier. Plunging into the icy waters of [Rajajoki] river, they started work on pontoon bridges. At 9:15 the section’s first battalion crossed the frontier on bridges and entered Finnish territory. The forests, so silent an hour ago before the attack, suddenly filled with the roaring of the motors of tanks, the clank of caterpillar links and the sirens of the machines along the snow-covered roads.

Interestingly, Virta was sporting enough to give Berner and his fellow defenders credit: “The enemy resists with determination.” The tone of Virta’s reportage would become more vituperative and less charitable towards the enemy as the Soviet advance bogged down, and his comrades began being blown up by the scores of mines and booby traps Finnish sappers had left behind in Terijoki, but for the moment he was all gung ho.

***

WHILE HARRY BERNER and his colleagues were retreating before the onrushing Red hordes at the Rajajoki, two hundred kilometers to the northeast, a mortarman by the name of Reino Oksanen was busy trying to stay warm. Like most of the men of his battalion, Oksanen hailed from the town of Messukyla near the southern central industrial city of Tampere. One of the strengths of the Finnish Army was that most of its men were drawn from the same area. “It was a good thing as we knew each other well when the fighting began. We knew each others’ qualities.”

Oksanen completed his compulsory military training in 1935. It was then that he received instruction in the use of the light, 81 mm mortar, one of nine such weapons assigned to each company. Not that he expected to put that training to use anytime soon. After all, Finland and Russia were at peace, or supposed to be. That all had changed in the fall of 1939. “Trouble had been brewing for a long time. But when they [the Army] started handing out calls for special training in October, we knew that this was serious. We were told to bring winter clothing. And guns. We were supposed to have submachine guns, but in reality they were quite rare. I was given a standard Pystykorva rifle, as were we all.”

Oksanen and his fellow soldiers from Messukyla were first assembled in a Tampere linen factory along with the rest of the 16th Regiment, which was led by Lt. Aaro Pajari, who would later distinguish himself in the pivotal battle of Talvajarvi. Oksanen slept side by side with his comrades on the floor of the factory. The next day, November 15th, they were dispatched by train to the Luumaki-Taavetti area of Ladoga-Karelia, where the entire division dug in.

Still, like the great majority of Finns, the men from Messukyia were skeptical that war would actually come: “Even then we debated amongst ourselves whether Finland would have to go to war.” Still, the general mood was very defiant. “We took turns in bragging how we would annihilate the ‘Russkies’—or at least some of us did,” Oksanen said, using the common pejorative Finns then used—and Finns of a certain age still use—to describe their almost universally loathed eastern neighbors. “There was this one man from Tampere who was full of enthusiasm when the negotiations were underway. He said he would be disappointed if peace endured. He was eager, he said, for Russky blood. Of course, when the fighting began in earnest he amounted to nothing.”

***

MARSHAL Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was having breakfast with his niece’s husband, Bjorn Weckmann, at his mansion in Kaivopuisto, Helsinki’s fashionable diplomatic district, when they were startled by the sound of bombs.

It was a sound, one suspects, the venerable Finnish general, who at 72 retained the ramrod posture of the imperial chevalier he had once been, at once dreaded and welcomed. Dreaded because it signaled the start of a costly war which he knew, as chairman of Finland’s defense council, a post which he had repeatedly resigned in frustration, Finland was not properly prepared to fight and couldn’t possibly win.

Once again, as it had twenty years before, the country of his birth needed him. First, in 1918, following Finland’s declaration of independence from Bolshevik Russia, the Finnish government had turned to Mannerheim, asking him to take command of the disparate White counterrevolutionary forces and quash the nascent Red rebellion that Lenin had engineered. Additionally, he had to disarm the Russian troops still stationed in Finland. Few generals have ever been handed a more difficult set of tasks. But Mannerheim, who had spent the greater part of his adult life in Russia and was a member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority and hitherto a virtual unknown in his own country, succeeded in bringing the brutal civil war, which cost an estimated thirty seven thousand lives and included atrocities on both sides, to an end, securing the republic’s independence.

Following that, Mannerheim, who later that year left Finland out of disgust for its increasingly pro-German inclinations, was asked by the Finnish Cabinet to turn around and help batten down Finnish sovereignty, by obtaining recognition from the skeptical Allies. Assenting, the versatile soldier-diplomat proceeded to wow both London and Paris with his dashing looks and courtly manners, as well as his manifest love and passion for his native land. “From capital to capital he went, pleading the cause for Finland,” wrote Herbert Elliston, “He not only won recognition for Finland; he won friends for her.”

Befriending, or even understanding the enigmatic former imperial officer, was a different matter. No man could be curter, as Henry Bell, Great Britain’s first consul to Helsinki, discovered when he came to call on Mannerheim one day at the London residence of the aloof former Russian general. Mannerheim had generally been genial to him, Bell wrote.

“One day, however,” Bell continued, “Mannerheim was more brusque. He addressed me in Swedish instead of the usual English. He hardly acknowledged my formal greeting, and he would not listen to what I had come to say. Sitting behind his great table, with a map of Finland and another of Russia in front of him, he said severely, ‘Herr Consul, do you bring me good news today?’”

“I blushed and stammered: ‘I regret, Your Excellency…’”

“‘Herr Consul,’ Mannerheim interjected, ‘if you do not soon bring me good news that Britain has recognized the independence of Finland, your visits will no longer be welcome. Good day.’”

***

IN THE EVENT, the inscrutable Mannerheim succeeded so well at his diplomatic mission that in December, 1918, he was summoned back to Helsinki and named Regent. There was talk of making him king; certainly he had the ingredients of one. However, like George Washington, a figure to whom he was frequentlycompared, Mannerheim refused.

Instead, he preferred to run for president. However, Mannerheim, still bearing the bloody stigma of the excesses of the White forces during the recent civil war, in which scores of Finnish Communists had been summarily executed (and for which he seems to have been at least indirectly responsible), lost to the more homely, down-to-earth Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg. For most Finns, the distant, haughty, outspokenly anti-communist general was, in the final analysis, too charged, too complicated a figure for them to entrust the peacetime destiny of their fragile young republic.

And so “The Liberator,

“It was the darkest day in our history, I think.”

—Harry Matso1

IF THE FIRST DAY of the Winter War was for Finns the longest day of the 105 day conflict, the last day was easily the second. If anything, peace, when it came, in the form of Vaino Tanner’s radio speech that day, March 13, 1940, announcing the terms of the armistice, was as traumatic, if not more so, than the incendiary bombs that had suddenly fallen out of the sky the previous November 30th.

It had been only two days since the Finnish people, who had been shielded so long from the truth, had first learned that negotiations with the Russians were underway. Still, no one could have imagined that the war, into which the entire nation had thrown itself, in which it had suffered so much and fought so hard, as well as experienced such everlasting glory, would end the way it did.

No journalist who was in Helsinki that dark day would ever forget it. Of all the passages in the droves of books and articles they would write about their experiences during the Talvisota, the most affecting are the ones dealing with what they saw and felt as they walked the streets of Helsinki and looked at the faces of the stunned, grief-stricken Finns around then. The experience was all the more vivid—and painful—for the newsman because, unlike the people around them, they knew what was coming. This was one scoop most wished they rather hadn’t have.

***

VIRGINIA COWLES, who had been in Stockholm to cover the peace talks along with her colleague, Eddie Ward of the BBC—her second trip to Sweden of the war—was one of the first to get the scoop, thanks to a last minute question Ward happened to ask Eljas Erkko, the Finnish minister to Stockholm, during a hurried phone conversation, as she recalls:

The following day [the 11th] there were peace rumors. I ran into a Danish journalist who told me he was positive an agreement had been reached in Moscow, but was unable to get official confirmation of it. Eddie and I had decided to return to Helsinki that night and rang up Mr. Erkko to arrange for airplane seats. Not expecting a reply, Eddie said to him:

‘Is it true that an agreement has been reached in Moscow?’2

To Cowles’ and Ward’s astonishment, Erkko replied in the affirmative. Ward then sent a telegram to BBC, which was read over the six o’clock news, the first semi-official report that the war was over. Erkko spent the rest of the evening trying to deny the peace rumors. When Cowles arrived at the Stockholm airport shortly afterwards, a number of people who had heard the report, including an irate Finnish colonel who refused to believe it, were discussing it.3

“Did you hear the report that the BBC is putting out?” the colonel asked the two reporters, unaware that he was speaking to the party—Ward—who was responsible for the BBC report. “That fellow must be crazy,” the officer exclaimed. “Peace!” he exclaimed. “We’ll make peace when the Russians withdraw every last soldier!” he continued, as the other passengers nodded in agreement. Ward sheepishly agreed and moved away, and waited with Cowles to board their flight.4

“When we took off from the aerodrome the lights of Stockholm sparkled like diamonds against the snow,” Cowles mused, “and we wondered what price Sweden had paid to keep them blazing.” She remained in a pensive mood for the remainder of the flight. “It was a sad trip. Eddie and I were apparently the only passengers who knew what we were returning to, and it somehow it seemed to make it worse.” “I looked at the faces around me, strong, confident faces, and dared not to think what the following day would bring.”5

Arriving in Turku, Cowles boarded the bus to return to Helsinki. Turku, its quietude long ago sundered, was still very much a city at war:

The Turku morning paper carried headlines of the number of Russian planes shot down the previous day. The only item referring to the negotiations was a small box in the corner of the front page announcing that foreign radio stations were reporting a solution had been reached in Moscow. And this was encircled by a large question mark.6

The notice didn’t attract the attention of the other passengers, mostly farm girls and road workers wearing white capes over their clothes to camouflage them from the Russian fighters who were still raising havoc around the country.

***

BACK AT THE KAMP, Cox, like the rest of the resident press corps had spent the night in a state of suspended animation, waiting for confirmation of the dread news that the peace treaty had been signed.

That night of the 12th of March I walked around in the black out, past the heaps of snow piled by the footpaths, to the Press Room. Every correspondent knew that tonight we would probably hear something definite.

I looked round the Press Room that night, at the green-covered tables with files of translations from the Finnish Press, the photos of Suomussalmi on the walls, the heavy curtains drawn for the blackout. Here I had heard the first communiqué of the war read out; here I had seen Miss Helsinkis, the pretty Finnish girl who acted as chief secretary, looking every night for the figures of Russian planes brought down.7

Cox asked Helsinkis how she felt now. “I live in Viipuri,” she responded, sadly. “Last week I saw on a newsreel my flat, smashed to pieces by a bomb. But I don’t mind that so much as stopping the fight now when we have suffered so much.”8

Later that agonizing evening, Cox’s fellow scribe, Leland Stowe, was sitting upstairs in the room of Walter Kerr, the popular reporter for The New York Herald Tribune (and future celebrated theater critic of The New York Times) along with a number of other journalists—including Cox, who had since decided to take out his anxieties on the typewriter:

We tried to cover the heartbreak of it all with feeble jokes. They fell as flat as when poor ashen-faced [Laurin] Zilliacus, commenting on Walter’s futile struggles with the telephone, had remarked: ‘Probably you forgot to put the nickel in the slot.’ We kept writing stories we couldn’t file.9

Pressed for news, all that the visibly depressed Finnish press officer Laurin Zilliacus could say was that it was possible that peace terms had been signed in Moscow, however he assumed that the eduskunta hadn’t voted on them. Otherwise he would have heard.

At least one Finn couldn’t wait.

Then the phone rang and a Finnish friend was called. He laid down the receiver and said in a dull voice: ‘The first of our friends has just committed suicide.’ It was a young woman, a writer by profession.10

Shortly afterward, the journalists were summoned again to the Press Room. Zilliacus was standing mutely in front of the room with a slip in his hand. “Fighting will stop at eleven tomorrow,” the dazed man said, forgetting that “tomorrow” was actually that day.

His voice was that of a man at a funeral. For a moment no one spoke. Then slowly the room emptied, as correspondent after correspondent went to type out his message telling the world that Russia had won.

Foreign minister Tanner, Zillacus added bleakly, was to speak to the Finnish people at mid-day, detailing the terms of the peace.11

***

SEVERAL HUNDRED KILOMETERS to the east, on the bomb-gutted Karelian Isthmus, astonished Finnish officers began receiving word of the imminent ceasefire, which they in turn began to pass on to their equally shocked men. Eric Malm was one of those men. “When our regiment [the 10th]—or what was left of it—went to Miehikkala [a town near Viipuri], on March 13th that morning,” he recalled, “an officer from the regiment command post came and said there would be a ceasefire.”12

“It came out of the blue. When I was on leave, I had heard rumors of some negotiations, but I had no idea that it would be so soon.”13

Malm’s first thought was to get himself to a safe place, especially since Marshal Voronov’s hundreds of artillerists, still parked wheel to wheel, seemed intent on shelling Finnish positions until the very last minute—and possibly beyond that as well:

Still the Russian artillery kept shooting, so I made sure I was in the safest place possible, knowing this would stop in just two hours. It would have been too ironic to get killed during the last hours of fighting. Still, the Russian artillery kept pounding us until noon. They had to put in that extra hour.14

To be sure, a number of Finnish troops and volunteers were killed after the official ceasefire time of 11 a.m. by the vindictive Soviets. In the north of Finland, just such a tragedy took place near Salla, when the Russians deliberately bombed a group of Swedish and Norwegian volunteers, who had recently taken over the fighting for their Finnish brothers there, causing numerous casualties.15

One of those who were wounded in that horrific incident was Orvar Nillson. Earlier that morning Nillson’s men had been told of the ceasefire. “We were disappointed, most of us, I think. We had wanted to do more fighting. After all, that’s what we had come for. But we accepted the ceasefire.

Then, around noon, an hour after the ceasefire went into effect, two Russian fighters came out of the clouds and dropped several bombs near our encampment.16

Nillson was fortunate to survive the incident with a broken arm. Nine of his Swedish comrades—the largest group of volunteers to die at one time—weren’t so lucky.17

***

FOR HIS PART, Nikolai Bavin, the fighting Soviet marine stationed at iced-up Saunasaari, was thrilled that the war was over. “I heard about the armistice over the radio. I was happy that it was over. I had nothing against the Finns.”18

Eric Malm felt much the same way once the Russian artillery stopped firing. “I was happy that I had survived,” said the future doctor, who, like most of his colleagues who survived the Winter War with body and mind intact, also served during the Continuation War, “and sad that so many of my comrades had not.”19

***

PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, there were a lot of Finns who wanted to keep on fighting, too—and did so, as Geoffrey Cox, who would go on to become one of Great Britain’s most distinguished news broadcasters after the war, wrote in The Red Army Moves the following year:

At Kuhmo one company, warned that they must stop fighting at 11 o’clock Finnish time, had hurled themselves against a Russian position at dawn in their anger, and had fought till almost every man was wiped out. At Viipuri, a Finnish icebreaker, sent in to try and crack the ice of the bay and cut off the Russians on the western shore—a brilliant strategic move—kept moving after eleven o’clock. Russian guns fired on it, killing
seventy men.20

At Taipale, on the Isthmus, where Finnish troops had held their positions since the beginning of the war, and had continued to repulse Timoshenko’s men until the bitter end, some of the men actually stood and cheered the news of the ceasefire, thinking that it was the Russians who had succumbed, not them. That was how little they knew what was going on.

It was only later when they realized their mistake that the Finns got angry. By then, of course it was too late to keep on fighting, but how they wanted to, as Leland Stowe observes:

At eleven o’clock the order to cease firing was given along the entire front. Finnish soldiers who could scarcely stand received it first with astonished disbelief and then with bitter cries of protest.

‘To hell with it all! It would be better to go on.’ Without munitions, without artillery, without airplanes, the Finns asked nothing except to fight on.

“In their hearts, they were never defeated.”21

***

NOW, IN HELSINKI, and elsewhere, the country was about to experience the supreme shock of Tanner’s armistice speech.

That morning of the 13th, Stowe had tried to brace his Finnish assistant, Clara, for the traumatic news.

I had warned Clara that peace was coming and she had cried ‘No, no!’ And then fiercely [after he told her what he suspected would be the final terms]: ‘But we’ll fight if we have nothing but our knives. …Hanko? They will take Hanko? I tell you our children and our grandchildren would fight to take Hanko back.

“No,” Clara had insisted, “they can never do that to us.”22

***

BUT, AS THE ADDRESS that Tanner bravely made that day to the country, surely one of the most painful addresses any politician has had to make to his own people, confirmed, “they” had done it. Instinctively, journalists Langdon-Davies, Stowe, and Cox, who had been stationed in Helsinki for most of the Talvisota, decided that they did not want to hear Tanner’s speech at the Kamp.

“I cast about in my mind for a suitable spot in which to listen to the news,” Langdon-Davies recalled. “The last place in the world for such a moment was obviously the press room in the Hotel Kamp. The irrepressible minority of journalists, and especially of cameramen, who had proved themselves incapable of realizing that they were the paid spectators of a national tragedy, would at such a moment be beyond bearing.”23

Instead, Langdon-Davies made for a nearby canteen operated by Elanto, the large Social Democratic-owned restaurant and grocery cooperative—

which I knew to have a wireless, and which would be full, I supposed, of the usual crowd of black-coated workers, shop girls, typists, clerks, soldiers, skilled workmen and the rest. I went there and sat down at a little table. It was early still, and for the next quarter of an hour people came in and took their places at different tables.24

Stowe had decided to do the same. Cox decided to listen to the listen to the speech in the dining hall of the Hotel Seurahuone.

Here are excerpts of what the three heard and saw that memorable, sorrowful afternoon:

First Langdon-Davies:

The wireless had been playing some non-committal light music, the sort of semi-classical frippery which always seems to appear in the morning and mid-day programmes the world over. A woman announcer stated that in a few minutes the Foreign Minister would speak. The wireless orchestra played Martin Luther’s hymn.

Luther’s hymn came to an end. It had been the same hymn that the otherwise silent crowd had sung spontaneously at Helsinki railway station when last year the negotiators had gone to meet Molotov in Moscow. Without further announcement Foreign Tanner began to speak. He spoke, of course, in Finnish, though the bilingual etiquette of Finland demanded that immediately after there should be a Swedish translation. Scarcely a word had been spoken, and now there was absolute silence. People stared at their plates: the Foreign Minister read out the terms of peace.

Every now and then as the true tragedy unfolded itself my eye was caught by a quick, short movement from one table and then another. It was the movement of a man or a woman suddenly brushing away tears, which could never be allowed to reach their cheeks. Twice there was another movement. Of course, I could not understand anything that was being said, except the proper names. It was the words, Viipuri and Hanko that produced this movement. A spasmodic stifled cry, which seemed to come from almost everyone in the room, as if in response to a physical blow from an unseen weapon.

The mother and sister at my own table were now sitting with closed eyes. The girl at the next table was staring at the young man in uniform, as if something incomprehensible had frightened her. Only once there was the slightest interruption. Somewhere down the room, like a pistol shot, a man’s voice snapped out, ‘Never!…’25

Cox, at the Seurahuone, watching an equally traumatic tableau, thought about some of the Finns he had met and come to admire, and yes, love, during the three months he had spent covering the war:

Every name came as a blow. ‘Viipuri.’ Gone. I thought of the fair girl on the ski jump in Rovaniemi, who had fought so willingly because she wanted to get back to Viipuri. ‘You should see the sea there in the evenings in the summer,’ she had said.

‘Sortavala, Kakisalmi, Hango [sic]…On and, on went the names. Suddenly the Lotta [seated next to him] burst into tears, her shoulders heaving…26*

Stowe, for his part, was impressed with Tanner’s self-discipline:

Tanner’s voice was steady and emotionless, supremely Finnish in its self-control. ‘We were compelled to accept peace,’ he said. A dark-haired young woman began to weep silently, hiding her face with her hands.
On all sides of me other faces stared, never registering so much as a twitch of their features. Tanner’s voice went steadily on. He was enumerating the Soviet conditions. ‘My God!’ exclaimed an English-speaking girl across the table.

Two more women were crying, but without making a sound. Tanner was explaining how foreign help had failed to come in sufficient strength and in time; how the Scandinavian governments had refused passage for British and French troops.

My eyes were drawn back to the young woman by the window. Now she lay limp in her chair, her face averted toward the drawn curtains. Her shoulders were shaking slowly and ceaselessly.27
***

NORTH OF HELSINKI, in Lahti, Pekka Tiilikainen, the roving YLE reporter, was listening, half-asleep, to a portable radio when Tanner came on. “One program number flowed into another and we were half asleep,” he remembered. “Then it came. Out of our radio receiver, softly, came the news of the disaster, wrapped in cotton wool. It came with reasoned, serious phrases. It brought disappointment, bitterness, sorrow. It brought this,” he wrote, “even though there were pockets [of soldiers] at the front where this meant salvation from death.”28

***

AMONGST THOSE SHARING Tiilikainen’s sorrow and bitterness, along with her thunderstruck family, was Mai-Lis, the durable lotta and aircraft spotter from Koivisto. Two weeks before, Toivonen, like many of the lottas assigned to the areas overrun by the Soviets, had been honorably discharged. Mai-Lis had then joined her mother, Eva, and her three younger brothers, Reijo, Martti, and Eero, at a farmhouse in Korkeakoski, whence her family had been evacuated. As it happened, the farm where they were staying didn’t have a properly working radio, so the family had to hike down the road to find another place where they could hear the armistice speech.

While they were walking, Mai-lis later recalled, the five of them had to pass through a clearing in the woods. Looking up through the curtain of the ambient trees, they were greeted by the sight of another curtain, luminously hanging in the night sky: the Northern Lights. A suspicious sort, Eva Paovala took the supernatural sight as a portent. “The war does not end here,” she said aloud, for her children to hear. “There will be a new war.”29

***

TANNER WAS COMPLETING his speech now. “We must start our lives again,” he was saying into the microphone in his small, cell-like studio in downtown Helsinki, “We are going to rise again.” But few Finns were listening at that point. The cauterizing speech came to an end. Like an audial bookend, the familiar chords of Luther’s hymn A Mighty God is Our Fortress wafted out of the speaker. However they seemed hollow now.30

***

IN HELSINKI, at the Seurahuone, Geoffrey Cox watched as the last notes of Luther’s hymn floated disconsolately around the room. “Men and women stood until the last note died away. Not a soul spoke. Silently they walked out, carrying with them the numb, proud solitude of their grief. The war was over.”31

Virginia Cowles, who had arrived in town too late to hear Tanner’s historic speech, was inconsolable, even though she already knew its tragic gist. Desolate, she sat down in a cafe. A group of Finnish officers came in and took the next table. They had a copy of the morning edition of the Helsingin Sanomat containing the peace terms, outlined by a dark black band for mourning.

“They read it silently,” Cowles, who herself would go on to become one of the great (if now forgotten) correspondents of World War II, wrote, “then one of them crumpled it up angrily and threw it on the floor. No one spoke. They just sat there staring into space.” The dejected American correspondent exited the café into the quickly darkening Finnish winter’s afternoon and looked up: the flags of Suomi were flying at half mast.32

***

AT INKILA MANOR, where his headquarters had finally been moved, Gustaf Mannerheim, the Finnish commander-in-chief, was already thinking about the final message to his valiant troops he would deliver the next day. The oration, perhaps his greatest, in a sense, a continuation to the stirring message Mannerheim had issued fifteen weeks—and a seeming eternity—before, on the first night of the war, as the fires from the first Soviet bombs were still burning. “You did not want war,” he began, solemnly.

You loved peace, work, and progress, but the fight was forced upon you and in it you accomplished great exploits which for centuries to come will shine in the pages of history.

Soldiers! I have fought on many battlefields but I have never yet seen your equals as warriors. I am proud of you as if you were my own children, as proud of the man from the northern tundras as of the sons of the broad plains of Ostrobothnia, the forests of Karelia, the smiling tracts of Savo, the rich farms of Hame and Satakunta, the lands of Uusimaa and South West Finland with their whispering birches. I am as proud of the factory worker and the son of the poor cottage as I am of the rich man’s contribution of life and limb…

Nevertheless, the audibly exhausted Finnish commander-in-chief continued,

In spite of all the courage and self-sacrifice the government has been compelled to make peace on harsh terms. Our army was small, and both its reserves and regulars were insufficient. We were not equipped for a war with a great power.33

Two hundred kilometers to the east, the defenders of bomb-blackened Viipuri—which had after all been the principal objective of the Soviet offensive—received the news of the end of the war, their war, with anger and dismay. And yet if they had the heart to look up they would see that the flag of Finland was still flying atop Viipuri Castle.