2026-08-07 · Notes

The Kremlin Card: Alpo Rusi on the Influence Finland Never Quite Named

Alpo Rusi has an unusually direct vantage point on this subject: Doctor of Political Science, career diplomat, and foreign-policy adviser to President Martti Ahtisaari. His book Kremlin kortti (The Kremlin Card) documents the KGB’s political influence operations in Finland from 1982 to 1991, and we spent an episode of Neuvottelija going through it — recorded in August 2022, six months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and while Finland’s NATO ratification was still working its way through allied parliaments.

Rusi is careful about what the book is and isn’t. “I myself maybe don’t like the word ‘lustration,’” he says. “This is historical research, and it tries to see both the good and the bad sides. I have no aim of hunting anyone down here. But I want the truth” (02:19). What the documentation shows, in his account, is a level of access that had no equivalent elsewhere in the West: “In no other Western country, for example, would you have a president socializing with the head of an intelligence station. That’s what happened in Finland” (04:25).

The book’s most striking figure is Kalevi Sorsa — five-time prime minister, chair of the Social Democrats, and by Rusi’s account a man positioned by Moscow as its preferred path to power after Kekkonen’s era ended. CPSU documents that surfaced in November 1992 identified Sorsa as a confidential KGB contact going back to 1970, when he chaired parliament’s foreign affairs committee (08:28). Rusi doesn’t frame this as a simple villain story. In his reading Sorsa is an interesting and finally tragic figure, a man who had gone too far in the cooperation arrangements and whose position then broke when Koivisto displaced him and Ahtisaari delivered the final humiliation at the presidential election (08:28). The point is not the man but how deep and how normalized the channel was.

Just as pointed is Rusi’s account of the “Tiitinen list”: a roster handed to Finland’s Security Police by German intelligence, naming individuals flagged for KGB and Stasi contacts. SUPO’s head, Seppo Tiitinen, shelved it rather than investigate. Rusi calls this a dereliction of duty committed in 1990, full stop — not because everyone named was guilty, but because nobody was ever cleared either: “if it had been the case that everyone on the list was investigated, and decisions then made based on what each of them had actually done, the matter would have been fine” (12:50).

My favorite passage in the whole conversation isn’t about influence at all — it’s a first-person account of how close Finland came to being locked out of the EU accession queue entirely. In December 1991, at Maastricht, a resolution was about to open membership talks with Sweden and Austria while leaving Finland waiting for years. Rusi got a warning call that evening, and with no time to consult anyone, phoned Finland’s ambassador in Bonn: “stop it — get in touch with Kohl.” Hours later, in a sauna with the Defence Command’s leadership, his phone rang again: Germany’s foreign minister had pulled the resolution. “Finland is saved,” his colleague toasted (18:28). It’s a reminder that “grand strategy” is sometimes one phone call and a sauna bench.

Rusi’s harder argument is about the doctrine that followed. Paavo Lipponen built Finnish foreign policy in the late 1990s and 2000s around deepening ties with Russia — commercially, energetically, diplomatically — on the theory that engagement would stabilize the relationship. In 1998, Lipponen predicted Russia would become “an economic superpower.” Rusi’s rebuttal is unsparing: the ruble had just collapsed, Russia ranked roughly tenth among world economies, and “no forecasts showed Russia’s economy rising to a level where it could be called an economic superpower” (33:14). He counts three windows where Finland could have joined NATO — alongside the Baltic states, after the 2008 Georgia war, or after the 2014 annexation of Crimea (26:19) — and argues that joining earlier “might possibly have” changed Russia’s calculus enough to avoid the 2022 invasion. He’s careful to flag that as speculation, but he’s unambiguous about the underlying judgment: staying out was “a strategic misjudgment” (27:28).

Where I land. Finland completed NATO accession on 4 April 2023, about eight months after we recorded this. Rusi has kept working the same material since — he’s a regular voice on Ukraine-focused Finnish media through 2026 — and I think that consistency is the point. His core claim isn’t really about a list of names from the 1980s. It’s that “Finlandization” wasn’t a onetime historical embarrassment Finland grew out of; it was a standing incentive structure — access, trade, a seat as mediator — that kept reasserting itself right up until the tanks made it undeniable. His closing formulation is the one I keep coming back to: the war in Ukraine, in his reading, “is a colonial attempt — an attempt to colonize Ukraine” (36:35), and every Finnish policy choice from 1991 onward is easier to evaluate once you take that framing seriously.

Watch the full episode on YouTube · read the full transcript.

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