The Kremlin Card in Finland: KGB Influence That Never Left | Alpo Rusi

Summary

Alpo Rusi — Doctor of Political Science, diplomat and former adviser to President Martti Ahtisaari — discusses with Sami Miettinen how Kremlin influence over Finnish foreign and domestic policy changed, but never disappeared, especially across the transitional period of 1991–2022. Themes include Rusi’s background; his book ‘Kremlin kortti’ on the KGB’s political war in Finland 1982–1991 (framed as historical research rather than lustration); how Presidents Koivisto, and figures such as Väyrynen and Aho, regarded the Soviet Union’s collapse and the EU; the tragic figure of Kalevi Sorsa; the Baltic states’ independence and Finland’s cold attitude toward it; how Finland joined Sweden and Austria’s EU-application ‘train’ in the Ahtisaari era; the 1991–2022 transition, the Paavo Lipponen doctrine, the roots of the Russia–EU energy partnership and the fading of Finland’s turn toward the West; the missed windows for joining NATO; and what history might teach us.

Transcript

English transcript derived from validated English subtitles (WebVTT · SRT). Timestamps link to the original video.

00:00 The aim is to look at how deep the Soviet Union got in controlling Finland’s foreign and security policy, but partly domestic policy too. So we probably still have a lot that hasn’t come to light, which for example Putin could have made use of, since he has all the files. So I called Finland’s ambassador in Bonn and said, stop it — get in touch with Kohl. There wasn’t really anything more that could be done. The claim that NATO’s enlargement, and the Kosovo peace process and the NATO bombing that preceded it, were— — that they were, as it were, Putin’s justification for starting an aggressive power politics. That’s a lie, and it absolutely has to be understood that this is the case. Finland’s foreign-policy turn from this early phase, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union broke up, also comes to an end around this Kosovo process, in the sense that in Finland the left, which had a strong position in foreign and domestic policy, began to criticize NATO heavily.

01:15 We remember Sorsa’s comments, how he criticized the European states for not criticizing the United States enough. All right, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. My guest is Doctor of Political Science Alpo Rusi. Welcome. Thank you. You’ve been a veteran diplomat, and besides that you’ve been a researcher at a foreign institution, and you’ve also been an adviser to Martti Ahtisaari. You’ve written several books, and you’ve even predicted certain shifts in the world order, for example China’s rise, and so on. Your newest book is The Kremlin Card, the KGB’s political war in Finland. In this, personally, I’m a child of this country’s eighties and seventies. As a young person I watched the Kekkonen era wind down and then mutate into the Social Democrats’— — that is, of course, through Kalevi Sorsa to Mauno Koivisto, and then, in that context, the cultivation of relations with the East also shifted from the Centre Party to the Social Democrats.

02:19 It’s quite interesting to talk about exactly that period. But is this— this is clearly a lustration book, meaning we go through it on the basis of documentation, — this whole business of grovelling, or the shift into Finlandization. How would you yourself describe this book? Well, I myself maybe don’t like the word “lustration.” 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 more, because I myself also served as a diplomat in the eighties — as a researcher, in fact. I’ve had to familiarize myself very thoroughly with the currents of that time. So we have to behave like adults when we deal with recent history. There’s been a lot of a certain pattern now, where people get a kind of fit of rage, if they notice their own name, for example, in a context

03:20 where this kind of close dealings with Soviet KGB cover diplomats comes to light. One shouldn’t get worked up or enraged, but should treat it matter-of-factly. The aim is to look at how deep the Soviet Union got in controlling Finland’s foreign and security policy, but partly domestic policy too. There’s no point denying this. This is something quite reasonably understood at the international level. We talk about Finlandization. And people shouldn’t climb the walls over that either, when the subject comes up. There are those who say one shouldn’t get defensive, because there’s this comment going around altogether that we supposedly never had any Finlandization at all, — that we did our best to get through those circumstances with as little damage as possible. Yes, it was the diplomats’ job to talk things up, but now, in hindsight, it’s wise to go beneath the surface

04:25 and look at how this behind-the-scenes management of relations actually happened, because Soviet diplomats and intelligence representatives have openly said that relations with Finland were handled on two levels. On one hand through official channels, but on the other hand also through unofficial channels. That unofficial channel was exceptionally broad. 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. Yeah, I might say — that word “lustration” is, to my eyes, still a kind of cleansing word, so let’s just talk about it like adults, as you said, about what actually happened, and of course there were mitigating circumstances, sometimes it was quite sensible to play both sides. We interviewed Esko Aho ourselves, who had written a good book, by the way, about the year 1991. He discussed it in a pretty grown-up way. What I was discussing there was what Koivisto knew and what he knew.

05:26 In that book he said, for example, that Koivisto had a direct channel to the Kremlin, which he didn’t always tell the prime minister about, even though it might have been necessary. But then he said that at the end of 1991 the last state treaty with the Soviet Union was made — that is, the YYA Treaty was dissolved, which was a seismic moment for the entire era of Finlandization. Wasn’t that quite a central document, invoking the YYA Treaty? I have precise notes from that year. I was head of office at the time and centrally involved in preparing Finland’s report on the benefits and drawbacks of the EU. And I sat on Aho’s team writing speeches for him, including for 3 September 1991, where he opened the door to the EU. So I have a very close personal experience of that.

06:26 And in that sense I would still say — there’s been a claim that Koivisto took Finland into the European Union, but he didn’t. It was the Finnish people’s vote that took Finland in, but we did the preparation. And civil servants in particular did the preparing. And Aho deserves credit there, in that he made sure these things moved forward. And Koivisto held back, and he was uncertain. And even after the Soviet Union broke up, he snapped at Foreign Minister Väyrynen, when Väyrynen had, a couple of weeks earlier, quite logically pointed out in a speech that the Soviet Union was breaking up. So Koivisto had stated that it wasn’t Finland’s job to announce whether the Soviet Union was dead or not. That was his way of constantly clashing with Väyrynen.

07:27 Later historical accounts can certainly clarify why the chemistry between them was so bad — which also led to Koivisto withholding important memos from his foreign minister, memos I’ve dealt with in that book. I’m not defending either of them, I’m just noting that what’s distasteful about it, I suppose, is that the very top of the state leadership isn’t able to discuss key matters. If we’re still in the territory of the Kremlin Card book, one big observation for me was that, in a way, the transition out of Kekkonen’s camp — since Ahti Karjalainen was a drunk, no successor could be found in him — so they tried to throw the ball to a promising Social Democrat, Kalevi Sorsa, who was indeed then lifted up. It was through the Socialist International, where he was heavily involved, and in a way a channel of Soviet influence on world affairs. He had a certain standing there, but then Sorsa’s wings couldn’t hold.

08:28 Mauno Koivisto came along, took his place in the Social Democratic camp, and then Martti Ahtisaari delivered the final humiliation in the presidential election. So in my view Sorsa’s figure was interesting in this book, and a bit tragic too. Well, based on many original documents, Sorsa had, so to speak, gone too far in the cooperation arrangements he pursued with the Soviet Union. That’s through the International, and then also through the positions he held in Finland. When he was then exposed in November 1992 by CPSU documents as a confidential KGB contact, and according to a memo drawn up in the CPSU Central Committee, — he had been in close, trusted cooperation with us ever since he was chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs committee. That is, since 1970.

09:30 He never really got over this exposure. And the memo from when he meets Koivisto in November 1992 is in Koivisto’s archive, quoted in that book, in which, after a long trip to Moscow, he reports his experiences to Koivisto. He was a member of the Bank of Finland’s board. And I do say that my own name pops up there too, in these papers from the Moscow flea market. They weren’t “flea market” papers — they were documents that surfaced through the research of Bukovsky, the Russian dissident, documents drawn up in the CPSU Central Committee secretariat in 1980. And then Ilta-Sanomat got hold of these papers in January 1993, but didn’t publish them. And Bukovsky was very disappointed that no attention was paid to this in Finland.

10:34 Just recently. The now-imprisoned Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote in an article for the Washington Post a couple of years ago, in which he brought up these archival records about Sorsa and said it was a signal to many Western politicians who had been in close cooperation with the CPSU — asking whether they too would be exposed. So we probably still have a lot that hasn’t come to light, which for example Putin could have made use of, since he has all the files. And this is also interesting, and in a way — if a lustration line had been taken, in fact even Mauno Koivisto himself said he had nothing against the Tiitinen list being published, given that apparently Kalevi Sorsa and several Social Democratic figures were on it — that it should be published, and it would in a way have been good if it had then been gone through, to see whether there was anything to it or not, but now it’s a bit too late. Nothing is too late, but let’s put it this way — Koivisto is actually in a rather peculiar position in this respect, because he probably never even got to see that list.

11:45 Even though he could have obtained justification for all that information, he never admitted that he had even seen it. But he did at least admit to a phone conversation, that one had taken place about its contents. That’s my theory. I only have the memo — when this came up in some way in connection with my treason trial on 5 September 2007, Koivisto, who by the way was genuinely furious about Supo’s actions against me, because according to the memos he valued my work, and considered it obvious that something here was way off, which it later turned out to be. So he has a phone conversation with Tiitinen, and based on that phone conversation Tiitinen writes a short memo, describing the Tiitinen list without names, but after that Koivisto never returned to the subject again. So I’ve thought about it this way — that he realized there that this couldn’t be published, because Tiitinen had perhaps said that there was—

12:50 — Sorsa, for example, and so on. It comes up because nobody was investigated. 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. In my view Tiitinen committed a dereliction of duty in 1990. It’s nothing more complicated than that. It’s not acceptable that the head of Finland’s Security Police, on receiving from German intelligence a list of people who might possibly be problematic for German security, or who had been reported as having KGB and Stasi contacts, would simply shelve it. That’s poor cooperation, first of all, with German intelligence. And then the justifications he’s given publicly don’t hold up — that these people might have been stigmatized without cause.

13:51 On the contrary, it’s likely that some legal process would have resulted — but would it have come too close to Finland’s political leadership. That’s the reason it was shelved. Right, wasn’t Tiitinen also a Social Democrat? He was actually a young deputy judge carrying a Centre Party membership card, chosen by Kekkonen and Interior Minister Eino Uusitalo, who didn’t have a single day’s experience in security service work. and he was put in charge of the Security Police, which was already, in itself, the wrong appointment. Appointments like that should never happen. You really shouldn’t put 30-year-old education ministry officials in charge of the security service. Right. Well, now we could think about, as I mentioned, this ‘91— there was, in a way, a chance for Finland to recognize the Baltic states and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which by then had essentially already been written off as the Soviet Union’s end as a state.

14:54 and then, for at least a few weeks, there was delay — the Baltics weren’t recognized and Koivisto was very harsh toward the Baltic states there, and as you said— you said it’s not our job to recognize that, and because of that, the Balts now, quite rightly, feel that it was done wrongly. Well, Esko Aho defended this, saying that there were truly critical weeks during which not even France or the Yanks had recognized them, so why would we have taken a risk there, since it was simply a very unsettled situation. So, in July, I was tasked with writing a draft text for the prime minister for the Europe speech to be given on 3 September. We got quite far. Then this coup happened. I was still in Stockholm on a negotiating trip during the coup. In the end the whole negotiation ended up focusing on the coup rather than on Finland’s possible EU matters, which had been the goal of the talks.

16:00 When I got back, the prime minister called the team together again and the speech was rewritten to some extent. That’s when this EU opening was added. And that’s how it got started — Koivisto, at that point, hadn’t done any thinking about Finland joining the EU, because he had clearly taken the position that the relationship between the Soviet Union and Finland was such that Finland couldn’t go any further into political integration. And he was waiting to see the Soviet Union’s fate, and he didn’t like the idea that the Soviet Union would break up. And I know this very precisely, because we made a kind of fact-finding trip to Paris with Jaakko Laevaan and Veli Sundbäck in October–November 1991. And we met with senior French foreign-policy leadership. I remember when we came to the door for the meeting, there was Boissieu, who was de Gaulle’s nephew, heading some department in the French Foreign Ministry.

17:23 He said to us at the door, “So here come the barbarians of the North.” We thought for a moment about turning back, but then went into the negotiations, and in that context, without having precise knowledge of the president’s position. We had the idea that we had to say something positive about Finland’s EU membership goal, because the Maastricht Treaty was coming up. At Maastricht, in early December, Sweden and Austria’s membership project was on the table, since they had already applied for membership. It came close to a resolution being adopted there that would have opened negotiations with these two countries but left everyone else out for years. Then I got a phone call that evening from the Maastricht meeting, with a warning that this was what was about to happen.

18:28 And without being able to consult anyone in that situation, I called Finland’s ambassador in Bonn and said, stop it — get in touch with Kohl. And I was then giving a lecture at the Defence Command, and once the lecture at the Defence Command was over, I got invited to the sauna with Commander Puu Klemper and the Defence Command’s commander, General Hägglund. And when we were there on the sauna bench having a beer, I got a phone call. Our ambassador, Sky Helen, said, “Alpo, mission accomplished. Klaus Kinkel, the foreign minister, has announced that Germany is pulling out — that it won’t approve the resolution.” At that Puu Klemper raised his glass and said, “Finland is saved.” Thanks for that. Then there’s this, for example — now Ilves from Estonia has gone, a bit belatedly, to carry out lustrations, together with Halonen.

19:35 And in a way there was this fleeting period when Ahtisaari was president, but then for some reason he stayed president for only one term, and Halonen was then found from somewhere out on the periphery to take his place. And in a way it was a bit like returning, in my view, to that Finlandization club, you could say, at least in my eyes. In fact, now that this document comes up again — this Russia-orientation as a kind of pillar of Finnish foreign policy. It really began right after the referendum was behind us. And Paavo Lipponen had this doctrine, which he then began developing also as an Energy Union between Russia and the EU. And now we see where that has led. I’ve regarded this — as I may have mentioned — this period from ‘91 to 2022, looking back at it now, as a kind of transitional era, where the first phase is joining the EU, new treaties with Russia, Ahtisaari’s arrival, and that’s when this NATO path opens up.

20:49 And we had a plan that went quite far as a diplomatic project — that a trilateral summit between the European Union, Russia, and the United States would be held every other year. This was, in a way, on our agenda for two years, and it had already gained the approval of both the United States and Russia. But for one reason or another — I don’t know the reason to this day — during Finland’s [EU] presidency this fell off the agenda. And in that I already see this kind of attempt to turn Finland away, a little, from the Western path onto this kind of mediator’s path. And that’s where the Kosovo peace process came in, which I myself was also involved in, and the task was to maintain contacts, especially with Germany, and this kind of behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

21:52 And in that way advance the process, which had at one point already been on the verge of collapsing along the way, and together with Germany we managed to prevent a French attempt to break it off — this was on 29 May 1999, which I can perhaps now tell here as something slightly new. I’ll come back to that in more detail on some other occasion. — the fear of isolation. I mean, there was nothing the West could do about the fact that Russia started isolating itself. Russia had its own immense problems, which couldn’t be solved from the West.

22:59 I recently watched an interview with Bill Clinton, in which he stressed that there was nothing else we could have done. One theory that was floated was that the Americans should have given Russia a Marshall Plan-style aid package. In a way it apparently felt like the Cold War had been so long, and it was so nice to win it, that one theory that was floated was that Russia was simply left to collapse into its own poverty. Actually, huge amounts of money went into lifting up Russia’s economy. A huge share of that money went to oligarchs and criminal organizations. There wasn’t really anything more that could be done, and the claim that NATO’s enlargement, and the Kosovo peace process along with the NATO bombings that preceded it, gave Putin some kind of justification to launch an aggressive power politics— That’s a lie, and it absolutely has to be understood that that’s the case.

24:02 Finland’s foreign-policy shift from that early phase, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union was breaking apart, also comes to an end around this Kosovo process, in the sense that in Finland the left, which held a strong position in foreign and domestic policy, started criticizing NATO heavily. We remember Sorsa’s comments, how he criticized European states for not criticizing the United States enough. And it has to be remembered that Sorsa had founded the Aleksanteri Institute, which actually gradually became — I’d put it this way — a research center for understanding Russia and the Soviet Union. Yeah, maybe I’d go back to that — by the way, speaking of Kosovo, I interviewed Pertti Torstila, who as I understand it was also your boss at the foreign ministry at some point, and we talked about Hungary’s strategy — that they essentially chose the strategy of joining NATO first, since that’s the easier path, and then joining the EU once you’ve proven that you’re a Western country.

25:16 But then Finland essentially left this entirely unconsidered — going into NATO at the same time as the EU, or even doing the preparatory work alongside it. This has kept nagging at me — whether that was an active choice. No, it wasn’t. What you just brought up is the tripartite angle. We’d had the Clinton–Yeltsin summit, where I was actually involved with the president in planning it. The thinking went that Finland’s role was to try to ease this potential tension between Russia and NATO that would arise from NATO’s enlargement. We didn’t oppose the enlargement — rather, we felt that our role at that stage was to connect and integrate as much as possible. In my view, that didn’t involve grafting the old East trade onto this — it was specifically about increasing cooperative frameworks at the political level.

26:19 So we felt we could afford to wait with our own NATO membership, in good conscience. But what’s important now is that — for example, if Finland had pushed to join that first wave back then, Russia might have clamped down on its relations with the Baltic states. And they might have permanently been left outside. So it was wise to wait, but once the Baltic states became actively involved, at that point, in my view, Finland should have joined in. So this second Eastern European wave, if you can call it that, would have been entirely possible for Finland. That was the first good phase, and the second phase would have been after the Georgian war, and the third phase right after Crimea. But that’s why I talk about this transitional phase — because we had that first phase up until around 2000: we approach, we conciliate— We approach, we conciliate with the East. After Putin came to power, for some reason an opinion started growing in Finland that Finland in particular needed to deepen relations with Russia.

27:28 Even though Russia was continually tightening its own domestic policy the whole time and behaving threateningly toward its neighboring countries. This is, in my view, a strategic misjudgment, which we can now say clearly since NATO membership was left unpursued. It would have been far more advantageous for us at that stage to warn Russia by joining together with the other Baltic states, or at the very latest after the Georgian war and the annexation of Crimea. And it may be that it could have helped the West rally its ranks, so to speak, and scared Russia, so that this war in Ukraine might possibly have been avoided — that’s speculation again, but now it’s essentially become unavoidable. Yeah, maybe — if you want to understand this integration, in the Cold War era there was this MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, through nuclear weapons, so in a sense, by building, say, energy and trade interdependence so large that… and Germany, well, it took this even further than Finland did — that’s where Nord Stream 1 and 2 got built, even though the Baltic states opposed them and, farsightedly, considered them a huge folly,

28:43 well, they got built there anyway, and Germany’s entire energy policy was built on the assumption of permanently cheap Russian gas. Maybe with the justification that this way you keep the bear asleep. So that was probably the doctrine, then — sort of MAD-style thinking. That’s one way to think about it. Many people thought that way. East Office, this kind of lobbying organization, which has had 27 Finnish companies, including Fortum, from the very start, either believed this or wanted to believe it, but in my view what actually happens there is that the risk from Russia gets downplayed, and what you get is a politicized analysis of the risk from Russia. In any case, there was a desire for such a large flow of money that many different parties felt: a lot of money can be made in the Russian market, and if we’re not there, someone else will be. And the alarm bells weren’t sounded. We had a kind of defense opposition in Finland throughout the 2000s.

29:47 And thankfully so, because the military at least made sure our capability was maintained. But on the political side, one would have hoped we’d had strong officials who would have warned about Russia’s turn, in terms of what it meant for Finland’s security. Warnings like that — they didn’t come from the level of the foreign service where they should have come from. We need to come back to this at some point — whether there’s been some kind of drift in the training of our foreign service officials, such that we gave up on geostrategic expertise in the very positions where it’s especially needed. This calls for an assessment, because in my view we’re taking on the NATO project at the worst possible moment. And someone like Paavo Lipponen, who’s said that now is the right time to join NATO — well, to that you can say it’s actually a very bad time to join NATO.

30:54 And he’s partly to blame for that — if we’re looking for people to blame now, there aren’t that many from that group who really stand apart, who could now be asked to explain themselves. And think about the tragedy facing Fortum, and for us as electricity users and those worried about gas supply — this situation isn’t easy. You could say that political East trade collapsed on us in 1990, and now for the second time political East trade is landing back in our lap. How many times can Finland withstand this? Didn’t we learn anything from the first time? And did it have to go this way? And those voices — I feel that I’m not trying to be a know-it-all here, because I did put in quite a lot of effort, both as Finland’s ambassador and also in various written pieces, to point out that Finland’s stability policy was actually a destabilizing policy after the annexation of Crimea.

32:06 Yeah, you mentioned Paavo Lipponen there — when he and Halonen were leading that EU integration process, what struck me was this odd need to water down the EU’s foreign policy and specifically carve Finland out as some kind of free agent. That somehow felt like a missed opportunity too. Or, looking back on it now, kind of insane, really — why they didn’t want to seek security guarantees from that. There’s this contradiction here. This again comes down to internal tensions within the SDP. If it had succeeded — this European Union defense union that Kaskeala outlined back in ‘96 — well, we ourselves clipped its wings. In my view that was down to nothing more than internal problems within the SDP. And Lipponen missed many opportunities to reform these things, but on the other hand, his whole grand strategy was based on believing in Russia.

33:14 In 1998 he said that Russia would become an economic superpower. Russia could never have become an economic superpower — that should have already been understood back then. The ruble had just collapsed, and similar things had happened, and you could see the actual scale of Russia’s economy, which ranked around tenth among the world’s economies. And no forecasts showed Russia’s economy rising to a level where it could be called an economic superpower. I think it’s problematic that a prime minister had such a fundamentally wrong strategic vision on such an important matter. Well, now that we’re on our way into NATO — as we speak, nine countries still haven’t ratified, with Turkey as the sticking point — I suppose this Kremlin card will disappear entirely.

34:15 Somehow it feels like an artificial kind of trump card — you supposedly have some shady connection to obscure channels that only a few political geniuses can use to save Finland. That kind of thing probably doesn’t really exist anymore, if Russia is permanently, or at least to a large extent, playing in a lower league now. But could this now give rise to, at the very least, a new Cold War, or some kind of rising polarization, where we’d have to be able to operate between these two blocs? I wouldn’t yet talk about two blocs — rather, a multi-bloc world order has already emerged. In that, Russia is nothing more than a power through its nuclear weapons. And of course during this transitional period that has now begun in the international system. Russia is a declining power, not the United States. Russia is a declining power. And it will reorganize this system, because a great power that has played such a large role will nonetheless have to accept a much smaller role for itself.

35:25 And that’s why this policy of violence that Putin has launched is meant both to strengthen domestic political discipline and to create the impression that Russia can change this world order. We’ve now briefly touched on th— And in that, Finns need to understand that we’re not bystanders — we are fully, wholeheartedly part of the democracies. And we will never succeed as a NATO member if we start pulling the same kind of tricks again — thinking that our job is somehow to prevent Russia’s isolation.

36:35 In other words, to prevent Russia from accepting a smaller role for itself in world politics, the way, for example, Britain accepted after the Second World War. Britain withdrew, and despite that it has managed to retain a significant position in world politics. In that book, After the Cold War, from 1991, I essentially put forward this theory: that Russia will get back on its feet the day it’s able to step back from a great-power status that has been built on the use of force against other states — in a sense, on colonizing them. And from that you could say that the war in Ukraine is a colonial attempt — an attempt to colonize Ukraine. Yeah, that’s an interesting thought. So I talked with Martti Kari, who’s a former intelligence colonel, and he had this strong theory about Russia’s strategic culture — that ever since the Mongol era it has tended to be aggressively expansionist, while at the same time trying to prevent foreign powers from coming across the steppes toward Moscow or Petersburg.

37:48 And that would almost require Russia to accept its own strategic culture as something destructive. Or a complete transformation. There should be — well, in the ’90s there were politicians pushing for democracy, who then, one after another, were either killed or marginalized. That was a huge tragedy, and even then we probably should have already understood that the country was turning in the wrong direction. It also had an impact on China. Many books in the field have pointed out that China might not have swung so sharply back toward communism in the 2000s, if Russia hadn’t turned so strongly authoritarian after Putin came to power. This is one such theory, but it’s clear that in the coming years we’re going to see this change in Russia within the world order, and it can be dragged out for a while through this kind of power politics.

39:01 But it’s realistic to think, as Galina Starovoitova — who was the founder of Russia’s democracy movement in the ’90s, and whom I usually met at conferences in the ’90s — said; at the time she was an advisor to Yeltsin in the Russian Federation, she said that their goal was to shrink Russia’s size and gradually get rid of the territories that had clearly been acquired by force. Then she said that, by the way, Karelia was also among those territories. I didn’t put that in my report, because I thought — well, I was a former diplomat after all. Yeah. So this is again, in this multipolar struggle, or new Cold War — I read this book by Ivan Krastev, The Light That Failed, about the death of Western liberal democracy, where it sort of mourned in advance that we’d already lost this game. That the totalitarians had won this game.

40:12 Here I count myself among the optimists, in the sense that I’m convinced that democracies are by no means on weak footing, but it would be a mistake to imagine that democracies don’t have big worries right now. And you can find those worries coming from two directions. One is pacifists’ strong grip on foreign policy in many countries, and what’s happening in Ukraine now is partly a consequence of that. The other is that democracies are being undermined from within through populism, both from the left, by the way, and from the right. People always forget that left-wing populism is also a current that undermines the foundations of a healthy democracy. Too much gets promised, and people are made to believe in things that aren’t actually possible to deliver.

41:13 Or conflicts are stirred up, like for example in the Middle East, where Jews, say, are blamed. That’s been a typical obsession of the left. Or class hatred in general. Yeah, constructs like that get built, where people are made to believe things that actually lead in completely the wrong direction. Yeah, this was Douglas Murray — he is indeed a British gay man, but he’s also on the political right. He wrote this book, The War on the West, where the thesis is that, partly through Eastern kompromat, the West is being made to hate itself and everything good about us, and to spit on it. And then the only things that get spared are the harmful ones — like Marxism, or Michel Foucault’s identity theories, and this kind of self-colonizing self-disgrace. And that way, in effect, the West is made to destroy itself entirely.

42:17 Still, I myself see the strength of liberalism in the fact that it gradually absorbs different things that in authoritarian societies get systematically banned. One example is sexual equality, and equality among different sexual orientations. At the same time, though, I think we need to make sure that children and young people get a healthy environment in which to develop as individuals. This is the kind of boundary-drawing that adults need to be able to manage. And this kind of classical liberal principle, which includes a constitution, the rule of law, regulated private property where regulation is needed, and social justice.

43:17 This whole package is what we’ve been working for here. It’s being fought for in Ukraine, and NATO was founded for it. And if we don’t believe in these pillars ourselves, no one else is going to handle these things on our behalf. Now we’re gradually part of a big group, and this transitional period for Finland runs from 1991 up to the end of 2022. It involves plenty of after-the-fact Finlandization, sometimes movement in different directions. Now I hope for that kind of adult approach to these matters. We tolerate each other’s even sharp positions, but then in the end we try to see— —that there’s a lot of good times ahead of us, and opportunities opening up especially for young people, and that later on we can invest more in environmental protection. But the whole time we need to be able to look after freedom of speech, democracy, the rule of law, and making sure we don’t leave anyone behind.

44:28 Yeah, those are good principles. Now, when you said this transition period is now over, and that during this transition period we weren’t able to look critically or maturely at the sins of our recent history and the era of Finlandization — is there then some kind of playbook we should learn from it, so that now, in this future NATO Finland, where fresh winds sweep out the politicians of the past and new ones take their place— —how could we deal with the sins, or really the decisions, of this transition period in a healthy way? I think what’s always needed is interaction between generations. There’s a nice feature in Asian culture, where mature, elderly people are specifically valued as wise guides. And I hope Finland doesn’t turn back into that kind of developing country, where thirty-somethings run the country.

45:32 That’s generally also a bad development trend. I’m a bit disappointed that recent governments haven’t had much wisdom. We do of course also have politicians who fought for these same principles even during the Cold War. They were often stigmatized. And then I do remember those who wanted to start the debate about Finlandization. They too were marginalized. I feel I’m in that group myself too — I noticed that it’s not easy to raise these themes without having to— They say if you raise one finger, three fingers get raised back at you. That’s this whataboutism. And that culture has dominated the 2000s in particular. And that’s why I talk about bringing in more of an adult approach — because this recent-history debate has been a bit like a kindergarten.

46:37 And we need honesty. I really think that many of the people who were clearly involved in these cooperative structures and are hiding those memories should now come forward bravely and say how it actually went. Because a big part of our recent history goes with them if they stay tight-lipped. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. Many things, after all, when you look at them in the moment when they were done, become understandable. But they don’t become understandable, because the people involved themselves never admit to anything. Thank you. Our guest today has been Alpo Rusi, and we’ve talked about Finland’s era of Finlandization, then this in-between period, and then this new era that began in 2022. Thank you. Thank you. And if you’ve watched or listened all the way to this point, go ahead and subscribe to the channel.