1 00:00:00,699 --> 00:00:10,660 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. 2 00:00:10,660 --> 00:00:20,400 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. 3 00:00:20,400 --> 00:00:26,620 So I called Finland's ambassador in Bonn and said, stop it — get in touch with Kohl. 4 00:00:27,280 --> 00:00:29,640 There wasn't really anything more that could be done. 5 00:00:29,640 --> 00:00:39,200 The claim that NATO's enlargement, and the Kosovo peace process and the NATO bombing that preceded it, were— 6 00:00:39,200 --> 00:00:45,520 — that they were, as it were, Putin's justification for starting an aggressive power politics. 7 00:00:46,420 --> 00:00:51,520 That's a lie, and it absolutely has to be understood that this is the case. 8 00:00:51,640 --> 00:01:15,120 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. 9 00:01:15,600 --> 00:01:23,260 We remember Sorsa's comments, how he criticized the European states for not criticizing the United States enough. 10 00:01:24,680 --> 00:01:31,700 All right, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. My guest is Doctor of Political Science Alpo Rusi. Welcome. 11 00:01:31,900 --> 00:01:32,180 Thank you. 12 00:01:32,620 --> 00:01:42,400 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. 13 00:01:42,460 --> 00:01:50,140 You've written several books, and you've even predicted certain shifts in the world order, for example China's rise, and so on. 14 00:01:50,620 --> 00:01:55,860 Your newest book is The Kremlin Card, the KGB's political war in Finland. 15 00:01:57,140 --> 00:02:01,160 In this, personally, I'm a child of this country's eighties and seventies. 16 00:02:01,520 --> 00:02:08,320 As a young person I watched the Kekkonen era wind down and then mutate into the Social Democrats'— 17 00:02:08,729 --> 00:02:19,360 — 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. 18 00:02:19,560 --> 00:02:21,720 It's quite interesting to talk about exactly that period. 19 00:02:22,350 --> 00:02:27,460 But is this— this is clearly a lustration book, meaning we go through it on the basis of documentation, 20 00:02:27,800 --> 00:02:30,960 — this whole business of grovelling, or the shift into Finlandization. 21 00:02:31,100 --> 00:02:33,300 How would you yourself describe this book? 22 00:02:33,600 --> 00:02:36,880 Well, I myself maybe don't like the word "lustration." 23 00:02:38,080 --> 00:02:43,140 This is historical research, and it tries to see both the good and the bad sides. 24 00:02:44,319 --> 00:02:48,220 I have no aim of hunting anyone down here. 25 00:02:48,760 --> 00:02:57,520 But I want the truth more, because I myself also served as a diplomat in the eighties — as a researcher, in fact. 26 00:02:57,600 --> 00:03:02,380 I've had to familiarize myself very thoroughly with the currents of that time. 27 00:03:03,300 --> 00:03:09,820 So we have to behave like adults when we deal with recent history. 28 00:03:09,970 --> 00:03:16,040 There's been a lot of a certain pattern now, where people get a kind of fit of rage, 29 00:03:16,530 --> 00:03:20,720 if they notice their own name, for example, in a context 30 00:03:20,780 --> 00:03:28,200 where this kind of close dealings with Soviet KGB cover diplomats comes to light. 31 00:03:29,720 --> 00:03:34,840 One shouldn't get worked up or enraged, but should treat it matter-of-factly. 32 00:03:35,900 --> 00:03:45,740 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. 33 00:03:45,800 --> 00:03:51,400 There's no point denying this. This is something quite reasonably understood at the international level. 34 00:03:52,320 --> 00:03:58,360 We talk about Finlandization. And people shouldn't climb the walls over that either, when the subject comes up. 35 00:04:00,400 --> 00:04:08,580 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, 36 00:04:08,880 --> 00:04:14,500 — that we did our best to get through those circumstances with as little damage as possible. 37 00:04:15,540 --> 00:04:25,320 Yes, it was the diplomats' job to talk things up, but now, in hindsight, it's wise to go beneath the surface 38 00:04:25,370 --> 00:04:34,339 and look at how this behind-the-scenes management of relations actually happened, because Soviet diplomats 39 00:04:34,360 --> 00:04:41,920 and intelligence representatives have openly said that relations with Finland were handled on two levels. 40 00:04:42,640 --> 00:04:46,540 On one hand through official channels, but on the other hand also through unofficial channels. 41 00:04:47,090 --> 00:04:50,120 That unofficial channel was exceptionally broad. 42 00:04:50,230 --> 00:04:57,700 In no other Western country, for example, would you have a president socializing with the head of an intelligence station. 43 00:04:58,160 --> 00:04:59,280 That's what happened in Finland. 44 00:04:59,340 --> 00:05:14,600 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. 45 00:05:14,720 --> 00:05:19,100 We interviewed Esko Aho ourselves, who had written a good book, by the way, about the year 1991. 46 00:05:19,979 --> 00:05:22,720 He discussed it in a pretty grown-up way. 47 00:05:22,850 --> 00:05:25,860 What I was discussing there was what Koivisto knew and what he knew. 48 00:05:26,300 --> 00:05:34,420 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. 49 00:05:34,920 --> 00:05:47,640 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. 50 00:05:48,040 --> 00:05:52,300 Wasn't that quite a central document, invoking the YYA Treaty? 51 00:05:53,140 --> 00:06:06,540 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. 52 00:06:07,440 --> 00:06:19,800 And I sat on Aho's team writing speeches for him, including for 3 September 1991, where he opened the door to the EU. 53 00:06:19,940 --> 00:06:26,020 So I have a very close personal experience of that. 54 00:06:26,990 --> 00:06:36,900 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. 55 00:06:37,900 --> 00:06:43,500 It was the Finnish people's vote that took Finland in, but we did the preparation. 56 00:06:43,620 --> 00:06:52,360 And civil servants in particular did the preparing. And Aho deserves credit there, in that he made sure these things moved forward. 57 00:06:54,300 --> 00:06:57,900 And Koivisto held back, and he was uncertain. 58 00:06:58,020 --> 00:07:13,680 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. 59 00:07:14,210 --> 00:07:20,000 So Koivisto had stated that it wasn't Finland's job to announce whether the Soviet Union was dead or not. 60 00:07:20,560 --> 00:07:25,780 That was his way of constantly clashing with Väyrynen. 61 00:07:27,040 --> 00:07:42,780 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. 62 00:07:43,780 --> 00:07:53,760 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. 63 00:07:53,900 --> 00:08:13,840 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. 64 00:08:13,920 --> 00:08:24,040 It was through the Socialist International, where he was heavily involved, and in a way a channel of Soviet influence on world affairs. 65 00:08:24,500 --> 00:08:28,440 He had a certain standing there, but then Sorsa's wings couldn't hold. 66 00:08:28,700 --> 00:08:35,860 Mauno Koivisto came along, took his place in the Social Democratic camp, and then Martti Ahtisaari delivered the final humiliation in the presidential election. 67 00:08:36,640 --> 00:08:41,280 So in my view Sorsa's figure was interesting in this book, and a bit tragic too. 68 00:08:41,380 --> 00:08:56,040 Well, based on many original documents, Sorsa had, so to speak, gone too far in the cooperation arrangements he pursued with the Soviet Union. 69 00:08:56,200 --> 00:09:01,860 That's through the International, and then also through the positions he held in Finland. 70 00:09:02,940 --> 00:09:19,420 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, 71 00:09:19,560 --> 00:09:26,740 — he had been in close, trusted cooperation with us ever since he was chairman of parliament's foreign affairs committee. 72 00:09:26,970 --> 00:09:28,020 That is, since 1970. 73 00:09:30,300 --> 00:09:34,460 He never really got over this exposure. 74 00:09:35,210 --> 00:09:43,740 And the memo from when he meets Koivisto in November 1992 is in Koivisto's archive, quoted in that book, 75 00:09:43,840 --> 00:09:53,440 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. 76 00:09:54,510 --> 00:10:01,440 And I do say that my own name pops up there too, in these papers from the Moscow flea market. 77 00:10:01,560 --> 00:10:20,340 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. 78 00:10:20,740 --> 00:10:28,100 And then Ilta-Sanomat got hold of these papers in January 1993, but didn't publish them. 79 00:10:28,800 --> 00:10:32,980 And Bukovsky was very disappointed that no attention was paid to this in Finland. 80 00:10:34,220 --> 00:10:35,020 Just recently. 81 00:10:35,880 --> 00:10:44,719 The now-imprisoned Russian politician Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote in an article for the Washington Post a couple of years ago, 82 00:10:45,080 --> 00:11:02,280 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. 83 00:11:02,840 --> 00:11:12,120 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. 84 00:11:13,180 --> 00:11:32,200 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. 85 00:11:33,800 --> 00:11:44,420 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. 86 00:11:45,160 --> 00:11:50,720 Even though he could have obtained justification for all that information, he never admitted that he had even seen it. 87 00:11:50,720 --> 00:11:54,020 But he did at least admit to a phone conversation, that one had taken place about its contents. 88 00:11:54,640 --> 00:12:20,200 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, 89 00:12:20,640 --> 00:12:26,760 and considered it obvious that something here was way off, which it later turned out to be. 90 00:12:28,240 --> 00:12:35,660 So he has a phone conversation with Tiitinen, and based on that phone conversation Tiitinen writes a short memo, 91 00:12:35,740 --> 00:12:41,860 describing the Tiitinen list without names, but after that Koivisto never returned to the subject again. 92 00:12:42,500 --> 00:12:50,060 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— 93 00:12:50,180 --> 00:13:06,120 — 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. 94 00:13:06,300 --> 00:13:35,560 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. 95 00:13:36,300 --> 00:13:40,520 That's poor cooperation, first of all, with German intelligence. 96 00:13:41,960 --> 00:13:49,500 And then the justifications he's given publicly don't hold up — that these people might have been stigmatized without cause. 97 00:13:51,280 --> 00:14:03,380 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. 98 00:14:04,040 --> 00:14:05,920 That's the reason it was shelved. 99 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:09,480 Right, wasn't Tiitinen also a Social Democrat? 100 00:14:09,620 --> 00:14:24,660 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. 101 00:14:24,820 --> 00:14:30,480 and he was put in charge of the Security Police, which was already, in itself, the wrong appointment. 102 00:14:31,420 --> 00:14:33,140 Appointments like that should never happen. 103 00:14:33,970 --> 00:14:40,980 You really shouldn't put 30-year-old education ministry officials in charge of the security service. 104 00:14:41,480 --> 00:14:44,140 Right. Well, now we could think about, as I mentioned, this '91— 105 00:14:44,450 --> 00:14:50,480 there was, in a way, a chance for Finland to recognize the Baltic states and the breakup of the Soviet Union, 106 00:14:50,490 --> 00:14:54,460 which by then had essentially already been written off as the Soviet Union's end as a state. 107 00:14:54,580 --> 00:14:57,500 and then, for at least a few weeks, 108 00:14:58,160 --> 00:14:59,820 there was delay — the Baltics weren't recognized 109 00:14:59,860 --> 00:15:01,240 and Koivisto was very harsh 110 00:15:01,420 --> 00:15:03,220 toward the Baltic states there, and as you said— 111 00:15:03,820 --> 00:15:05,620 you said it's not our job to recognize that, 112 00:15:05,620 --> 00:15:07,420 and because of that, the Balts now, 113 00:15:08,699 --> 00:15:09,500 quite rightly, 114 00:15:09,600 --> 00:15:11,400 feel that it was done wrongly. 115 00:15:11,440 --> 00:15:13,180 Well, Esko Aho defended this, 116 00:15:13,300 --> 00:15:15,320 saying that there were truly critical weeks during which 117 00:15:15,460 --> 00:15:17,540 not even France or the Yanks had recognized them, 118 00:15:17,600 --> 00:15:19,380 so why would we have taken a risk there, 119 00:15:19,400 --> 00:15:21,740 since it was simply a very unsettled situation. 120 00:15:23,739 --> 00:15:24,540 So, in July, 121 00:15:24,560 --> 00:15:29,920 I was tasked with writing a draft text for the prime minister 122 00:15:30,140 --> 00:15:34,180 for the Europe speech to be given on 3 September. 123 00:15:35,700 --> 00:15:40,780 We got quite far. Then this coup happened. 124 00:15:41,920 --> 00:15:47,780 I was still in Stockholm on a negotiating trip during the coup. 125 00:15:49,360 --> 00:15:59,880 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. 126 00:16:00,990 --> 00:16:11,040 When I got back, the prime minister called the team together again and the speech was rewritten to some extent. 127 00:16:12,040 --> 00:16:13,820 That's when this EU opening was added. 128 00:16:15,000 --> 00:16:36,440 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. 129 00:16:36,520 --> 00:16:45,680 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. 130 00:16:45,860 --> 00:16:59,380 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. 131 00:16:59,700 --> 00:17:23,360 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. 132 00:17:23,500 --> 00:17:40,640 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. 133 00:17:41,500 --> 00:17:51,020 We had the idea that we had to say something positive about Finland's EU membership goal, because the Maastricht Treaty was coming up. 134 00:17:51,900 --> 00:18:00,580 At Maastricht, in early December, Sweden and Austria's membership project was on the table, since they had already applied for membership. 135 00:18:01,060 --> 00:18:14,540 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. 136 00:18:17,240 --> 00:18:28,100 Then I got a phone call that evening from the Maastricht meeting, with a warning that this was what was about to happen. 137 00:18:28,180 --> 00:18:38,780 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. 138 00:18:39,860 --> 00:18:55,240 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. 139 00:18:55,520 --> 00:19:22,900 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." 140 00:19:23,220 --> 00:19:35,080 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. 141 00:19:35,360 --> 00:19:49,360 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. 142 00:19:49,480 --> 00:19:55,320 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. 143 00:19:55,720 --> 00:20:04,020 In fact, now that this document comes up again — this Russia-orientation as a kind of pillar of Finnish foreign policy. 144 00:20:05,660 --> 00:20:12,580 It really began right after the referendum was behind us. 145 00:20:14,060 --> 00:20:23,140 And Paavo Lipponen had this doctrine, which he then began developing also as an Energy Union between Russia and the EU. 146 00:20:24,270 --> 00:20:25,820 And now we see where that has led. 147 00:20:25,880 --> 00:20:49,520 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. 148 00:20:49,660 --> 00:21:03,700 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. 149 00:21:04,920 --> 00:21:12,960 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. 150 00:21:13,120 --> 00:21:23,720 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. 151 00:21:25,400 --> 00:21:38,820 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. 152 00:21:38,960 --> 00:21:52,760 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. 153 00:21:52,920 --> 00:22:11,300 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. 154 00:22:11,440 --> 00:22:13,900 I'll come back to that in more detail on some other occasion. 155 00:22:46,480 --> 00:22:47,980 — the fear of isolation. 156 00:22:48,430 --> 00:22:52,620 I mean, there was nothing the West could do about the fact that Russia started isolating itself. 157 00:22:52,800 --> 00:22:58,340 Russia had its own immense problems, which couldn't be solved from the West. 158 00:22:59,620 --> 00:23:07,920 I recently watched an interview with Bill Clinton, in which he stressed that there was nothing else we could have done. 159 00:23:08,260 --> 00:23:13,300 One theory that was floated was that the Americans should have given Russia a Marshall Plan-style aid package. 160 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:17,980 In a way it apparently felt like the Cold War had been so long, and it was so nice to win it, 161 00:23:17,980 --> 00:23:23,000 that one theory that was floated was that Russia was simply left to collapse into its own poverty. 162 00:23:23,820 --> 00:23:30,480 Actually, huge amounts of money went into lifting up Russia's economy. 163 00:23:31,100 --> 00:23:37,100 A huge share of that money went to oligarchs and criminal organizations. 164 00:23:37,260 --> 00:23:56,440 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— 165 00:23:56,560 --> 00:24:02,480 That's a lie, and it absolutely has to be understood that that's the case. 166 00:24:02,600 --> 00:24:26,080 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. 167 00:24:26,560 --> 00:24:52,020 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. 168 00:24:52,660 --> 00:25:16,340 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. 169 00:25:16,460 --> 00:25:29,000 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. 170 00:25:29,100 --> 00:25:41,780 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. 171 00:25:43,900 --> 00:25:56,080 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. 172 00:25:56,460 --> 00:26:04,000 We didn't oppose the enlargement — rather, we felt that our role at that stage was to connect and integrate as much as possible. 173 00:26:04,120 --> 00:26:18,480 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. 174 00:26:19,100 --> 00:26:22,320 So we felt we could afford to wait with our own NATO membership, in good conscience. 175 00:26:23,220 --> 00:26:35,360 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. 176 00:26:35,910 --> 00:26:38,560 And they might have permanently been left outside. 177 00:26:39,410 --> 00:26:49,080 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. 178 00:26:49,160 --> 00:26:53,780 So this second Eastern European wave, if you can call it that, would have been entirely possible for Finland. 179 00:26:53,800 --> 00:27:02,720 That was the first good phase, and the second phase would have been after the Georgian war, and the third phase right after Crimea. 180 00:27:02,900 --> 00:27:12,800 But that's why I talk about this transitional phase — because we had that first phase up until around 2000: we approach, we conciliate— 181 00:27:14,339 --> 00:27:16,300 We approach, we conciliate with the East. 182 00:27:16,380 --> 00:27:26,940 After Putin came to power, for some reason an opinion started growing in Finland that Finland in particular needed to deepen relations with Russia. 183 00:27:28,140 --> 00:27:37,400 Even though Russia was continually tightening its own domestic policy the whole time and behaving threateningly toward its neighboring countries. 184 00:27:37,480 --> 00:27:58,540 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. 185 00:27:58,680 --> 00:28:14,900 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. 186 00:28:14,960 --> 00:28:43,820 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, 187 00:28:43,940 --> 00:28:52,480 well, they got built there anyway, and Germany's entire energy policy was built on the assumption of permanently cheap Russian gas. 188 00:28:52,920 --> 00:28:55,920 Maybe with the justification that this way you keep the bear asleep. 189 00:28:56,770 --> 00:28:59,560 So that was probably the doctrine, then — sort of MAD-style thinking. 190 00:29:00,600 --> 00:29:03,160 That's one way to think about it. Many people thought that way. 191 00:29:03,580 --> 00:29:11,400 East Office, this kind of lobbying organization, which has had 27 Finnish companies, including Fortum, from the very start, 192 00:29:12,460 --> 00:29:25,680 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. 193 00:29:26,639 --> 00:29:37,780 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. 194 00:29:39,040 --> 00:29:46,680 And the alarm bells weren't sounded. We had a kind of defense opposition in Finland throughout the 2000s. 195 00:29:47,370 --> 00:29:52,660 And thankfully so, because the military at least made sure our capability was maintained. 196 00:29:53,310 --> 00:30:04,640 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. 197 00:30:05,500 --> 00:30:13,180 Warnings like that — they didn't come from the level of the foreign service where they should have come from. 198 00:30:14,140 --> 00:30:31,120 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. 199 00:30:34,360 --> 00:30:45,500 This calls for an assessment, because in my view we're taking on the NATO project at the worst possible moment. 200 00:30:46,480 --> 00:30:54,720 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. 201 00:30:54,860 --> 00:31:11,260 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. 202 00:31:11,360 --> 00:31:25,620 And think about the tragedy facing Fortum, and for us as electricity users and those worried about gas supply — this situation isn't easy. 203 00:31:26,130 --> 00:31:36,080 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. 204 00:31:36,620 --> 00:31:40,760 How many times can Finland withstand this? Didn't we learn anything from the first time? 205 00:31:40,840 --> 00:32:06,640 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. 206 00:32:06,740 --> 00:32:25,300 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. 207 00:32:25,300 --> 00:32:28,440 That somehow felt like a missed opportunity too. 208 00:32:28,440 --> 00:32:34,460 Or, looking back on it now, kind of insane, really — why they didn't want to seek security guarantees from that. 209 00:32:34,540 --> 00:32:37,360 There's this contradiction here. 210 00:32:37,770 --> 00:32:40,220 This again comes down to internal tensions within the SDP. 211 00:32:40,600 --> 00:32:51,680 If it had succeeded — this European Union defense union that Kaskeala outlined back in '96 — 212 00:32:52,670 --> 00:32:56,500 well, we ourselves clipped its wings. 213 00:32:57,150 --> 00:33:00,940 In my view that was down to nothing more than internal problems within the SDP. 214 00:33:02,900 --> 00:33:13,940 And Lipponen missed many opportunities to reform these things, but on the other hand, his whole grand strategy was based on believing in Russia. 215 00:33:14,160 --> 00:33:17,980 In 1998 he said that Russia would become an economic superpower. 216 00:33:19,600 --> 00:33:24,540 Russia could never have become an economic superpower — that should have already been understood back then. 217 00:33:25,260 --> 00:33:37,520 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. 218 00:33:38,180 --> 00:33:47,240 And no forecasts showed Russia's economy rising to a level where it could be called an economic superpower. 219 00:33:48,260 --> 00:33:59,720 I think it's problematic that a prime minister had such a fundamentally wrong strategic vision on such an important matter. 220 00:34:01,100 --> 00:34:15,700 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. 221 00:34:15,780 --> 00:34:32,860 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. 222 00:34:32,860 --> 00:34:43,820 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? 223 00:34:44,659 --> 00:34:51,980 I wouldn't yet talk about two blocs — rather, a multi-bloc world order has already emerged. 224 00:34:55,119 --> 00:34:59,180 In that, Russia is nothing more than a power through its nuclear weapons. 225 00:34:59,750 --> 00:35:07,140 And of course during this transitional period that has now begun in the international system. 226 00:35:08,880 --> 00:35:12,340 Russia is a declining power, not the United States. 227 00:35:12,880 --> 00:35:14,040 Russia is a declining power. 228 00:35:14,220 --> 00:35:25,200 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. 229 00:35:25,900 --> 00:35:42,280 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. 230 00:36:07,140 --> 00:36:12,380 We've now briefly touched on th— 231 00:36:12,420 --> 00:36:20,780 And in that, Finns need to understand that we're not bystanders — we are fully, wholeheartedly part of the democracies. 232 00:36:20,780 --> 00:36:35,560 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. 233 00:36:35,760 --> 00:36:45,300 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. 234 00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:51,920 Britain withdrew, and despite that it has managed to retain a significant position in world politics. 235 00:36:53,900 --> 00:37:14,380 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. 236 00:37:14,440 --> 00:37:25,300 And from that you could say that the war in Ukraine is a colonial attempt — an attempt to colonize Ukraine. 237 00:37:25,400 --> 00:37:28,280 Yeah, that's an interesting thought. 238 00:37:28,400 --> 00:37:48,580 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. 239 00:37:48,720 --> 00:37:54,160 And that would almost require Russia to accept its own strategic culture as something destructive. 240 00:37:54,260 --> 00:38:09,239 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. 241 00:38:09,260 --> 00:38:21,520 That was a huge tragedy, and even then we probably should have already understood that the country was turning in the wrong direction. 242 00:38:21,680 --> 00:38:41,460 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. 243 00:38:41,580 --> 00:39:01,200 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. 244 00:39:01,280 --> 00:39:22,440 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, 245 00:39:22,600 --> 00:39:34,600 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. 246 00:39:35,440 --> 00:39:38,940 Then she said that, by the way, Karelia was also among those territories. 247 00:39:39,390 --> 00:39:47,120 I didn't put that in my report, because I thought — well, I was a former diplomat after all. 248 00:39:47,240 --> 00:40:12,040 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. 249 00:40:12,120 --> 00:40:30,540 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. 250 00:40:30,660 --> 00:40:44,780 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. 251 00:40:46,060 --> 00:40:55,280 The other is that democracies are being undermined from within through populism, both from the left, by the way, and from the right. 252 00:40:55,440 --> 00:41:07,320 People always forget that left-wing populism is also a current that undermines the foundations of a healthy democracy. 253 00:41:08,200 --> 00:41:12,599 Too much gets promised, and people are made to believe in things that aren't actually possible to deliver. 254 00:41:13,670 --> 00:41:23,080 Or conflicts are stirred up, like for example in the Middle East, where Jews, say, are blamed. 255 00:41:23,260 --> 00:41:26,400 That's been a typical obsession of the left. 256 00:41:27,080 --> 00:41:28,620 Or class hatred in general. 257 00:41:28,720 --> 00:41:37,960 Yeah, constructs like that get built, where people are made to believe things that actually lead in completely the wrong direction. 258 00:41:38,400 --> 00:41:45,920 Yeah, this was Douglas Murray — he is indeed a British gay man, but he's also on the political right. 259 00:41:46,100 --> 00:41:59,160 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. 260 00:41:59,160 --> 00:42:11,400 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. 261 00:42:11,500 --> 00:42:17,600 And that way, in effect, the West is made to destroy itself entirely. 262 00:42:17,620 --> 00:42:32,860 Still, I myself see the strength of liberalism in the fact that it gradually absorbs different things that in authoritarian societies get systematically banned. 263 00:42:32,940 --> 00:42:39,520 One example is sexual equality, and equality among different sexual orientations. 264 00:42:39,920 --> 00:42:52,440 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. 265 00:42:53,380 --> 00:42:58,760 This is the kind of boundary-drawing that adults need to be able to manage. 266 00:42:58,860 --> 00:43:17,840 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. 267 00:43:17,860 --> 00:43:37,640 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. 268 00:43:37,780 --> 00:43:45,740 Now we're gradually part of a big group, and this transitional period for Finland runs from 1991 up to the end of 2022. 269 00:43:46,540 --> 00:43:51,520 It involves plenty of after-the-fact Finlandization, sometimes movement in different directions. 270 00:43:52,150 --> 00:43:57,440 Now I hope for that kind of adult approach to these matters. 271 00:43:58,420 --> 00:44:03,740 We tolerate each other's even sharp positions, but then in the end we try to see— 272 00:44:03,840 --> 00:44:16,740 —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. 273 00:44:17,580 --> 00:44:28,440 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. 274 00:44:28,500 --> 00:44:56,600 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— 275 00:44:56,680 --> 00:45:03,780 —how could we deal with the sins, or really the decisions, of this transition period in a healthy way? 276 00:45:05,200 --> 00:45:09,420 I think what's always needed is interaction between generations. 277 00:45:10,580 --> 00:45:23,860 There's a nice feature in Asian culture, where mature, elderly people are specifically valued as wise guides. 278 00:45:24,960 --> 00:45:31,660 And I hope Finland doesn't turn back into that kind of developing country, where thirty-somethings run the country. 279 00:45:32,250 --> 00:45:35,020 That's generally also a bad development trend. 280 00:45:35,030 --> 00:45:43,320 I'm a bit disappointed that recent governments haven't had much wisdom. 281 00:45:43,400 --> 00:45:51,540 We do of course also have politicians who fought for these same principles even during the Cold War. 282 00:45:52,440 --> 00:45:53,540 They were often stigmatized. 283 00:45:54,960 --> 00:45:59,760 And then I do remember those who wanted to start the debate about Finlandization. 284 00:45:59,820 --> 00:46:01,400 They too were marginalized. 285 00:46:01,940 --> 00:46:10,260 I feel I'm in that group myself too — I noticed that it's not easy to raise these themes without having to— 286 00:46:12,480 --> 00:46:16,740 They say if you raise one finger, three fingers get raised back at you. 287 00:46:17,520 --> 00:46:19,320 That's this whataboutism. 288 00:46:20,400 --> 00:46:23,700 And that culture has dominated the 2000s in particular. 289 00:46:24,880 --> 00:46:36,160 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. 290 00:46:37,119 --> 00:46:40,200 And we need honesty. 291 00:46:41,140 --> 00:46:53,080 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. 292 00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:58,740 Because a big part of our recent history goes with them if they stay tight-lipped. 293 00:46:59,540 --> 00:47:00,740 There's nothing to be ashamed of in that. 294 00:47:00,840 --> 00:47:06,780 Many things, after all, when you look at them in the moment when they were done, become understandable. 295 00:47:06,900 --> 00:47:11,640 But they don't become understandable, because the people involved themselves never admit to anything. 296 00:47:12,020 --> 00:47:24,740 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. 297 00:47:25,180 --> 00:47:25,340 Thank you. 298 00:47:25,810 --> 00:47:29,820 And if you've watched or listened all the way to this point, go ahead and subscribe to the channel.