The Land of Sad Songs – Stories From Protect and Survive Finland

[Petike]

Nah, I say that you should keep up the name dropping - I doubt even all Finnish readers notice them all

I agree. Besides, it's a nice way of reminding readers of Finnish personalities of the era (or making them discover ones they haven't heard of up until then).

 

[Hörnla]

I think that interviewees would have a tendency to remark if they encountered famous pre-war personalities. It would always make a Great impression: joyful the celeb survived; sad due to what they (have to) do now.

 

[Karelian]

It would always make a Great impression: joyful the celeb survived; sad due to what they (have to) do now.

Or not: When the old world burned and froze to death, who gives a damn about whether Spede survived?

Naturally this would depend on the individual in question, but Finns are rather low-key with their celebrities in OTL, even more so in 1980s. Most famous Finnish musicians and writers can still go to local grocery stores and most attention they get are a few curious stares, even though everybody knows them.

 

[DrakonFin]

I think that interviewees would have a tendency to remark if they encountered famous pre-war personalities. It would always make a Great impression: joyful the celeb survived; sad due to what they (have to) do now.

They do that, like with Nykänen (in the last update mentioned for the second time in the TL). And there are other examples.

But it might also be a case of them not recognizing the person in question, either because of the changed conditions, context and appearance at the time or because they hadn't been acquainted with that person at the time because the reason they are more or less famous had been outside of their personal interests until then.

In the last update I assume that the doctor might have just merely heard of the other now-famous person (Nurmio) but had pretty much not cared for what he had done until then. So he calls a musician with a few pretty successful records "an anti-war artist-type" and thinks that suffices for the interview. The man was still in the early part of his career, not a household name like he is in 2013 OTL; it is very likely an older-generation military doctor wouldn't really care for his fame. In any case, in the doctor's story the point is not who exactly addresses the court, but it is the content and context of the petition itself.

Generally, we can also consider the fact that many of those who were more or less celebrities before the war would not be celebrities after it, and so after 30 years has passed their previous lives might have faded to the background from the interviewee's POV.

There is also the fact that the interviewees are addressing an interviewer who they know comes from a foreign country. In this case, the doctor thought Nykänen would have been well-known enough in Sweden to merit a mention, but Nurmio would not have been - even if he was thought to be somewhat famous in Finland in the 80s.

 

[CanKiwi]

I also enjoyed the celebrity name dropping.

I do that a bit too much, don't I? I promise to cut back some in the future...

No, keep it up. It adds another little twist to the story. And unless you mention, most non-Finns will not get more than the odd one or two. I enjoy.

And on the subject. What happens to Tarja? I sure hope she survived and pops up in your story somewhere, she, I would miss!

 

[DrakonFin]

No, keep it up. It adds another little twist to the story. And unless you mention, most non-Finns will not get more than the odd one or two. I enjoy.

Thank you. I kind of like being obscure about some of the characters, hoping that someone reading this might have a bit of fun trying to decipher who they are.

And on the subject. What happens to Tarja? I sure hope she survived and pops up in your story somewhere, she, I would miss!

Are you talking about Halonen or Turunen?

Don't worry, I'd say both had a higher-than-average chance of surviving (though for different reasons) and might turn up in a future episode.

 

[CanKiwi]

Thank you. I kind of like being obscure about some of the characters, hoping that someone reading this might have a bit of fun trying to decipher who they are.

Now that's definitely me

Are you talking about Halonen or Turunen?

I was talking Tarja Turunen (for those of you who don't know who she is, check out the following music clips)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTcjn20es-4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZMraAGlpwc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu59QQ0qzL0

..... and now you have me checking out Tarja Halonen (OK, I admit it, I don't follow current Finnish politics, only the politics from WW2 and prior..... so now I've got her figured. Prefer the other Tarja tho......)

 

[Ancien Regime]

Tarja would have been 7 when the bombs hit so she's probably not gonna have "power metal vocalist" pretty high on her "What do I wanna be when I grow up" list. And she certainly isn't going to be classically trained. Still, she's obviously a great singer, so who knows. But most likely nothing resembling OTL's Nightwish is ever going to get formed, even if all of them survive.

I think their specific niche though - escapist fantasy - will be pretty big in a post-strike Finland, just because idealism and magic would be the polar opposite of a world where everything is shattered because of destructive technology and cynical geopolitics. I bet there will be nostalgia for when wars were fought with swords.

 

[DrakonFin]

...
Do you see the restless faces, wandering
The small lonely souls, waiting, for some damn miracle to scoop them along
There are too many hands here without someone to hold them
There are too many mouths here without anything to say
And it isn't what you say but how beautiful it's all dressed up to be

I've just toyed with things for so long I'd like to finally stop it
Too many times I've woken up to find lies pouring from my mouth
I know you are leaving but sit down for a moment and please listen to me
Don't go yet don't go stay for a moment
Don't go yet don't go stay for a moment please just for a moment
...

Sir Elwoodin Hiljaiset Värit: Älä mee (1993)


XXXVIII. Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance


Fragment 170.
Logged 22.12.2011
HAN


[This fragment is an extract from the FNA collection of interrogations of captured enemy soldiers, deserters and domestic dissidents. The collection extends to 1995; only selected parts of the years 1984 and 1985 have been made available to Minne researchers. - JSH]

...As I arrived to the foyer, the duty Sergeant said the Colonels were just in discussions with the local administrators about, well, administrative issues, he suspected, and that they were not to be disturbed. Knowing my place, I sat down to have a chat with the man. Junior officers and technical personnel would pass us from time to time, but most we both knew and didn't need to pay much heed to.

The Sergeant was a wholly ordinary-looking man in his late thirties, with a metropolitan Moscow accent, really just distinguished by a nasty scar running across his left cheek. He had fought in Afghanistan and injured during the campaign. He never spoke about it himself, and I guess nobody had gathered the courage to ask. Some said he had been captured by the Mujahideen and tortured, others that he had gotten drunk with his squadmates and stumbled nearly fatally off a moving BMP. Be the cause what it may, it gave the soft-spoken man a roguish edge and decided martial respectability.

And that was rare among these troops. The Soviet Army of Occupation in Finland, the Colonels called it. Some others would have called it two understrength brigades of green third line infantry drafted from the Leningrad area. Factory and office workers, cooks, teachers, metro attendants and your urban everymen. Conscripts not career soldiers. Tired, filthy, irradiated, half-starving and sick. Demoralized and partly mutinous. Suicidal. And by all accounts making up the most successful and cohesive units in the Soviet Army, such as it was as of May 1984.

Such as it was. Slowly but surely it had dawned on us that we might well be all that was left of the armed forces of the Socialist Motherland. Maybe even what was left of the Socialist Motherland itself. The Colonels were keeping up a brave facáde of promising to remake contact with the Russian interior and the surviving Warsaw Pact troops in Eastern Central Europe, as soon as possible it was said, as soon as technical problems were solved, as soon as the weather thawed, as soon as the ice in the Baltic melted. Some still believed in it. Some even thought Moscow, in all its wisdom, had just made the nation withdraw underground and play dead to coddle the decadent West to complacency. And then it would pounce suddenly, any day now, to crush what remained of the NATO countries once and for all.

But then some men are foolish enough to believe in just about anything. Most of us, though, were becoming increasingly aware of how alone we were. It was just not the silence east of what had been the Finnish border; not even refugees were making their way to us from the Leningrad area, from nearby Vyborg or from the entire oblast. Recon units sent east had soon encountered wrecked, snowed-in roads and excessive radiation and had had to turn back.

But the world wasn't dead, not all of it. There were Finnish and Swedish radio broadcasts, and those who understood the languages said that they seemed to be the products of organized centres of power. They even had music that we listened on the quiet, lonely nights in the camps and lodgings in and around Hamina. There had been desertions, especially in the early days and then again lately, of men seeking a better existence among the enigmatic Finns. As you might know, I imagine. And now we were all keeping an eye on each other to make sure nobody was stepping out of the line. But then that was not entirely new to Soviet citizens.

An uncertain armistice had been forged by the Colonels between us and the Finns; which Finns, we didn't know, all we knew there had not really been any fighting since the bombs fell. Nobody really ever saw Finnish troops those days but we knew they must have been there, just on the other side of this or that forest. While we got really no Soviet refugees, Finnish refugees were still arriving into our little enclave on a weekly basis, from areas that seemed to have no law and order at all. And from that we knew that the Finns were surely hurting too, both the people and their leaders. Look it any way you like, in these latitudes any order is better than no order. Bloody hell, that might as well had been one of the mottos of any government running Mother Russia, whether it was communist, socialist, bourgeois or tsarist. Law and order means warmth and food, and warmth and food make living possible.

The local Finns had, by and large, decided to agree with that sentiment. After a turbulent period of denial and low-level attacks by scattered Finnish military units and militia, peace had prevailed in the occupied area. In a politically astute move, the Colonels had allowed the locals to form what was called an Administrative Council, a sort of local civilian playground for would-be collaborators. It was even allowed some trivial powers.

And it worked like a charm. Instead of fighting us, the locals were now squabbling among themselves.There were Finnish Communists and those who were members of the prewar Finland-USSR Society who would seek friendship and trust with any Soviet officer, to enhance their position, to be able to cut ahead in the food lines, to get fuel for their vehicles. There were the undecided and uninterested, the politically paralyzed and the depressed. And then there were the patriots who would oppose any move the collaborators did. They were less numerous, though quite steadfast. The Colonels let the sides squabble, and then would step in to solve the issues they could not amongst themselves, as ”neutral” arbitrators. When you have the guns and with them the keys to the all-important warehouses you are the one who has options.

The warehouses, though, were starting to run empty. And so did the fuel tanks. Spring was coming, late though it was, but that was a small comfort. Food confiscations among the locals had been stepped up, and units at the perimeters of the occupied area had been ordered to enlarge the extent of their foreging operations to cover as much of the no-man's land between us and the expected Finnish lines as possible.

This was undoubtably what the Colonels were talking with the local administrators behind those closed doors. There had already been some grumblings along the Finns because of the recent ”food drive”. Things would get worse before they would get better.

The meeting dragged on. I talked this and that with the duty Sergeant, of food and of cigarettes and alcohol, of what we did not have, and of our various ailments which we had more than we needed. War makes us all these sad combinations of babies and the elderly, interested only in the most immediate needs and pleasures of life, and then the ways of escaping the worse sides of it.

A man stormed into the foyer out of the adjoining corridor, a Signals Efreitor with a worried look on his face. He stopped cold as he saw the big double doors closed.

”- Comrade Junior Lieutenant, Comrade Sergeant, I have an important radio message to...”

He gestured towards the door, with a note in his hand with something scribbled on it.

”- I'm sorry, Anton Valentinovich, bt the Colonels are not to be disturbed”, said the Sergeant. The men had served here together for some time.

”- It is the Finns,” he said shaking his head, ”it seems they are on the move.”

”-What do you mean, man, 'on the move'”, I remember snapping back at him.

He looked at his paper.

”- Comrade Junior Lieutenant, I mean making preparations for an attack, reconnaissance, troop movements. Captain Krasin has collated similar reports from several perimeter posts. He will himself be here soon to explain, but he sent a message beforehand.”

There was suddenly a roar in the air that shook the building. I heard a glass break on the other side of the door. In a few seconds, Colonel Morozov opened the door urgently and stepped out, flanked by Major Stepanov. He noticed us three standing there.

”- What in seven hells is this? Vanja, you follow me”, he said to me putting on his hat and stepping towards the front door. As I followed him, I saw the radio man, Anton Valentinovich, making a beeline for the Major. Two Finnish civilians just stood there, confused. Lieutenant Colonel Kruzenshtern chose to remain in the big room.

We arrived on the yard to see several men standing there, pointing to the air. Apparently two aircraft had just flown past at a very low level and from the sound of it they, or some other aircraft, were approaching again. The sound was deafening. I wondered briefly for there being no sound of AA fire; then remembered that since the de facto armistice there had been a standing order in force not to open fire on any aircraft without new, specific orders.

The Colonel looked to the two specks in the air, approaching from the east.

”- Those, those are MiG-21s, I am pretty sure. Now, I wonder...”

There was a tragically hopeful look of expectation on his face, just briefly.

Then the two aircraft were next to us, to the left, and we could see the markings on their sides. The Colonel's face fell. It made him look old beyond his years.It had been a long winter on the old man.

”- Finns. Those are Finnish interceptors. What the hell are they doing here?”

The MiG on the right started again gaining altitude, but the left one kept losing it fast.

” - Uh oh”, said the Colonel.

” - That doesn't look right at all.”

The explosion shook us both badly. I estimated it looked like the aircraft had come down right on top of our main motor pool, and told that to the Colonel.

” - I'm afraid you might be right, my boy. Let's get back inside and start sorting it out.”

Just then, a mud-spattered, asthmatically wheezing UAZ jeep rounded the corner and stopped at the curb. Captain Krasin, the intelligence officer, disembarked and walked briskly to us.

I looked again at the one aircraft still airborne, now barely visible against the clouds, and followed the Captain and my father back inside the headquarters of the Soviet Military Government in Finland.



Fragment 39
Logged 09.09.2008
BER

[This fragment is a hand-written notebook found, apparently, by a FNA recon and recov team. No further information is available.]


It was yet another evacuee or refugee camp. I lost track of how many we had been in so far. Their conditions varied wildly, in some of the secluded camps or sites founded early, before the Exchange, the conditions might still be bearable, sometimes even approaching idyllic. And then the camps on the Line... They were hellish, at least for a time. As long as there was people in them to die. After they had passed, well, then we who were left alive would have to trudge along as we could.

For the whole time, what seemed for the whole winter, we had been making our way northeast. Slowly, ever so slowly. Sometime after the first evacuation stage to that sad camp site and the encounter we had with the wandering National Entertainment Tour members, it had stuck to my mind that we would have to get to Kuopio, and later this had been changed in my mind to Mikkeli, or any place in the surroundings.

Why there? There was no special reason. Except for the safety those places promised to me in my head. Except for Tommi, of course. He was a young engineer I had met some time before the war. A sort of withdrawn, honest young man, with a, quiet, quirky sense of humour and not at all bad looks. Even after he had been called over to the Air Force he had phoned me and sent me one letter before... Before there were no letters or calls to anyone anymore.

And after what had happened to me, to my homeland and to my poor mother, I had become convinced that if I can just find this young man again, it would somehow make things better, create a future for me and him. For us. Happy, perhaps, but at least it would be something concrete. A continuity. From his calls and the letter I was convinced he was thinking about me, too.

It was foolish, definitely, to wager one's future on such a hope. For someone who might be dead, would most likely be dead, even if alive would probably not remember me anymore. Not after the end of the world. But I guess we all need something to hold on to to keep moving, raise our eyes up from the ground and take that next step, however heavy it would be.

This camp, here at the beginning of spring, here somewhere south of Mikkeli, was not bad, considering. There was food, even if it was always the same and tasted funny, there were reasonable lodgings. Old summer houses by a lake that was starting to thaw. The cottage we managed to find places in had something like a bad reputation, I gathered. People said someone had killed many people and himself there, and that those people still haunted the place. At this stage in our journey, just rumours could not scare me anymore. I had already seen too much to fear anything that was most certainly already dead.

We shared the cabin with an old man in his 70s, a fortyish woman and two underage children, a girl and a boy. They were not related to each other, but had just been tossed together by circumstances. The old man had been a farmer, and he took it upon himself to keep the cottage warmed and to keep an eye on my mother. He was still quite fit and had this kind of tenacious fire and intellect burning in his eyes. In another world, another life he might have been a revered village elder. He reminded me of my late father.

The rest of us, me, the woman and the kids, would have to take part in the work duty tasks, so called, to keep the municipality running. It was all kinds of heavy work from cutting firewood to construction to clearing roadways. If children lived through those days they would come to age quickly. It was all that work and an expectation to act and perform as adults. We would form a kind of unit, us four, and try to help each other. It only took days living and working together to make me feel like we were family, or at the very least old friends.

As the snow started melting and the weather warmed, the large highway running north to south outside the municipal centre became the center of attention to the local authorities. Throughout the initial panicked rush from the capital area and the winter car wrecks and the bodies of those who had perished wandering through the frozen darkness had been gathering up on the shoulders of the highway. Now something had to be done to that.

It is said the road to hell is lined with good intentions. I don't know about that. But I know that the road to Mikkeli is lined with the dead bodies of many good people. I was among those that buried them there, in shallow graves just meters from the roadway. For days we would dig holes into the ground, variably muddy and wet or still frozen, to hide those grisly remains partly decomposed, party eaten by animals. I hope it was animals.

One day coming ”home” from work I found the old man and my mother sleeping quietly together, holding each other by the hand. Initially I became angry, thinking the man was taking advantage of a woman who was losing her mind so early. But in the morning I understood what it was all about. My mother was convinced the old man was his late husband, my father, Tarmo. She seemed very happy to finally find him again and berated him kindly for staying for so long ”on his travels”, stroking his arm. The man looked at me, knowingly: he had decided to play the part for now, not to upset my mother. And it was all very innocent. They would just sit there, holding hands, and then fall asleep together in each other's arms. Two old people with something to hold on to in the world.

And then on one morning, Heikki (that was the real name of the old man) shook me awake gently.

” - Anne”, he said to me.

” - As I woke up, I noticed that Raili was not breathing anymore. I think she died in her sleep last night, some time in the small hours. I am so sorry.”

When I went to see her, my dead mother looked angelic, her eyes closed and a slight smile on her dry lips.

It was as if after weeks and months of travelling on foot and staying in different camps and eating what she could she had found a reason to give up, to let everything be and to just slip away. I will be convinced for the rest of my life she died as a happy woman.

We buried her that day, in a grave we dug ourselves next to the cabin. The recent exercise helped. A woman from the municipal Civil Defence unit, an immensely tired woman by the name of Liisa, I think, helped us to give her a proper burial, that is under the circumstances.

That same day I was back on the side of the road, digging holes and rolling the remains of unknown people int them, as a military convoy passed us going south. A long line of trucks of various kinds, lots of equipment and serious men sitting in the cabs and in the back, holding weapons.

In the back of one of the trucks I saw him. Tommi. I am sure of it. He looked exactly the same, if thinner and more tired. He looked directly at me and followed me with his eyes as long as he could. Mouthed something, I have no idea what.

And so I knew he was alive. That man that was my anchor. I would find him and see what would come of it, I solemnly promised to myself.

The next morning I packed my humble belongings and took to the road. It was time to move again.



Fragment 40
Logged 09.09.2008
BER

[This fragment is a hand-written notebook found by a FNA recon and recov team. No further information is available.]


Anne. I still had her photo in my breast pocket. It could not have been her. I was sure she had died in one of the blasts or... after...

There was no way I could find it out now. To leave the moving convoy would have been considered dereliction of duty, even desertion. We all were needed, now that it seemed the Soviet troops around Hamina were again moving, God knew why. I had been put in charge of an infantry squad and sent south; apparently the service branch lines didn't mean much anymore.

I looked at the woman in dirty workwear until a turn in the road took her away from my field of vision.

(She had returned my look and recognized me. That was what my mind kept telling me that night as I fell into darkness.)

(filler)

 

[Archangel]

Many families were destroyed in the war. I wonder if there was any effort to reunite surviving members of families later.

 

[Hörnla]

Many families were destroyed in the war. I wonder if there was any effort to reunite surviving members of families later.

In some way or the other, institutions such as the Red Cross will do so if/as soon as their capabilities allow that. They acted similar to that in Central Europe after 1945. However, this time around, the task might be easier depending on the degree to which computer technology/data connections are available.

 

[Karelian]

To attempt to actually wage a war on operational scale after a winter like that...and for postnuclear southeastern Finland, of all places.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o4yccttch4

 

[DrakonFin]

In some way or the other, institutions such as the Red Cross will do so if/as soon as their capabilities allow that. They acted similar to that in Central Europe after 1945. However, this time around, the task might be easier depending on the degree to which computer technology/data connections are available.

In Finland, it will take some time before the authorities make reuniting families a priority. There is a lot to do before getting as far as that.

Some rudimentary population numbers are absolutely needed for allocating food and resources, so the Civil Defence Boards have been, where possible, trying to constantly gauge the remaining "original" population and additional evacuees and refugees in the still functional municipalities and towns. Beginning from summer 1984 the situation will be stable enough for the local Register Offices, as well as the Lutheran and Orthodox parishes to start again recording the local residents. It will be a slow process, and it really takes until the first official post-war census to create a centralized database of who actually survives, and where.

In the meanwhile, people are finding surviving family members with the help of rumours and word-of-mouth. The authorities' growing efforts in trying to keep people put, in some places, and/or to forcibly relocate them from others for different reasons will complicate things.

 

[DrakonFin]

To attempt to actually wage a war on operational scale after a winter like that...and for postnuclear southeastern Finland, of all places.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o4yccttch4

What follows will be a tragedy. But then again that should not be news for any seasoned readers of the TL... Let us just say that for different very human and understandable reasons, wrong or mistaken even if they might be, both sides here think that the battle ahead is necessary for survival.

 

[Karelian]

What follows will be a tragedy. But then again that should not be news for any seasoned readers of the TL... Let us just say that for different very human and understandable reasons, wrong or mistaken even if they might be, both sides here think that the battle ahead is necessary for survival.

Not to mention that diehards on both sides will surely draw parallers to 1918. It will be just plain ugly once the actual fighting part is over

 

[Petike]

And just the other day I was thinking about checking this timeline for new chapters. Thanks, DF.

 

[DrakonFin]

And just the other day I was thinking about checking this timeline for new chapters. Thanks, DF.

You're welcome, sir. On Friday last I just decided I better write an update, any update, to keep even some of my readers interested. Accompanied by one of (to me) most emotionally engaging Finnish songs of the 90s. Maybe I'll try to write some more over Easter.

 

[Petike]

You're welcome, sir.

Don't call me sir, I don't like lofty addressing.

Speaking of Easter, how is it celebrated in Finland ? (This will become relevant either way, since the story of post-Exchange Finland is moving towards Easter time.)

Not to mention that diehards on both sides will surely draw parallers to 1918. It will be just plain ugly once the actual fighting part is over

I'm only starting to read the latest chapter, but the thought about the conflict's factions evoking the Finnish Civil War had also crossed my mind...

 

[Petike]

Hm, so that's what happened to Anne and Raili in the end. Touching story.

 

[DrakonFin]

Speaking of Easter, how is it celebrated in Finland ? (This will become relevant either way, since the story of post-Exchange Finland is moving towards Easter time.)

In comparison to some other holidays with origins in the Christian tradition, Easter has perhaps best kept its religious character here. Most people spend the holiday at home with their families, and many go to church, although that has been becoming less common as of late.

One sure sign of Easter are young children going house to house with willow branches, often dressed as "witches", to touch people with them for good luck and happiness. The practice is called virvonta and it stems from Eastern Finnish Orthodox tradition, but has been (con)fused into a general phenomenon with the Western Finnish semi-pagan "Easter Witch" tradition. Painting eggs is a common Easter activity, mainly for kids. Chocolate eggs are consumed aplenty and parents organise egg hunts for the kids.

In Ostrobothnia they also burn Easter bonfires; according to tradition the time when Jesus was briefly dead meant that the influence of Satan was the greatest in the world and thus the bonfires were meant to scare away evil spirits.

It is traditionally the end to the Lent, so people eat festive food, today the main course on Easter is often a meat dish of mutton or lamb. While there are some traditional Finnish Easter foods, many have fallen by the wayside during the last decades. The one thing about Easter food that would occur to most Finns would be the special desserts, the (for some) infamous mämmi for the "general population" and pasha for the Orthodox folks. The Orthodox tradition places more importance on the holiday than the Lutheran here, or as least that is the general perception, and also when I comes to foods I think the Orthodox are more in tune with tradition.