by Tim Moore
And the snow kept coming, now flicking me painfully in the eyeballs, now drifting atop my pogies and front carrier, now smothering out the whole wide world. It wasn’t going anywhere either. For a reminder that Finland’s snow lay deepest in March all I had to do was take a single step away from the carriageway, and watch the waist-high accumulations come up to meet me. I was thus a prisoner of the road, compelled to conduct all my out-of-saddle business in the lonely bus stops that broadened it every few miles. Warmth was painfully stamped into feet, supermarket burgers fumbled from mitten to mouth, discoloured holes left steaming.
Two or three times a day a demonic cacophony announced the approach of an Arctic Machine – an infernal, implacable snowplough with that legend writ large across its fearsome blade. I learned the hard way that this was the cue to hurl the bike into the roadside drifts and crouch behind its panniers, face to the forest and arms round head. As the grating roar climaxed, a bow-wave of snow and compacted ice nuggets would crash over me, followed by the gritted tornado that every large vehicle trailed behind them up here. In truth, I rather enjoyed these painful and terrifying cannonades, simply because they gave me something to do that wasn’t pedalling very slowly into a blizzard or pissing all over my mittens at a bus stop.
The natives I encountered in these difficult days embraced every national stereotype, which is to say both of them. This is a country whose self-referential comedic lexicon is focused on lugubrious alcoholism, with an entire joke genre devoted to the knockabout adventures of two men marooned in a lonely cottage with a case of vodka. In my favourite, Kimi ransacks the tool shed after the last bottle is drained, and comes back with a jerrycan of antifreeze.
‘We could drink this,’ he tells his friend, ‘but we’ll probably go blind.’
Mika looks slowly around the cottage and out of the window, then says, ‘I think we’ve seen enough.’
Every village mini-market I went into was home to a stubbled, booze-breathed Mika like the chap who had cooked me reindeer stew, shambling furtively about in the cider aisle (anything stronger than 5 per cent demands a visit to that triumph of feel-good branding, the state-run ‘Alko’ store). The woolly-jumpered snowmobiler who told me about Lapland’s ‘dry cold’ did so during single-handed combat with a three-litre wine-box. (In eloquent – but shameful – testimony to my diminished state, it was a week before I even remembered the half-litre of Norwegian duty-free vodka buried in my panniers. And another week until I perfected the Dirty Rudolf: two parts vodka, one part Hi5 citric energy powder.)
Like the winter that defines their homeland, Finns can come across as bleak and chilly. I never heard a raised voice, or a cheer, or a roar of laughter; to borrow from Dorothy Parker, they run the gamut of human emotions from A to B. It would be a mistake, though, to interpret this dour dispassion as heartlessness or disdain. I made this mistake again and again. I made it when the snowmobilers greeted my near-death stagger across their cottage threshold by asking me to take off my boots, as they’d just swept the floor. I made it when a UPS driver listened to my blathering, blizzard-muffled request for directions, then said: ‘An airplane has crashed in the Alps. Everybody is dead. Everybody.’ And I made it when an elderly hotelier explained where her restaurant was by pointing first at the petrol-station grocery over the road, and then at a microwave in the corridor.
The last time I made it was just after my first puncture, mysteriously suffered on a thick bed of snow in the standard middle of nowhere. As I battled the rear tyre off, bare fingers raw and shrieking, an ancient Audi rumbled up from the bleached horizon and slowed to a noisy halt. The window squeaked down and a mournful wail of blues guitar burst out, followed by a ginger-bearded face. ‘I think you are not from Finland,’ declared its owner in the default toneless blare, and I told him he thought right. He flicked the stereo off and impassively surveyed my predicament. ‘A bicycle is a bad idea. That bicycle is a very bad idea.’ Then he nodded, turned Blind Kimi up to maximum volume and shouted his farewell: ‘If you need help, you will ask.’
Enlightenment dawned as I watched the Audi wobble and slither away. There was no malice or misanthropy in his words, just naked truth, baldly delivered. Finns were people of few words, understated to the point of bluntness. I would never meet a Finnish bullshitter. Dauntless, hard-core journeys were part of everyday winter life up here, so mine wasn’t about to impress anyone. And it wasn’t as if I needed to do this at all, certainly not at this time of year and on this sort of bike. If I’d chosen to make it harder for myself, then that was my own silly fault. Redbeard had simply called it like it was. His was a land of harsh sincerity, where spades were spades, and daft little bikes were daft little bikes. Where you got help if you asked for it, but otherwise didn’t. Where bad ideas went to die.
My progress was punctuated with reminders of my idea’s many-headed badness. Some taunting memento of kinder seasons, an upturned kayak on a frozen lakeshore or a field of snow-smothered holiday caravans. Being overtaken by a cross-country skier. An old lady dragging home her weekly shop on a sledge. My arrival, after ploughing south for days and days, at the EU’s most northerly tourist destination – the full-on ski resort of Saariselkä (of course I stayed at Santa’s Hotel, and of course – look away now, kids – I ate reindeer pizza there). The evening afterwards I phoned home, and learned from my son that I was still seven degrees north of Anchorage, Alaska.
Every morning was the start of a new expedition, off into an unpeopled void with nothing but blind faith and three bowls of guest-house porridge to sustain me to the next staging post. More than once I wheezed wretchedly into the only settlement I’d be passing through all day to find its solitary shop or café closed. On one such occasion, pressing my desperate face up at a locked glass door in the village of Tanhua, I spotted a tiny crone inside stacking shelves. Emboldened by hunger into a land beyond decorum I successfully gained her attention with uncouth yells and a tattoo of knocking. Then promptly lost it with my follow-up mime, a primal caricature of ravening, hand-to-mouth consumption. Her eyes widened, her head slowly shook and to my horror she shrank cravenly away down a dim aisle.
As her retreat unfolded I caught my reflection in the glass. The man before me was not an obvious object of sympathy. A persistent headwind had inflated the top of my gimp-mask snood into a Klansman’s cone. Scoured and reddened by regular facefuls of iced grit, my eyes burned out through the balaclava slot beneath. Set off with a baggy, hi-vis tabard, this was a look that said: Terrorist steward. Poor old dear. But it was 43km to Mrs Santa’s Cabin in Savukoski and I wouldn’t be doing that on the permafrosted Snickers wedged somewhere in my anorak.
‘Oi. OI!’
The glass bowed and sang like a saw beneath each furious blow of my mittens, which along with an intemperate accompaniment of vocal decibels may explain why I wasn’t aware that a police van had arrived until one of its occupants tapped me on the shoulder. A consolation occurred as I turned to face the young female officer: however this pans out, I’ll probably get fed.
‘There is a problem, yes, no?’
I explained my predicament and after a curt nod she strode wordlessly to the shop’s door, which opened before she had a chance to knock. By the time she re-emerged I had begun to ponder the attractions of a custodial resolution, which for a breach-of-the-peace conviction might secure me a week of catered warmth. It was not to be. ‘You will buy her food, use her kitchen and drink her coffee.’ I gave the officer my rather awkward thanks, then looked past her inscrutable face at the shopkeeper’s very scrutable one, crinkled into a wan attempt at welcome through the open door. If you need help, I thought, you will ask. And then I thought: Don’t whatever you do try this in Russia.
For long days the route had led me away from the border I had set out to follow – no Arctic waste is wastier than north-east Lapland, and no inhabitants meant no roads. But after some sustained eastwards veering, EV13 was now bumping hard up to Russia: I had, at last, picked up the scent of the bear,
and with it a faint whiff of Curtain. At Saariselkä the gift shops had been full of Cyrillic keyrings, and the night afterwards I turned the telly on in my fish-shop-café chalet (yes, really) to be greeted by a dead-eyed Vlad-matic newsreader, reciting approved information above a tickertape clotted with back-to-front Rs. Placing my dinner before me, the café owner explained that wealthy Russian visitors had transformed the tourist industry up here over recent years. The dispiriting principal lure: non-counterfeit luxury goods. ‘They tell me in Russia everything can be fake, even shoe and whisky.’ But then the rouble had collapsed, and almost overnight the flood dwindled to a trickle. ‘In this situation I lose ten thousand euros in every month.’ He sighed, taking away a plate very lightly smeared in residual reindeer stew. It would be two days before I encountered my first Russians, a couple in a spanking-new Range Rover. Their faces gave them away before their number plates: expressions of aghast disbelief that shared nothing with the native motorist’s studiously deadpan reaction to my presence. What the actual fuckski?
It was later suggested to me that Finland’s brooding and reserved national character is a legacy of their traumatic wartime interactions with the bear over the border. As the suggester had by that stage repeatedly saved my life, I am happy to agree. The 1,000km balance of my ride down Finland would take me right through the strung-out slaughterhouse that was the Winter War of 1939–40, the coldest of cold wars. Many times a day I stood humbled before a modest memorial stone or cartwheeled artillery piece on some lonely white road, imagining the snow stained pink beneath my feet, and the peaceful forests echoing with violent death. When the world’s largest military power took on one of the smallest there could only be one outcome. Before reaching it, however, the scarily redoubtable Finns would mete out some of the most one-sided defeats in military history, accounting for 250,000 Russian soldiers in the bloody process.
The Finns are a definitive breed apart, their extraordinary language sharing nothing with the otherwise closely related Nordic tongues; its speakers are thought to have originated in north-western Siberia before settling in Scandinavia’s least hospitable corner. Survival has always been a harsh and marginal affair up here. A third of the Finnish population died in a famine more recent and more merciless than that caused by the failure of Ireland’s potato crop. Even today, 90 per cent of the nation is classed as a rural wilderness.
As its regional rivals developed and prospered, Finland remained mired in rustic poverty; it is remarkable to consider that this archetypal first-world technocracy was fundamentally medieval until a couple of generations back. Male life expectancy languished in the low forties well into the last century, and times were so hard in the Twenties that when the first border posts went up along the boundary with the fledgling Soviet state, the Finnish guards’ principal task was to stop their countrymen fleeing to Russia in search of a better life. A rural tradition of talismanic sorcery that lingered well into the Thirties was mercifully distilled into the creation of the Moomins. In 1950, half of all Finns worked in farming and forestry, and right up to the Sixties, native woodsmen used horses to pull logs and slept in crude forest dormitories, the bunks fitted with screens to prevent inhalation of a neighbour’s tubercular sputum. They were lumberjacks, but they weren’t OK.
You can read about the impoverished deprivation in guidebooks, or, if you find yourself in a warm supermarket with a core temperature to restore, on multilingual product labelling. The Finns, I found, have native words for only the humblest human needs – water, milk, nuts, corn. Everything else, from vinegar to sugar, from ham to pornography, is borrowed from Swedish. (There may not have been any pornography in the supermarkets.)
But extremely resistible as this dirt-poor wilderness was in most respects, Finland’s strategic importance as a back-door land bridge from Europe to Russia made it a valued and much-swapped pawn in the Baltic zone’s imperial struggles. For the thick end of a millennium it was never more than an outpost of the Swedish, Danish or Russian empires; ‘Finland’ didn’t exist in name until the eighteenth century, and the Finnish language was recognised only in 1893. Independence was finally secured in 1917, but the nation only had twenty-two years to enjoy it before the Russians rolled in. Stalin’s dumbfoundingly cynical non-aggression pact with Hitler had freed him to swing the Red Army sledgehammer right at Finland’s nuts, intent on securing a generous buffer zone against the Nazi invasion everyone knew would come: Leningrad – St Petersburg as was – lay no more than a grenade’s throw from the Finnish border.
Stalin was assured that the Finns would hold out for no more than a fortnight, and by generals who were well placed to judge. Before 1917 Finland had been a Russian satellite for over one hundred years, and much of its military equipment still dated from that era: the bulk of the nation’s artillery, modest as it was, had last seen action in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Russian top brass knew they could fire more shells in any given day than the Finns possessed in total. They knew that the Finns had a mere dozen fighter planes capable of keeping pace with even their most lethargic bombers. As their troops massed along the cold border, they knew that the hapless enemy was outnumbered forty-two to one. Excitingly for me, but probably less so for them, the Finnish army had been obliged to supplement its single operational tank with several ‘bicycle battalions’, mobilised to repel the largest armoured assault the world had ever seen. On the mismatch scale, this was Goliath taking on David’s nan.
The Winter War began on 30 November 1939, when a Russian air-raid killed 200 Helsinki residents. In the days ahead 425,000 troops surged over the Finnish border in ten places that spanned almost its full length – an invading force nearly three times larger than the one that crossed the Channel on D-Day. But many Red Army soldiers didn’t even make it out of the motherland. The winter of 1939–40 was shaping up as the harshest in a hundred years, and the Russians lost a tenth of their troops to frostbite before they crossed the border.
Read an account of the Winter War and you will spend a great deal of time shaking your head in disbelief. Ride through its bloodiest theatres on a shopping bike in deep snow and those head-shakes will come with a side-order of heavy, mist-breathed sighs. How terrible to imagine the massed ranks of the Red Army trudging numbly through these forests in soleless felt boots and cotton tunics. How easy to forgive them for building the suicidally conspicuous bonfires they huddled around at night, great stacks of blazing trunks that drew Finnish sharpshooters from afar. And how very cruel to picture the Russians shuddering into a vacated enemy command post to find that even on the frontline, every Finn could expect a hot meal and a sauna. When one frozen and ravenous Russian battalion overran a Finnish field kitchen they were powerless to resist the cauldrons of sausage stew still bubbling away; as they stuffed themselves by the warm stoves the cooks regrouped, returned and slaughtered 400 men.
As Stalingrad would later demonstrate, the Red Army’s great forte was the iron-willed defence of the motherland. Attacking a harmless neighbour presented a more awkward motivational challenge. Many Russian soldiers didn’t even know the name of the country they were invading, let alone why they were doing so. One especially pathetic POW told his captors he’d been dragged off the streets of Murmansk by a military commissar while buying his wife a pair of shoes, and sent directly to the front after an hour’s training. When the Finns emptied his pack they found the shoes still neatly wrapped at the bottom.
Stalin’s boundless paranoia had despatched three-quarters of the Red Army’s officers to the gulag or the firing squad, endowing his invasion force with a leadership sorely lacking in experience, and understandably fearful of showing initiative or questioning even the most flagrantly catastrophic orders. Of those there were plenty. A typical Russian advance sent hundreds – sometimes thousands – of men marching in tight formation across a yawning frozen lake in broad daylight. Presented with this khaki-on-white turkey shoot, the Finnish machine-gunners on the opposite shore could hardly believe their luck. Soon the whol
esale butchery so sickened them that many were evacuated with post-traumatic stress. Each attack was a pocket Somme that left the ice strewn with corpses; in one representative engagement, 4,000 Russians failed to take a position held by thirty-two Finns, suffering more than 400 fatal casualties in the process.
The Finns had a rubbish hand but played it brilliantly. Short on men and abysmally equipped, they atoned with pragmatism, imagination, cold-cured winter resistance and a fierce determination to defend their nation and its new-found, hard-won independence. Cunning volunteer officers – amongst them MPs, lawyers and the president of the State Liquor Board, Old Man Alko himself – fashioned and honed the nimble, freelance guerrilla techniques that are still regarded today as textbook tactics against a massively superior force. White capes and skis allowed Finns to slide right up to their enemy unseen and unheard. The Molotov cocktail was a Finnish Winter War invention, named in mocking honour of the Soviet foreign minister who drew up the pact with Hitler. More than half a million were mass-produced by Alko, each bottle bundled with two storm matches. The Molotov’s pimped-up apotheosis was a blend of petrol, kerosene, tar and potassium chloride, ignited on impact by an ampoule of sulphuric acid tied round the neck. This glass bastard could take out a tank, though getting close enough to do so was rather a big ask. The even more challenging alternative was a ‘satchel bomb’, lobbed directly under an oncoming T-34, ideally after a well-built colleague had wedged a log in its tracks to slow it down. Such tactics explain why the mortality rate in anti-tank combat units hovered around 70 per cent.
The Finnish campaign was littered with acts of indomitable valour. The corporal who commandeered a carthorse and rode it bareback along the Russian front line, towing a cannon that he would unhitch and fire at tanks from point-blank range. The lieutenant who took on a pair of T-34s with his pistol, unsettling the crews so successfully that they swung around and retreated. The old woman who whitewashed and scrubbed her cottage overnight, after being told by a Finnish officer that he would regrettably be returning in the morning to burn it down as part of a scorched-earth retreat. ‘When you give a gift to your country,’ she explained in a note left for his perusal on the kitchen table, ‘you want it to look nice.’ On the floor sat a can of petrol and a neat stack of kindling. (The Finns’ fanatically efficient rearguard torching of any structure that might have sheltered Russians explains the post-war concrete dreariness that defines every single town in this part of the world.)