Accompanying these recollections of my travel year 1985 are some of the songs I kept hearing while on the road. This video features an actual library, otherwise known as the place where I hung out for months prior to travel, researching the trip.
Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ‘85, Ch. 13: Introductions to Oslo, Bergen, Stockholm and Uppsala.
In this passage from Germania, Tacitus ((c. 55-120) was not speaking of youthful backpackers in Europe: “The Fenni live in astonishing barbarism and disgusting misery: no arms, no horses, no household; wild plants for their food, skins for their clothing, the ground for their beds.”
However, one might reasonably guess that the learned Roman’s passage explains why many non-Finnish speakers refer to the Suomalaiset people (as they call themselves) as Finns, and this is partially correct, although the Fenni referenced here probably were the Sami, natives of the Arctic region, later to become known as Lapps, which may be a mild pejorative in the fashion of Canucks, and anyway, there are many more of the Sami in Svenska (Sweden) that Suomi (Finland).
Concurrently, Finnish is fiendishly bizarre to non-natives. It is derived from the Uralic family of languages, entirely removed from Slavic or Germanic tongues.
English: My hovercraft is full of eels.
Finnish: Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita.
Hence my advice to native English speakers: Please stop and give thanks that so many others on the planet learn our language. For their willingness to absorb English in sufficient measure to help tourists like me (and you), we collectively owe the Finns a beer, a hug, and maybe a round of mustamakkara.
More about that particular delicacy in a moment.
On July 29, 1985, the overnight ferry from Stockholm docked in Turku, Finland. Immediately upon debarking, I presented my passport to the uniformed man and received yet another national entry stamp, stamped straight and level, neatly contained within the delineated box. With every degree of latitude traveling north, greater attention was given to orderly detail, or at least it seemed so.
The drill, now familiar, began anew: Lodging, eating, drinking and learning. What did I know about Finland at this embryonic stage of my global awareness?
Well, I knew that Finland’s history as an autonomous nation was relatively brief. For centuries, Finland was dominated by Sweden. Thereafter, it was attached to the pre-Soviet Russian empire. Finland became independent only in 1919 following World War I, and then fought twice against the USSR during World War II ― retaining its independence, garnering admiration for sheer tenaciousness, but still losing territory (Karelia) amid the post-war reordering.
In post-1945 foreign relations terminology, Finlandization was defined as the process of a stronger country (the USSR) exerting influence against a weaker country (Finland), while allowing the latter to remain (mostly) free.
These things I knew about Finland. I also was familiar with …
- A composer named Sibelius, who spoke powerfully to the Finnish spirit through a piece of nationalistic music known as Finlandia
- A vodka sold overseas by the same name (a.k.a. Koskenkorva)
- An indigenous fermented beverage, Sahti, homebrewed from a variety of grains, spiced with juniper berries, and filtered through twigs
- A tradition of highly heated bathing, the sauna, involving sweating, swatting and swimming
- An early 20th-century experience with Prohibition, similar to America’s
It was Monday morning and Turku, albeit briefly. On Thursday morning the weekend bus tour of Leningrad would depart from Helsinki; from the outset of my European conspiracy, the USSR junket was anticipate as the high point of my journey.
The most logical course would have been taking the short train ride straight to Helsinki, finding a hostel, and relaxing. Instead, I hopped a local train to Tampere (TUM-puh-reh), a mysterious inland city appearing in neither of my two sacred travel texts.
—
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland,
It’s the country for me.
—Monty Python
Tampere offered a final opportunity to take advantage of cousin Don’s multi-national connections. Among Don’s best European friends were Henrik and Eva, natives of Tampere, who once had been his students. They maintained contact and had met on previous occasions. He let them know that I might be coming to visit, and gave me their street address and phone number.
Intriguingly, Henrik came from a brewery-owning family. Just months prior to my trip, he and his siblings had finalized a deal to sell Tampere’s Pyynikki Brewery to Sinebrychoff, the largest brewing company in Finland (now owned by Carlsberg).
I’d never consumed a Finnish beer, but one of Pyynikki’s brands, Amiraali, was sufficiently well known to have merited inclusion in Michael Jackson’s seminal World Guide to Beer. Amiraali’s unique labeling stratagem was a series of portraits of famous admirals, mostly European, but including Japan’s legendary Heihachiro Tōgō .
Why would a Japanese admiral appear on a Finnish beer label? Because karma is real, and the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Tōgō’s most renowned victory came at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, when his fleet decisively defeated the Tsar’s navy during the Russo-Japanese War.
This particular Amiraali beer featuring the Tōgō label remains in production today, as owned and brewed in Japan, where it is sold at a memorial to the admiral.
Pyynikki itself originated in 1897, and later became part of a consortium with eight other local breweries. It rose to become first among equals during the stewardship of Henrik’s grandfather (if I recall) Sulo, who was succeeded by his wife Rosa.
Tampere originally was settled at the narrowest point of land separating two lakes, astride rapids that provided power for mills. By the 19th-century, Tampere was an industrial city (textiles and metallurgy) often compared to Manchester, England, and as we know, factory workers drank lots of beer in those times. In turn, their consumption was good for both brewers and prohibitionists.
By the late 1800s, Tampere’s brewers had switched to lager brewing on the German model. Pyynikki’s brewing plant was located at Koulukatu 11, only a few blocks from the epicenter of industry in the city. Henrik’s family lived close to the brewery.
After the family sold to Sinebrychoff, the brewery remained active for less than a decade, eventually being shuttered in the early 1990s. Since then, the buildings have been adaptively reused as housing, as with the erstwhile Hansa in Bergen.
I’ve since met Henrik and Eva twice, in the French Alps in 1998 and on a return trip to Tampere in 1999. However, we never got together in 1985, and the blame lies with entirely me. My virulent telephonophobia was a malady borne of crippling shyness, and as in Pecetto and Bergen, it defied my resolve to communicate. Simply stated, I couldn’t bring myself to call them.
Instead, I bought a city map and a bus ticket, and found my way to their home to knock on the door. There was no answer, and this was little surprise; it was late morning, and surely they both were at work. This time there was no miracle comeback in the late innings as in Italy and Norway.
Rather, I punted and made the most of my day in Tampere. Happily, our paths eventually crossed.
Tampere’s youth hostel wasn’t far away, situated in what appeared to be student housing in the university quarter, and tourists weren’t exactly beating down its doors. My belongings duly stowed, I returned downtown and found a restaurant with a handy fixed-price lunch special.
The eatery was on the second floor of a 1960s-era retail structure facing one of the main streets, and the rustic wood paneling in the dining room reminded me of innumerable Legion halls in the American Midwest. Unsurprisingly, the menu was indecipherable. I chose the mixed sausage platter on the recommendation of an English-speaking waitress, who observed that because we didn’t eat reindeer in America, I should try some in Finland.
She found it more difficult to describe another sausage offering, which was a deep, dark, reddish-tinged colored and an odd texture. She translated the word “mustamakkara” as black sausage, and the significance hit me. “Black” in sausage-speak means “blood,” and it was the local specialty.
Could I get some of each? When you’re eating on a budget, parts is parts; all calories count, and you clean your plate.
A state-run liquor store down the street from the restaurant yielded a bottle of Koff (the flagship Sinebrychoff lager) and two of Amiraali. One of them was Lord Nelson, and the other wasn’t. Tōgō was not in stock. The lagers were cool, not cold, and I happily drank them straight from the bottle while seated on a park bench somewhere in downtown Tampere, watching the local people pass by.
For all I knew at the time, two of them might easily have been Henrik and Eva, returning home from work.
Back at the hostel, I made the acquaintance of my roomies for the evening. In a room with three bunk beds, five of us would be sharing sleeping duties. My four new friends were traveling together as a group, evidently there to visit the university. They were friendly and engaging, but didn’t speak very much English, and judging from appearances and the sound of their language, I guessed them to be Middle Easterners.
The following morning at breakfast their passports came out, and it was revealed that they were Libyans, at the time regarded by Americans as prime exponents of international terrorism, second only to Palestinians. And to think I wasn’t even carrying a gun, so as to protect my rights.
The Libyan chaps seemed nice enough to me. After coffee, we said our goodbyes and wished each other well. I set off for Tampere’s train station, and Helsinki.
My day with mustamakkara, Amiraali and random hostel Libyans in Tampere was all it took to begin subconsciously sensing the presence of a fundamental reality of life in otherwise autonomous Finland during the Cold War, which is to say that even as I remained securely ensconced among the freedom-loving Finns, the vastness of the Soviet Union lay just beyond their perimeter.
The dividing line between east and west was a mere two hours by bus from Helsinki, and it was a route I’d soon be traveling to Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The closer I got to the USSR, the more the anticipation escalated. What sort of people would be revealed on the other side?
Cold warriors in furry caps?
Stone-faced ideologues spouting canned propaganda?
Or, plain working folks who wanted the best for their kids, struggling to get by like most of the rest of humanity?
Looking back, questions like these strike me as indicative of a well-honed tendency to over-think almost any topic or situation. I might plausibly cop a plea of relative immaturity, being only 24 years of age (with my 25th birthday coming in Leningrad), and having no experience on the ground in a Communist country.
It didn’t help that propaganda wasn’t the exclusive domain of godless commies. Given what we’d been taught at school in America during the Cold War, perhaps it was understandable to harbor a full slate of weird inner misconceptions, half expecting to be confronted with dogma-spouting automatons or antennae-festooned space aliens as opposed to living, breathing men, women and children.
But it was becoming easier to know better. In spite of a lifetime spent being trained to fear the Russian, Soviet and Communist enemy, my conscious intellect benefited from the very act of traveling. The trick was rejecting the bilge, whether ours or theirs, and often both.
Without a healthy contrarianism, I wouldn’t have come to Europe in the first place.
Back at Indiana University Southeast, falling under history’s spell and compiling my coursework accordingly, Russia and the Soviet Union became objects of an obsessive fascination. Professor Frank Thackeray deserves credit for this, though in a supreme irony, so does my old man. He thought well beyond his GED.
Roger G. Baylor, USMC, served aboard a Navy ship as a gunner in the Pacific in World War II. He didn’t talk about his own experience very often. Instead, he practiced something akin to transferal, becoming a self-taught scholar about the war’s European Theater ― places he never went, during the war or afterward.
Specific aspects of the conflict in Europe were recurring features of my father’s storytelling, among them the heroism of the Finns in their ultimately fruitless winter war against the Soviets, but moreover, the primacy of the USSR’s role in defeating Hitler. In fact, he openly admired the Red Army.
To say the least, this wasn’t the sort of interpretation commonly heard amid backyard barbecues and Little League baseball games during the 1960s. My father’s friends talked far more about America’s victories at places like Iwo Jima and the D-Day beaches, which of course were critically important. However, they tended to be entirely unaware of the massive scale of the bloodletting on the Eastern Front.
My father richly enjoyed reminding them. “20 million dead,” he’d say. “Just think about that for a minute.” Uncomfortable silence would ensue.
Was J. Edgar Hoover listening?
One time, I recall asking my father whether he thought Stalin’s governmental system was a good one. His quick answer was no, not at all, except that the excesses had little to do with the sacrifices of soldiers who fought and died for their country, just like ours did for the American way of life. In retrospect, I believe my recurring contrarianism has a clear antecedent.
All else aside and on the ground in Finland, maybe I was just getting nervous.
In 1985, it had been only 40 years since the end of the war, which remained a living memory in Europe, as attested by the geopolitical shape of the continent, where numerous boundaries owed to self-interested postwar calculations. There were armed camps, nuclear weapons, buffer states and untold miles of fencing. Not a hot war, but a cold one, and the chill could always be felt.
(20 years later, British historian Tony Judt would release a book that helped me understand what I’d seen in 1985: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. I highly recommend it.)
On Thursday, I’d finally get a look behind that curtain.
As noted, Finland formerly was Swedish, with the Russians taking control around 1809. The Finns, Sami and remaining Swedes became subjects of the Tsar, and it was at this time that Helsinki’s modern appearance began to take shape. The neoclassical buildings at Senate Square reveal the Tsar’s 19th-century urban imprint, as commissioned of German architects, who were charged with emulating the appearance of St. Petersburg, 389 kilometers away.
It probably frustrated the Finns that their streetscapes reflected a legacy of occupation. For instance, certain districts of Helsinki were sufficiently “Russian” in appearance during the early 1980s that international film directors often shot location footage there (Reds, Gorky Park) because the USSR was inaccessible.
My own whereabouts proved novel. To cut costs, I resolved to sleep in the cheapest possible bunk, which brought me to Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium, originally built to host the 1940 games.
However, the war had intervened, and athletic pageantry finally occurred in 1952. Tucked into one side of the stadium was a youth hostel (it closed only recently), of which my sole firm recollection is using the communal fridge to store a forgotten foodstuff, obeying the instructions and marking my container, and having it stolen nonetheless.
Hmm. Might this have been a first taste of shared socialism?
I’d placed my bag in a train station locker before hopping the tram to the hostel to check on availability. With a spot secured, it was back to the center, and a very vivid Helsinki memory: The indoor fish market on the harbor promenade. I was sufficiently enamored to make a return trip, absorbing the shapes, sights and smells of largely unaffordable seafood, apart from a pickled herring sandwich with onion purchased from a kiosk.
Here is a photo taken in 2016 inside the same seafood market hall.
Talk about coming a long way. My first-ever exposure to pickled herring had been in Oslo only a few days before, followed by a seafood buffet in Bergen and another aboard the Silja Line ship bound for Turku. It’s safe to conclude that the ocean’s rich bounty was making a deep impression on a corn-fed landlubber who couldn’t even swim.
Emerging from the heavenly saltwater grub shed, it was impossible to ignore Helsinki’s red-brick, onion-domed Eastern Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral church atop a hillock overlooking the harbor. Here was the Russian imperial legacy again, just as surely intended at construction to dominate its surroundings as Stalin’s garish Palace of Culture smack in the middle of Warsaw.
A very different church, Temppeliaukio, made a puzzling impression at first glance. It is known as the Rock Church, and lends the impression of a defense bunker topped by a saucer. Overhearing English being spoken in an authoritative tone, I noticed a small tour group and sidled over to them, close enough to follow the narrative as I fiddled with the camera lens.
The basic facts about Temppeliaukio Church: A design competition in the 1950s, construction in the 1960s, and the decision to build down rather than up, excavating stone to create a unique sanctuary. The lightbulb that stayed with me from the guide’s comments was the concept of functionalism in architecture, the seemingly simple idea that a building’s design should be based on its function.
Specifically, in Finland after independence, functionalist architecture was a tangible way of building “out” as population and cities grew, and building “native” in contrast to using imposed or inherited (read: Russian or German) forms. Belatedly, it was dawning on me that architecture lived and breathed, and wasn’t restricted to sepia from the past.
On Wednesday afternoon, my wanderings took me past a pizzeria promising American-style pizza. I was hungry and intrigued, and decided to authorize a minor splurge on a pepperoni pie accompanied by an ample mug of draft Koff. I’d purchased a newspaper earlier, and sat on the patio. This is when I learned of Rock Hudson’s death.
Food and drink; urban surroundings, and a temperate summer’s day. This travel thing had been my best idea, ever. Too bad it had to end.
—
In my early twenties, I was gripped by an interest in all things Russian. Significantly, it was a bookish infatuation not directly linked to strong drink, Slavic women, winter sports or taboo Communism.
After all, hard liquor and foreign gals were intimidating, and a dangerous combination for a shy, tongue-tied guy perpetually in search of his voice. As for ice, snow, and frozen tundra, moderation matters; once in a while suffices, rather than six solid months. Small wonder the Russians drank so much.
But it is true: communism was an aspect of my desire to know more, strictly from a voyeuristic sense and best assayed from afar, as opposed to living it. The Scandinavian socialist model struck me as a viable compromise. Just the same, I wanted to be able to say that I’d been there and seen the “other” type, behind the Wall. Professor Thackeray’s lectures on history had found a vulnerable spot, indeed.
What was it about the Tsarist Russia that managed to produce Lenin, Stalin and seven decades of so-called dialectical materialism, when even the Marxist revolutionaries themselves had been schooled to reject the possibility of it happening at all in such a backward place?
Tsarist times were impoverished and reactionary, and yet they also gave the world Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and Borodin; many were the nights I struggled drunkenly through passages of obscure Russian literature (in translation) while playing and replaying Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture.
After Russia’s catastrophe in the Great War ― a societal meltdown, the Tsar’s murder, the violent creation of the USSR ― how did the country survive Stalin’s famines, purges and gulags, and still rally its strength to bludgeon the Nazi invasion?
This was my father’s constant fascination, and I came to share it.
These many years later it’s probably impossible to point to a single epiphany, the precise moment when the bulb was illuminated and the possibility of dipping behind the Iron Curtain as a tourist first took hold.
It took two years to save enough money to visit Europe in 1985, allowing plenty of time to plan, so it’s probably the same old story: I must have read about it somewhere.
Given that one of my essential texts was Let’s Go: Europe, a quick glance at the 1984 edition reveals a reference to the Travela agency in the chapter on Helsinki. That’s surely it, as Travela (apparently now defunct) was highly recommended as an organizer of budget youth and student tours to Leningrad, the once and future St. Petersburg. I dimly recall sending for the brochure and pricing.
If memory serves, there were several longer guided Travela jaunts offered for 1985. There wouldn’t be enough time and money for any of those, and Moscow, Kiev, Samarkand and the Trans-Siberian railway would have to wait. However, one of several Leningrad motor coach excursions looked to ideally slot into my projected summer’s itinerary.
- Thursday 1 August: Helsinki to Leningrad
- Friday 2 August: Leningrad
- Saturday 3 August: Leningrad
- Sunday 4 August: Leningrad to Helsinki (and Turku)
The trip cost a scandalous $195, and would leave me with a very long haul from Helsinki back to Luxembourg for the flight home on the morning of the 8th. But what the hell; a few extra shifts at the liquor store went into the cigar box, and the wait began.
—
The only firm memories I have of Helsinki on the morning of departure involve an all-consuming nervous apprehension. Tour documents listed the meeting place at Travela’s office (Mannerheimintie 5 downtown, near the train station), easily reached by public transportation from the youth hostel. I got there early, and gradually, my fellow travelers trickled in. It galls me to remember so little about them. Names and addresses from 1985 were lost forever in 1987, when the little blue book tumbled from my pocket in Vienna. Only broad outlines remain.
There were around 25 of us on the tour, which was expressly designed to be English-speaking. Many were Americans, but not all. The Finnish tour guide’s name was Ari. He was blonde, urbane and multi-lingual. I was surprised that a Mexican family was with us; dad was a corporate executive on the cheap, just like the rest, and they were charming.
A balding Swiss schoolteacher soon would have his star turn at the Peter & Paul Fortress. Mark, an Australian my age, had been away from home for a year and a half, working his way across the globe. He tried mightily to get me into “good” trouble throughout our stay ― and almost succeeded.
The bus eventually loaded, and off we went. I experienced a thinly suppressed moment of panic, borne of too many Cold War movies, upon arrival at the Finno-Soviet border. Several uniformed guards came aboard to examine passports and visas. The latter were procured by Travela, this being a prime selling point of such a tour; otherwise, the process was said to be exhausting.
Several pieces of luggage were removed and searched, but overall, it was less of a hassle than I’d expected, although within eyesight was an ancient Volkswagen van with West German license plates, parked over what looked like a grease pit, seemingly being disassembled bolt by bolt.
We made good time until the outskirts of Leningrad. Few cars were on the highway amid a flat rural landscape of pastures and woods, reminiscent of northern Michigan. There was a break in the middle of a dreary town by the main road near Vyborg in Karelia, the region extracted by Uncle Joe in WWII
Our stopover offered a first glimpse at the bizarre institution of the Beriozka shop, albeit a poorly stocked example compared with the ones about to be plundered in Leningrad. At the Beriozka, only foreign currency was legal tender. Rubles weren’t accepted.
The reason we were being discouraged from indulging in black market currency transactions on the street wasn’t so much their illegality (small-scale trading posed far greater dangers for Soviet citizens than foreigners) as the plain fact that having amassed a fortune in rubles, there’d be absolutely nothing of quality to buy.
In 1987, my friend Barrie learned the hard way that by design, quality goods went to the Beriozka, because the hard currency spent in the Beriozka went straight to the government sans grubby middlemen. Communists may not have been capitalists, but they understood how capitalist systems worked; when departing the USSR, one was not allowed to cash rubles back into hard currency without a bank receipt (which black market traders obviously didn’t give), and it was illegal to export rubles.
This is why foreigners indulging in black market currency swaps inevitably wound up splurging at better restaurants. You could eat, drink, be exceedingly sloppy, invite half the tour group along for the ride, spend the equivalent of what it would cost to dine at McDonald’s back home, and in the process unload the excess funny money.
Our Karelia pit stop was a thoroughly depressing locale. Older buildings were chipped and faded, and newer ones built cookie-cutter with pre-fabricated concrete sections. It was my first good look at “rabbit hutches,” as the Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel described these ubiquitous housing towers; the Czech word is “panelák,” also the name of a more recent Slovak television series.
There weren’t many people on the street, and the ones I saw weren’t hustling and bustling. It was more like drooping and shuffling. My memory doesn’t provide a perfect snapshot, but rather a sensation of moroseness that came as a shock. There is no way I’d have pointed a camera at them. However, an important corollary: these people were flesh and blood humans like us, not the ideological robots depicted by hardcore (and generally under-educated) patriots back home.
Surely this revelation counted for something.
On the outskirts of Leningrad, the rabbit hutches began multiplying like M.C. Escher mazes viewed from afar. Near the waterway, industrial complexes squatted horizontally, their messy dishevelment punctuated by clusters of heavy work cranes. Impenetrable propaganda displays appeared on billboards and buildings. Eventually, I’d learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
In the interim, many of us aboard the bus practiced simple words and phrases: Please, thank you, beer and toilet. Perhaps six hours after leaving Helskini, maybe a bit longer, the bus finally stopped at the Hotel Sovetskaya, now called Azimut (it was renovated in 2018).
The Sovetskaya Hotel is located on the south edge of the historical center of St. Petersburg, near the intersection of Lermontovsky Prospekt and the Fontanka River. Rooms on the upper floors of the hotel feature fantastic views of the city center with the domes of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Trinity Cathedral and St. Nicholas’ Cathedral dominating the skyline.
The hotel was frowsy but reasonably modern (1967), and from the window of Room 1031 (how did I merit a single room?), there was indeed a commanding view of downtown. St. Isaac’s Cathedral’s gold dome looked like it was right around the corner, but as my feet were about to learn, it was at least a thirty-minute walk ― and even further to Nevsky Prospekt and the other main historic sites.
The room was musty and bedraggled; I’d seen worse. An old radio occupied much of a worn tabletop. It had two knobs, one to turn it on, and the other to adjust the volume. The radio dial was permanently tuned to a single frequency. The channel could not be changed. I clicked the button.
Knowledge of Russian was not required to glean that these two men were talking interminably about Lenin, primarily because the words “V.I. Lenin” were repeated every minute or two. It was a veritable Communist Gospel Hour, hypnotizing and metronomic.
As I submitted to radio-driven brainwashing in a language I couldn’t understand, right there in my hotel room, it occurred to me that a border too far had at last been crossed. Now I’d become part of a secret sleeper cell, whispering passwords to fellow operatives. Would I be allowed to depart the USSR?
More importantly, was my room phone bugged? It didn’t matter because I never learned how to use it. Telephonophobia, remember?
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 15: Soviet times in Leningrad and the long trek back to Luxembourg.
