BECAME INDEPENDENT AFTER RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
By Bob Van Leer

  (HELSINKI, FINLAND, Aug. 15, 1993) - Our stay in Helsinki was short. Our cruise ship entered Helsinki harbor, small as major ports go, at 11 this morning for our six-hour stay. With bow thrusters this ship is highly maneuverable in spite of its size. Docking involved making a 180 degree turn and then backing alongside the dock, all without the assistance of tugs. It was impressive to watch the smooth way this was done. We were tied up and had port clearance by noon and could leave the ship.

  Betty and I had been here before and elected to walk the short distance to downtown and spend the afternoon mainly relaxing. Daughter and son-in-law, Doug and Amy Bornemeier, took a bus tour around Helsinki.

   The city has an excellent small park a block wide and four blocks long with a walkway the length of the park. This was a sunny Sunday and the park was alive with people. This was family day and a good part of the infants in the city were being pushed in their carriages through the park. This is a country where blue-eyed blondes appear to be in the majority.

  Helsinki seems smaller than its population of a half million. As in most of Scandinavia, it is a high social service city. About 40,000 people are employed by the city government, about 8% of the population. If the same percentage were applied to the City of Gold Beach, the city would have about 130 employees instead of about a dozen. There are few high-rise buildings and downtown is easy to walk to. It is a prosperous city with an average per capita income of $15,000-16,000. The country has a history of mostly being governed by some other country. The city was founded by King Gustav Wasa of Sweden in 1550 on a site just north of the present city center.

Russian Takeover

  In 1808 the city was taken over by the Russians and incorporated into the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland. Russian Czar Alexander established the city as the capital of Finland in 1812. Taking advantage of the chaos created by the Russian revolution, Finland declared its independence Dec. 6, 1917, and, with the help of the Germans, evicted the Russians.

  Just before and during World War II, Finland fought two wars with Russia and wound up on the losing side with Germany. At the conclusion of the war, this cost Finland a large chunk of its territory and a permanent limitation on its armed forces. Finland's foreign policy is limited by Russian interests. In practice, the Finns are not in position to antagonize the Russians. But the Finns have learned to live with this and also manage to live much better than the Russians.

  Reflecting on our stay in Russia, the Russians still have the same the same, a three-part visa of which the first part is taken when you enter the country. The visa requires that we proceed directly to our Moscow hotel. There the hotel kept our passport and issued us a card that let us move around Moscow. In effect, we were under house arrest in Moscow. On leaving, the hotel kept the second part of the visa and the third, and last, part enabled us to leave the country.

Russians Suspicious

  One man at our dinner table is a retired airline pilot who got his start in aviation on anti-submarine patrolling in the North Atlantic. He said a Russian trawler that anchored behind us while we were docked at St. Petersburg is the type the Russians use for surveillance and his guess was the trawler was monitoring all our ship's radio transmissions while we were in port.

  We had breakfast from a man from northern Louisiana and learned from him the timber industry is alive and expanding there. Willamette Industries, an Oregon firm, is very active there. He said the red clay hill land of that region was farmed for cotton but after World War I the land was left to revert to forest and is now mature. Now it is being actively tree-farmed, continuously replanted after being cut.

  One woman passenger is having a more memorable cruise than she really wanted. Yesterday, when leaving the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, she fell. She was taken back to the ship's on-board infirmary. Overnight she was diagnosed as having a broken hip and taken to the Helsinki University Central Hospital. A daughter is flying from the U. S. to be with her.

  At 6 p.m. our ship got underway with Stockholm, Sweden, the next port of call. We will arrive about 9 a.m. for another short stay. Stockholm is not on the open ocean and our ship will thread its way though islands for more than two hours before finally getting into port. Tonight we gain back the second of the 11 hours we lost since leaving home.