All right, welcome to the Neuvottelija channel. Today we're doing something that's never been done in Finland. We're doing an autopsy on Finnish communism. We'll also ask the question you're not supposed to ask: why has this country never cleaned house of the people who whispered on Tehtaankatu (the street where the Soviet embassy stood), pocketed rubles, and built their careers on keeping Moscow happy?
They got back into the establishment once the Soviet Union dictated the peace terms after World War Two. When East Germany fell, they carried out a lustration. When the Soviet Union fell, our Baltic brothers said never again and opened the archives. In Finland, we opened the state liquor stores and shut our mouths. The Tiitinen list is still locked away.
Money flowed in from the East into party coffers and election funds, and Centre Party people, Social Democrats, and communists competed over who could get closest to the Kremlin, and nobody has ever been held accountable for any of it. Today's guest is Pekka Virkki, who has done what no Finnish historian has dared to do as a whole: written a book laying bare the entire history of Finnish communism and its fraternizing with the Soviet Union. Lenin hid out here. The SKP
was founded in Moscow. The Taistoists (hardline pro-Soviet communists, named after Taisto Sinisalo) sang songs of peace while the Red Army rolled over Prague. Listening to Pekka, you understand why Soviet communism is really an imperialist, racist, Russian serfdom-based system, not some European labor movement.
In this episode we also ask the awkward question: do we still have communists in parliament? And if so, what name do they go by these days? If you're curious why Finland never settled its accounts with the East, and why that still has a price today, skip ahead. This is Neuvottelija. Let's get started.
All right, welcome to the Negotia— the Negotiation Club— the Neuvottelija channel.
Every now and then I wonder a bit about my own identity, just like the communists do. So — Pekka Virkki, An Autopsy of Finnish Communism. Welcome.
First time here, actually. Thanks. Good to be here.
Yeah, and I sent you a brief and asked if you had any questions about it, and my first brief was something like — why are the commies wrong? Why are the commies wrong in Finland?
Why — why hasn't anything ever been done about this historically? Why isn't anything being done about it still? And should their backsides be tarred before they reach heaven? That was roughly, freely recalled, my first brief — but let's do this a bit more seriously, since that shows why Finns now need yet another book like An Autopsy of Finnish Communism. Well, I won't say there can never be too many books, since time famously has an opportunity cost,
but I will say this much: this is still a topic where a comprehensive account has been missing. Up to now, I'd say, pretty much entirely missing — a history of Finnish communism and, above all, its relationship with the East. I don't mean there's no general history of the Finnish communist movement, but rather a history of the relationship between the Finnish communist movement and the Soviet Union — a history of that movement's spiritual legacy.
And it deals quite a lot with what the relationship was, in a sense, between the Soviet Union and Finnish communism, which grew up right alongside the Soviet Union — actually grew up at the same time the Soviet Union was born, since Lenin hid out here in Finland, and there were a lot of what you'd call horizontal connections even before the revolution. So our communist movement has had extremely deep ties eastward even before the Soviet Union itself came into being, so
what, in a sense, is the relationship to Russianness on one hand, and on the other hand the relationship to communism, which is nonetheless first and foremost a German, British, Central European and Western European idea [scoff] — so those are maybe the main factors I focus on there, and not much has been written about it in that way. Well, that's God's honest truth. By the way, Russia ties into this — there's Lenin—
Ilyich, on the cover here, drawn with somewhat Asian features, since Finland didn't have a chief communist — some Otto Ville Kuusinen or someone else — who could've been put on the cover instead.
Well, let's put it this way — OV would of course have been a cliché choice, but I think OV's looks are also such that people wouldn't really recognize him.
— on the book cover, I admit. It's supposed to sell, after all, and, well, maybe that partly shows why there's a need for this book — that even someone like Ville Pessi, for instance, is a very central figure during the Cold War, with Jaakko Laakso later as his heir. But I don't know if — well, yes, Lenin is probably the person people know best, after all. Yeah, both for good and, above all, for bad, of the people I've mentioned,
nobody recognizes these SUPO directors and the big whisperers of Tehtaankatu — nobody recognizes any of them, and no such lustration was ever carried out in Finland regarding these careers. There was no walking anything back at all. And I think that's another reason this matters — that a lustration will happen at some point. What's your take on lustration now? Well, it's a process, in that—
— I think you could say it's underway in Finland in a certain sense, and I'm really looking forward to the Tiitinen list at least being opened up to researchers. Hopefully with as clear supporting background material as possible. And I've explained a bit in the book why that would be needed. As SUPO chiefs, there haven't really been any actual Soviet-style communists, but
as heads of the State Police, yes — as chief after the war, which was SUPO's predecessor, there were people very closely tied to the communist movement, both in the leadership and further down the ranks. And actually, while writing, I got access to Alpo Rusi's notes. Rusi has, I believe, been a guest on this show at some point too.
And there was a comment from Juhani Väänänen, former head of SUPO's secretariat — it emerged from those notes that Seppo Tiitinen, SUPO's long-serving chief during the Cold War, had allegedly been on the FSB's payroll. So, hypothetically, if this were true, we're talking about a time even after the Cold War.
Yeah. And then you get to questions like why rascals named Jaakko Laakso and company have gotten off this lightly, in terms of public — and possibly other — scrutiny, at least as far as what's publicly known goes. Yeah. So in my world, a properly Finlandized Social Democrat and a communist start to become pretty much the same thing. I apologize — you're of course very precise as a researcher,
so if a communist wasn't in SUPO, then fine, that's that — but if a thoroughly Finlandized Social Democrat is there, then in my world, that's the same thing to you as well.
And at its worst it wasn't even the case that someone was specifically in the SKDL, or among the Taistoists, or in the Communist Party — that wasn't the point. It was simply about who was mixed up in the Tehtaankatu muck, and how much compromising material they were picking up, and how often they went down to Tehtaankatu to hear instructions.
Yes, that was largely the actual substance of Finlandization — of course the communists had their own outright violent aims of overturning the social order, though at some point parliamentary activity came into the picture too, but the way Soviet influence shows up in Finland shows up exactly in that way. I try to be very careful with terminology myself, because if you start using these terms
half-heartedly, without it clearly being ironic, then it very easily ends up nullifying the whole message, and I myself am against that in that sense — of course you talk about it, and then there's also this: there's a bit of a traumatic background here too, because in Finland there was also
genuinely right-wing radicalism. That's not some invented thing — it existed in the interwar period. And back then there was this idea that basically all leftists are the same bunch, when in reality they really aren't — the Social Democrats, at a certain point in history, you could say, helped save Finland's free social order after the war, and they deserve credit for that, no question. But then, the further the Cold War went,
Finnish Social Democrats were fitted into a role that was both ideological and geopolitical: when the Soviet Union occupied Czechoslovakia in the late '60s, communism suffered a crisis of credibility. And that's when the Soviet Union started trying to build alliances out of Western Social Democrats, but above all Finnish ones — and of course there was a certain crowd that jumped on board very eagerly. I write there, for instance,
about the Pälkäne movement, among other things, which was essentially the SDP's own Taistoists. And while the Social Democrats have their merits, there was also a significant group among them who never learned to draw that line. I don't know if Lasse Lehtinen has been a guest of yours — he hasn't. Lasse Lehtinen — I like his book on Väinö Tanner right up until the halfway point, when he starts talking about Kekkonen, and then we know what he's going to
write, because his view of Kekkonen turns pretty grim — it basically takes that fine account of Väinö Tanner's great career and steers it into how lousy a guy Kekkonen supposedly was. But we can come back to that too. Everyone here is guilty, guilty, guilty — Tanner was the purest Finnish patriotic social democracy there ever was, but after the war he became persona non grata, and then the Social Democrats drifted off, and eventually we ended up at Alpo Rusi, when
you mentioned, from quite modern times, [unclear] and others who still seemed to lean toward that old left-leaning wing of the Social Democrats — and so, well, Alpo Rusi in turn stumbled over the Ahtisaari affair. So this really is a strange continuum. Actually, we could start a bit from history. Since we've got Lenin here, and he
— well, from the Pet Shop Boys song 'West End Girls' that we all know, there's the line 'from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station' — so, through Finland, on to Petrograd, to go fight with those guys — is that where communism actually got started, or should we go back to Karl Marx instead? Well, I'd actually start with the French Revolution. So yes, I do cover
communism's intellectual-historical roots quite far back there. And then, of course, one factor was Europe's 'mad year' of 1848 — there was already famous artist-communism back then. Richard Wagner was famous — among the famous early communists, or at least someone who declared himself a communist, at a certain stage of his life.
So is this some kind of mutation of Hegelian dialectics, or what? You'd have to ask Wagner that. [laughter] Maybe you can find some spiritual connection to him there, but actually, from that same year, 1848, there's a very similar quote from him as from Marx himself — this idea of the specter of communism haunting Europe, and that everyone must, as it were, take
a stand on this new movement. And in that sense, the original European Western communism, and Central European communism, is really just an extreme form of left-wing socialist thought. And as we know from the French Revolution, socialist thought — leftism — was one of these three or four, depending on how you count it,
basic ideologies — socialism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism — and it's one form of those, and in Europe it's clearly, in its own way, part of the intellectual-historical heritage. Then, among economists, as I understand it, there's disagreement about what Marx's role actually was in that field. I've understood there's some kind of consensus, or at least a fairly common view, that
on the supply side, Marx did have certain insights that hadn't been made before in economics, but it was pretty thin. And [throat-clearing] with Engels there was some [unclear] mixed in — they certainly aren't living under communism now, more like heading toward some kind of oligarchy, as I understand it. But — no, but the Hegelian angle, the philosophers, is what interests me, because I think the problem with communism and the far left is this kind of collectivist illusion,
that we have this kind of zeitgeist that, through technological determinism, somehow inevitably ends up in that damned communism. I think that's just — it's like a fairy tale, that the collective somehow just ends up in pure communism, and along the way tens of millions of people happen to die. Somehow this is really childish nonsense, if you ask me. [laughter] It's the same reason engineers and artists should never be let anywhere near [laughter] government
on their own, because they think too highly of themselves. And I guess there's a bit of that idea in the dialectic too, that everything can be calculated — and of course, even if everything could in theory be calculated, even if we did have that kind of computing power, that would require us to also have all the information, with nothing ever approximate and no errors ever occurring. And that's the fundamental problem of totalitarianism and collectivist thinking, but above
all, the basic problem of state-led totalitarianism is that if there's no decentralization of decision-making information at all — and that doesn't just apply to the market economy, it applies to politics too — which, since we don't currently have a night-watchman state and never really have had one, still has certain regularities in how markets get regulated politically. And in a sense, if this kind of political-administrative
competition is eliminated entirely, then I don't know that it's ever led to anything other than tyranny. It can take somewhat different forms — nowadays, of course, it's maybe a bit different than it was in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but fundamentally there's an awful lot that's the same. Yeah. But this whole progression — feudalism, feudalism, something else, and then capitalism, then real socialism, communism — it's somehow like these
— silly stuff about it. And what's missing — I had this guy, Binga Tupamäki, who tried, in his master's thesis, to map out this leap of technological determinism into communism. But that's just it: this requires removing democracy, and then some [unclear] 'enlightened' types stepping in between — so who thinks that's a good idea? Why did we have this kind of cult that wanted to voluntarily join Finland to the Soviet peoples?
It just feels like [laughter] — where did this kind of cult even come from?
But let's go through a bit of that, from Lenin's time — we had this feudal government that lost a war to the Japanese, and then we got lucky in that we managed to slip away, and then our Reds didn't quite manage to reattach us to the Soviet Union during the Civil War — but that was actually pretty close. We did, for some reason, have really close ties to Russia's
communist party here in Finland too, right in the early years of independence. Mm. Well, you can of course always debate how close that was and how close it wasn't, but in Finland there was specifically this Western, industrial-working-class-based, European-spirited labor movement, and of course it operated institutionally largely within the same organizations as those who became Social Democrats.
Mm. The SKP was founded in the Soviet Union, and it became the revolutionary, violent wing. Uh, going back to that thesis for a moment — it's actually an interesting piece of work. I read it at some point and liked it a lot. If I recall, it got the top grade, and I think Jukka Kekkonen was either the supervisor or, in fact, the examiner — and you couldn't really call him a right-winger either — but the Marxism-Leninism angle, he was quite
central to it as a concept. And Marxism-Leninism's thinking on the rule of law — Marxism-Leninism is specifically the Soviet Union's own version of this communist far-left thought, which combined the idea that, since Russia wasn't and hadn't developed into an industrial state, there's instead this alliance of workers and small peasants — that is, against landowners, estate lords, and also wealthy
farmers — that is, the middle class, the independent middle class, insofar as one existed in Russia at all — and the working class was just part of that revolution. And Marxism-Leninism was, in a sense, originally a very Russian idea, because at that stage the economic structure of European states was different, and it stemmed from that serf economy and its legacy, so the mental
leap to Marxism-Leninism was actually quite small. If we talk about how serfs were bound to the land well into the 19th century in Russia, and what happened right after that — was it '28, someone can fact-check that, I don't quite remember — but soon after Lenin's era, Russia introduced this internal passport system, meaning in reality there was no
getting into the cities at all without proper business there, and no permission from the Party, and no permission from the kolkhoz boss, the political commissar. And in effect, the same way there used to be estate lords, now it was just the Communist Party representative in their place. And on top of that, of course, came the kulak persecutions — the destruction of independent farmers, quite literal, physical
destruction — but also, of course, persecution based on nationality. If we talk about what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, that's Great Russian chauvinism, that's Great Russian imperialism, but it's also part of communism's ideological legacy, because Ukrainian national identity is very much tied to being independent farmers. In the same way, how Russia had
anti-Semitism — Jews largely made their living from trade and entrepreneurship, and those were hugely suspect groups from the communist regime's point of view, often without even having to say a word about it. Though sometimes it was said outright too. Yes, sometimes the Soviet Union engaged in outright ethnic — this kind of ethnic hate speech, to use today's terminology — but, in effect, that communist
ideology justified the genocide of entire groups of people.
Yeah, yeah. That does paint an interesting picture. I think, starting with Marxism-Leninism, it's always struck me as an attempt to slap some kind of ideology on top of the horrific mess of Stalinism, so it can be discussed in these vaguely technical, scientific-sounding terms, so it doesn't sound as stupid as the plain fact that it was totalitarian Stalinism, where the Gulag system and state terror were taken to the next level — where people were murdered quite methodically,
including their own people — not just the Jews and other well-off farmers who happened to still be alive at that point. But an interesting angle — I had Sofi Oksanen on, who's written several books about Russian imperialism, and she had a somewhat similar view — that this kind of Russian authoritarian imperialism has indeed become intertwined
with this bizarre nationalism, and then there's this endless game of terminology, where Ukrainians are supposedly still, in their word for it, Nazis — sort of like the villains of World War Two. The terms used in Russia are just bizarre. And of course [laughter] — they love using the word 'fascism.' It's a bit of a cliché now to get into whether National Socialism was
left-wing or right-wing — I probably had those arguments back when I was fifteen and thought I was some kind of high-school genius. But it is true that even there you can see how the ties to socialism got conveniently dropped once it became clear the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wasn't going to work out.
Yeah. And, well, it's true that the National Socialists and the communists actually did share a strong common ideological foundation, even though they later became enemies — and that's also something that maybe helps explain what's happening in Russia today.
Yeah. But let's go back to this Finnish communism — okay, so there was the Civil War, the Reds and Whites fought, and then there was a bloodbath, and then the White tyrants, as the communists would probably see it, took power. Then, in a sense, came Väinö Tanner and people like him, who I think were, in a sense, good Social Democrats — they brought over sensible cooperative ideas from Germany, and things like the earlier Forssa movement improved workers' conditions, building this kind of good
social-democratic foundation, which the Russians and the communists probably found kind of bland. So — was there any interesting movement within this communism in the interwar period? Yes, in a sense there was, because once the SKP went underground across the border, its leadership operated from there. In Finland there was this underground SKP communist movement, which in the end was fairly small, but it did operate right alongside the Soviet Union,
funded by it — and it's fair to say that by the time we got to the Winter War, the SKP's secret intelligence activity in Finland did have, or would at least have had, if the Red Army had gotten further, an effect that would have made its operations easier. So, in that sense, it really was a full-blown fifth column. And then there were communists operating in Finland, and communist
fellow travelers, which is a fairly commonly used term. I don't mean leftists in general, but people who genuinely operated in very similar contexts, with similar ideologies, but through different parties. There was, for instance, a short-lived attempt called the Finnish Socialist Workers' Party, which was then banned by the authorities in the '20s, and then
they operated through various electoral organizations up until 1930, when it was banned outright. Social peace also started to become shaky more generally around then, because there were fears of a far-right backlash to all this too. And this brings us to — since Urho Kekkonen's already been mentioned — Kekkonen wrote a pamphlet called Democracy's Self-Defense, in which
he actually laid out, quite thoroughly, the ideas of the young Kekkonen, back when he was still a bit of a right-leaning Kekkonen — but by that stage he'd already, mentally, moved away from that; he certainly wasn't a right-wing radical, in fact the pamphlet is also very strongly directed against right-wing radicalism itself. Okay.
That text — if you're looking for a point of comparison — is more like Karl Popper, a few decades later.
So now this is starting to sound like — Lasse Lehtinen, Kekkonen. I'm not — [laughter] — but you know why Adam Smith is celebrated instead of, say, Anders Chydenius: Smith wrote in what was, in effect, the lingua franca of his day [unclear], whereas Democracy's Self-Defense is, above all, a political pamphlet. Of course it didn't contain the kind of philosophical system that Popper later built [throat-clearing] — in the
'70s, but a few decades on. But in a sense, the idea is the same.
Yeah. Well, Kekkonen was a sharp guy, and he later ended up in something close to the position of a communist-style dictator himself. But he does have an interesting arc of development.
Then came the Winter War. That's the classic story of Reds and Whites uniting. The government too had Ryti and Tanner and Kekkonen there, all in perfect harmony, and at the front there were both Reds and Whites — against that first, unadulterated wave of the Winter War, the nation united, at least according to the myth. And even the communists fought back then — those, that is, who weren't
over in the Kuusinen camp keeping up the fifth column — so at least the more moderate wing came together. But was the alignment with Germany — the Continuation War — something that reignited that communist hostility? Well, you have to remember that the traumas of 1918 didn't just disappear on their own, and the divide didn't either — that Finland experienced the
Soviet attack, across very broad segments of society — including among the left — simply as outrageous. So there really was quite broad unanimity, especially during the Winter War, but yes, these old traditions and divisions were still there underneath. I don't know that the Continuation War itself was something that changed this basic divide
much. What it certainly did affect: Finland had a small far-left resistance movement, especially in the Tampere area, that operated specifically against cooperation with Germany, and I've written about that in the book too — in Hämeenkyrö. Yes, there was a surprisingly large group there,
who went, so to speak, AWOL, into the woods, really. [throat-clearing] But then, from that Winter War-era episode we learned that we narrowly ended up second best, and then the Soviet Union started dictating terms — the Porkkala lease came, and so on — and among the very first measures, the communists were rehabilitated;
communist activity could no longer be banned — that was after the Continuation War. And then Ryti was thrown into a penitentiary, and Tanner ended up on some list of suspects over in the Soviet Union, and then things started rolling — election funding started coming in fairly directly, and in effect they started propping up the left wing. Yeah, I also got quite a lot of material from the Security Police,
archive material, for the book, specifically related to this — to how the SKP's money flows were organized — and I've brought some of that to light in the book.
There's been information on these things in other sources too, and I also go through how the Soviet Union influenced other parties, because even though this isn't a general history of Finlandization, my aim is still to shed light on what the communists' mental and real-political influence was on other parties, and how the communists' Soviet-friendliness — or at least the perception of it —
forced other parties to build these relationships too, since nobody wanted to let the SKP have a monopoly on friendship with the Soviet Union — and that suited the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union always had both minimalist and maximalist goals in Finland. The minimalist goal was that Finland would remain geopolitically within the Soviet sphere of influence, and the maximalist goal, of course, one could see, would have been
revolution — but even that revolution shouldn't really have been carried out in a way that undermined other goals, if there was a risk it would fail, or, for instance, that Sweden would be driven into NATO as a result, with an iron curtain ending up running across the Gulf of Bothnia. That's actually been considered one of the major factors in why the Soviet Union
never fully committed to backing a Finnish revolution. And, yes, that probably also explains why our special relationship with Sweden has remained so strong right up until quite recently, and still today. Of course we have a long shared state history and so on, which shouldn't be underestimated, and plenty of cultural ties, but there's also been a hard geopolitical core to it — that Sweden's and Finland's positions have
always, in this sense, depended on each other too.
Yeah, yeah. But then, Finland's political system was, for a long time, president-led. We had the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line, under which both of them first tried to minimize the damage of the war and get the Russians off Finnish soil, and they did partly succeed in dismantling structures in the occupied areas — bunkers and so on. Karelia wasn't recovered. There was, at one point, a genuinely viable opening to get back some of these ceded areas, in a way that
— back, but those then slipped away. But then the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line, the realpolitik of it, ended up going in the direction that, especially with Kekkonen as president, he could dissolve governments pretty arbitrarily — and that, I think, turned the Centre Party into this strange kingmaker leaning eastward.
I also have Russian archive material there, which some researchers fetched back in better times, which brings out the election funding received by Kekkonen's inner circle, and related documents, and how, in fact, Arvo Pentti — who once served as head of the Security Police, rest his soul, an old Mannerheim Cross recipient and a war veteran, and in that respect a man deserving of respect —
but unfortunately, the archive material reveals that he was granted a certain sum of money from the East, and besides being SUPO chief, he also, for a long time, served as treasurer of the K-line's election fund — that is, of Kekkonen's supporters. It was an organization called something like the Rural Joint Committee Foundation, which I believe still exists today, but it would be nice to know where that money ended up flowing. And I have a bit of a hunch that it isn't necessarily all just in
the Centre Party apparatus. Because in the big picture, people often say that after the 'years of danger' in the '40s and '50s, it was supposedly the case that the West backed the Social Democrats and the National Coalition, while the Soviet Union backed the communists and the Centre Party — but that's not actually how it was. In fact, yes, the US and the CIA did support the Agrarian League as a party, but it was really Kekkonen's inner circle,
the K-line, this Rural Joint Committee Foundation — in effect, the Soviet Union carved off its own slice of that party. Similarly, later, when Väinö Tanner was elected chair of the Social Democrats in the late '50s, the TPSL faction split off from the SDP, and even though they weren't communists, the Soviet Union still saw fit to, in effect, take them
in, right then and there. And then, once the SDP's internal peace was restored a few years later, Kalevi Sorsa's SDP was already something quite different — because Soviet influence had entered, in effect, through the TPSL, and it happened in a rather sneaky sort of way. And then came the communist split later, in the late '60s,
which really broke out in earnest in a couple of stages there — and that too was one of those things where, even though you might think the split weakened the communists' revolutionary prospects in Finland, it may paradoxically have actually increased the Soviet Union's grip on Finnish domestic politics, because it gave them the Taistoists as a kind of reserve force of their own.
Yeah. And into that mixed the idealism of the era — American imperialism, the Korean War, the Vietnam War — and, in effect, this whole 'peace and nuclear disarmament' angle out of the Soviet Union somehow, especially among young people, turned into this strange, supposedly virtuous cause — peace and love and Taistoist songs — and it's kind of hard to grasp. I didn't live through that era, but it seems genuinely bizarre how
this became a kind of cult, from which every party then got some kind of outpost of its own — well, you could call those outposts communism, in every party — and then general reasons, like not being allowed to put, say, the National Coalition into government, meant the whole political map stayed at least centrist, if not fairly left-leaning. So I wouldn't call them communists in any sense, but I would call them fellow-traveler allies, who had
— because it was specifically about advancing the Soviet Union's geopolitical interests, and of course, if a system change of that kind had actually come about, then sure, these various elements from different parties would have been allies in it. The communists did indeed have this so-called popular-front tactic in their thinking, but then you have to remember that within this popular front, the communists never saw themselves as equals — they always saw themselves as
in the leading position, and that's baked into their ideology, at least into Marxism-Leninism — their allies aren't equal actors at all; the communists are the vanguard, and everyone else is secondary. But yes, some of these factions, which were themselves Soviet-friendly in a sense, or at least you could say supported Finland's official foreign policy in an extremely papal, obedient way.
Yes, well, you could say that for some of these factions, a motive was also to squeeze the living space away from the communists, since Finland, after all, held elections — real elections. That's the difference: in Russia, elections are staged, and in Finland elections are held — and Venezuela, probably, also stages theirs. Yeah, [scoff] but, well, there is
a bit of that kind of thing, and that's partly what makes assessment tricky, because people have had all sorts of different motives, which could have overlapped quite a bit and weren't always so obvious. Yeah, that's interesting. In a way, you mentioned popular fronts, and it just strikes me that in this communism, democracy is exactly that unpleasant intermediate stage in the technological-determinism story, and then
through capitalism — the capitalist funds the rope he'll be hanged with — and you end up at totalitarian communism, where democracy becomes completely pointless, because the correct answer is already known, and the political commissar, and in effect the vanguard carrying out the correct ideology, runs the whole society. Somehow that's just silly — you're basically trying to kill off both capitalism and democracy on the way to this so-called happiness of theirs. Well, there's
this idea that democracy is like a streetcar — you get off at a certain stop. But the communists haven't necessarily held the view that the revolution must inevitably be either democratic or violent. It was tied to whatever circumstances applied at the time. That was, at least, Tuure Lehén's view — he was a key dogmatist within the Finnish communist movement — and that's how Lenin was read back then
too. But there's also this: when it comes to talking about democracy, well, the same way nowadays in some circles people like to say 'I'm not racist, but...' — back then, likewise, it was 'I support democracy, but...' [scoff] and what usually followed was 'I don't support bourgeois democracy,' and why should some institution—
— for instance, one where people can freely vote in elections, be meaningful at all, when the communist movement carries out the people's will best anyway. And this is, in fact, still going on — if I think back, I remember a few years ago listening to Professor Teivo Teivainen, who had invited to Finland — or maybe it was the University of Helsinki, but Teivainen was hosting the event — a very highly regarded Chinese
professor, I believe called Yuetong [unclear], and he explained current Chinese thinking — how can anyone possibly come and lecture us about a lack of institutional democracy as long as even a single Chinese person is hungry? [laughter] And here you could almost quote Jesus: the poor you will always have with you. By that logic, we could never — as long as there are any social or economic problems at all in
the world — we could never talk about a lack of freedom, a lack of democracy, a lack of freedom of expression.
We could never talk about it at all, because we'll always have these problems too — and that can't possibly mean they shouldn't be solved. And that's maybe the fundamental problem of communism, not just in relation to democracy, but also to freedom.
Yeah. I don't really understand this either. This whole class-struggle thing — going back to the Pet Shop Boys again, there's 'Left to My Own Devices' [unclear] — a really fine song, alongside 'West End Girls' — this bourgeois concept, and the idea that the bourgeoisie must be killed, and then, in effect, this whole capital-versus-labor conflict — that's essentially Marx's
economic theory too, and it's a pretty silly idea — that labor somehow converts into surplus value — that's just not how it works, and if nothing else, in this age of AI we're learning that it's just a lousy theory, this idea that labor, human labor, is somehow the source of all surplus value, and that capitalism is pure exploitation, and that anyone who holds capital is a bourgeois who must be killed as a class enemy. So again, I just don't get who could
believe this kind of nonsense — of course there's the whole 'those people are doing better than me, so they need to be gutted' envy angle, which is maybe some universal human thing that appeals here, but I still find this whole class concept just incomprehensible within this communism. One more thing that ties communism together — totalitarian communism in particular, and other similar ideologies — is this idea that the world
is a zero-sum game. Yeah. And that's exactly the same idea you find in a certain kind of raw imperialism, or in fascism — this idea that now, when Russia goes and conquers territory, it goes in and takes over the homes of wealthier areas, takes their toilet bowls, and so on — and then you imagine we'll all be better off if we just go and take that over. Fundamentally, that's
a very similar zero-sum-game way of thinking to what's happening here — that you eliminate this class, and so on — and also this idea that the West's prosperity — of course colonies mattered, and many Western countries had colonies at one time or another. In which direction that influence actually ran, in which particular case, is something you can debate, and there's certainly been
a lot of analysis done on that. But very often on the left too, it's emphasized that we're rich only because we once brought back — well, we personally didn't, but say, brought back rubber, rubber, rubber from the Congo, or whatever. I would actually argue that the foundation of our prosperity, even if that had some effect, really comes down to what kind of institutions we've had.
what kind of industry and technological development it enabled. Yeah, so there's this thing with colonialism and imperialism, where, when it's the Soviet version, it's fine, and when it's American or Western, then suddenly it's exploitation and rot and white-man piggery. That's another thing I really don't understand. And then it gets turned into this cultural phenomenon, passed down across generations, as if the fact that we happen to have pinkish faces means
we should feel any particular guilt at all about 19th-century Congo plunder and the Belgians. That's just silly thinking to me — again, this idea of historical inevitability, dredging up the past, as if everything is just some magical transition across the decades toward [laughter] some starter version of communism that's never actually reached. Maybe with AI, though.
I have to throw this in, actually. I've gone completely down the AI rabbit hole, if you hadn't noticed — I'm running four of these agent systems full time. One's OpenAI-based, and since they charge me by the token, these AI workers, I'm basically exploiting these silicon brains of mine — so you start getting this little planned-economy fantasy going, where I give them pretty
big tasks, and they produce quite a lot of value — and there's none of that Marxist human element to it — but maybe, through a small pair of binoculars, I can catch a glimpse of that Star Trek future, after this hellish technological-determinist detour. [laughter] I didn't really land anywhere with that, but maybe it captures something about the challenges of our time when it comes to this.
People talk about techno-totalitarianism and so on — I'm not one of those people who imagines — well, let's come back to China. So, in China there's apparently still a Communist Party that does planning and wants to organize society into a totalitarian surveillance state. Do you think China is a communist society? Well, if we start from the fact that China is, after all, one of the world's central
world powers, with a ruling party that calls itself communist — I don't see why I'd be the one to go around saying, 'No, you're not communists.' Of course, it's not exactly the same kind of communism as Soviet communism was, or whatever some ideal Marxist communism was supposed to be. A lot of local cultural heritage and tradition has mixed into it, just as it did in the Soviet Union, and
various models, but it would be pretty presumptuous of me, in my view, to go tell them, 'You're not communists.' Mm.
And, yes, there are quite a few of those elements — just the same way I talked about Russia's old serf economy, Chinese culture and tradition also has elements that maybe make it easier for the Chinese to adopt this certain kind of collectivist thinking than it would be in the West. And that's not some genetic thing, it's purely a matter tied to long-standing tradition,
a tradition — and in that sense, of course, Chinese communism is its own thing. What we often overlook is that China, and the Soviet Union too, even though they were, in a sense, at each other's throats during the Cold War, also started to ease tensions toward the end of the Cold War. They watched each other closely and paid attention to what was happening on each side. And China's system is,
in fact, very much Andropov's system — the KGB's long-serving chief — and what Deng Xiaoping did, as the father figure of China's so-called market opening, which of course meant that they started looking at genuine performance targets instead of political dogma. But it did mean that some people would have to get rich
first, as the saying goes, and very often those people turned out to be members of the party's nomenklatura. So, in effect, the elite stayed the same elite, but their position improved. And in Deng's view, Gorbachev's biggest mistake — Gorbachev's biggest mistake — was that Gorbachev made perestroika and glasnost political as well. Deng felt it should have been kept
strictly within the economic sphere, and then the Soviet Union would have survived, along with its power structures. And, well, I don't know whether that's actually how it would have played out — whether that could really have saved it.
My guess is probably not. But that's how China did it — over there, at the Square, they went straight in and put the students down, but then opened up the economy, and that's been the secret of China's later success. Richard Nixon — I think it was '93 — gave an interview to South Korean TV where he said that Russia's development would determine whether
free democracy and a free market economy would end up winning out in the world.
And, well, because if Russia's development succeeds, then China too will eventually liberalize, because it would otherwise be left alone in that position. But if Russia sinks back into autocracy, as happened under Putin, then China becomes the main challenger to the Western social model.
Mm, and yes, I do think — whatever else you think of Nixon — his analysis was quite on the mark in this respect. Yeah, and now it's fair to wonder why Western companies moved so much of their supply chains into China's arms. But that's where we are. Maybe on to Russia — I had Colonel Martti J. Kari on, who, shortly before his death, put forward this idea of a Russian strategic culture, and that's what I—
wondered about in his interview — because his starting point was that this Great-Russian expansionism goes all the way back to, say, Napoleon's invasion, that this is where the Russians are coming from, and how, once upon a time, the Mongols managed to conquer them and brought these brutal structures in — so he had this strategic-culture theory that Great-Russian thinking is genuinely old and enduring. So maybe that shows up
as communism, but yes [scoff] — communism and Great-Russian imperialism form a toxic cocktail that's still visible today. And I have to say, I think Martti Kari is completely right. These things don't rule each other out — both exist at once — and what also connects Russia with China is that it sees itself as an empire, and empires, as we know, have soft borders. At least these kinds of
continental empires do — they see themselves as having a right, and really even a duty, to maintain a so-called security zone around them. Who was it [scoff] who once said that Russia only feels safe when a Russian soldier is standing on both sides of the Russian border? [laughter] Yeah. And that, of course, played out at its worst in the Yalta agreements and after the
Second World War, where they finally agreed on what Hitler and Stalin hadn't been able to settle in the Ribbentrop pact — dividing Europe into security zones, which, unfortunately, went pretty far. Finland ended up on the wrong side of that line.
But then, on the other hand, looking at our Baltic brothers, the lustration happened to them maybe precisely because it was so brutal — living standards collapsed — so they decided: never again. For us, on the other hand, since we managed to slip into the EU and later NATO, this cleansing somehow never got done. Yeah, and I do think many of the problems
relate to what foundation this Finnish corporatist system was built on. Sure, the other Nordic countries have some kind of corporatist system too — that's not unique in itself — but Finland's corporatist system was built in the Soviet Union's shadow. Trade with the East played a significant part in that, and, at the same time, these things — the K-line and so on — were, in effect, part of that Soviet-influence
apparatus, but they were also shields against that communist pressure campaign. And it's well known that once the threat of communism disappeared — well, once the threat disappears but the structures remain, somewhat aimlessly — I think that's roughly what happened to us. Of course there was the 1990s recession, where the disappearance of trade with the East certainly played its own part too, but here
what happened was that the Finnish Cold War-era society, and its economic structures too, basically survived, because nothing else was really invented to replace them — and then, of course, there was that stroke of luck called Nokia, which kept us afloat for quite a long time, meaning less needed to be done — and then suddenly we find ourselves,
in 2010, in a situation where we've gone and joined a currency union.
Nokia no longer means the same thing in that decade, and now we're in a situation where — how many years has it been — where there's been essentially no real economic growth for around 17 years. Although, I did have Juho Romakkaniemi on recently, and there was some celebrating over 0.9% quarterly growth, which annualized would actually be 3.5% a year — but then the Strait of Hormuz came along and spoiled the party, so
And then, of course, there's still what I write about in my earlier book, An Autopsy of Post-Finlandization, where I'd say much the same conclusions came up later in the Government's Russia-influence report — that we still had this trade with the East. I'm not saying — of course it's understandable that Finns also traded with Russia and even invested somewhat
there, but yes, we did put unnecessarily many eggs into that particular basket. That's just how it is. Yeah, yeah. On this Tiitinen list — I once interviewed, about his negotiating mandate, Martti Ahtisaari's biographer, and he said people generally want two things: ordinary people want to be able to trust the police and the justice system. So, somehow, in this lack of lustration, both of those things ended up left hanging — that we might have had
even people within the Security Police itself who should have been cleaned out. Take an example — if you think, say, that Orbán was a total washout, and now a more energetic guy comes in who turns out to show no mercy toward the previous crowd, putting those oligarchs on corruption charges — well, that's how it should be done. Whenever a fully corrupted, rotten system like that comes to an end, there needs to be a bit of a knife put into that old system.
For us, that never happened, and at the very highest possible levels, people just stayed on, still following that old order.
Yes, well, and there's also the fact that, bit by bit, absolutely unbelievable things keep coming to light here, things that don't always even make the tabloid headlines, but for people who follow this stuff — I'm not saying — well, if you look even at the United States, which is supposed to be the mecca of freedom and openness — mm — I don't know if you count the Epstein files and so on, but yes, there are all kinds of problems there too,
it seems. But the point is, if we'd gone through all this once and for all in the '90s, I think that would have been a healthy experience for society, and we could genuinely have said afterward, 'no point going back to this.' But instead, it keeps happening this way, where investigative journalists, or somebody, keeps digging something up here and there, and things like this come out — for instance, that we have
Putin's closest mentor, Felix Karasev [name uncertain], came to Finland in '95 and basically announced, 'now you're changing your SUPO chief' — and a little while later, sure enough, the SUPO chief changed. That kind of thing certainly doesn't help build trust. And you also have to remember that there's been a lot of talk along the lines of, we shouldn't discuss this stuff, because trust itself is so important that the authorities shouldn't be questioned.
Yeah. But as far as I understand, this doesn't actually hold up in light of research. There may well be varying studies on this, but my understanding is that in countries where [scoff] authorities do get investigated when necessary — even criminal investigations — trust is actually higher there. Yeah. I don't get this thing where [sigh] — like, the Tiitinen list, and then people's freedoms — okay, if my name, say, were on the Tiitinen list, so what, that
I'd happened to end up in this strange East-German-style network of Russian informants — but the idea that we pretend this is so sacred that no one is ever allowed to see it until everyone involved has been dead for 30 years — what kind of rule of law is this supposed to be? Some guy apparently compiled a list like that, and now it's treated as a list that can't withstand any sunlight at all, while that same guy gets to lob accusations around in public himself. I seem to recall that
there are certain names on there where you'd think — what on earth is this.
Exactly. Exactly. [laughter] So — but now, thankfully, the current SUPO chief, Juha Martelius, has said he's made inquiries in Germany about this, and that releasing it to researchers is at least now being considered. Hopefully that actually happens, and I do get quite positive vibes that it might even happen. And if there are
any predictable names on there, say, some Social Democrats — so what? Can't the Social Democrats handle a bit of discussion about having had a few people who listened a little too closely to Tehtaankatu once upon a time? Fine, then let's go through what's actually behind that. Somehow the world doesn't get better just because nobody knows what happened. [laughter] That's exactly why it would be important — or let's say, better — for researchers to also be given the supporting materials at the same time, and to be able to interview these people themselves, but even that, of course,
isn't pleasant either — think, say, of the descendants. Okay, here in Finland, each of us is responsible for our own actions, but it's not exactly nice to suddenly discover that, say, your dad's name is on there. And Dad's been dead and buried for ten years, and you can't even ask him about it anymore. And then, for the rest of your life, you're the son or daughter of a Stasi spy. Yeah. And I have to say, when you mention Rusi, that really was an incomprehensible affair,
where a list gets misread in East Germany, mixing him up with someone of the same name, and the poor guy gets dragged through sixteen kinds of hell over it — and, well, I don't remember his exact story precisely, but somehow it ended up tangled up with Ahtisaari, who was the 'wrong' candidate instead of Sorsa, and the Social Democrats did this bizarre little dance around all of it. I really should have Alpo Rusi on as a guest too, if we get the chance. He, of course, has
done some quite interesting [throat-clearing] research recently too, and I don't know if you've had him on since his newest book, We Won't Isolate Russia — yes, We Won't Isolate Russia was the last thing we talked about — but that too is, in a sense, about these Russia relations, and it's interesting — we've had this whole Tehtaankatu mafia going on, plus 'house Russians,' and all sorts of spy-thriller-familiar encounters, and money has
changed hands, and so on. That's genuinely unpleasant and disappointing conduct — but somehow the whole thing gets hushed up, with everyone pretending there's nothing to see here, and that, once again, just strikes me as an affront to my sense of justice. Yeah, you could put it that way. But maybe, then — do we still have Finnish communists? Anna Kontula hasn't been a guest of mine, but somehow I get the feeling that [throat-clearing] — if she's talking about, say, men's rights
— or she's dissing petty bourgeois types like grandmothers who bring food to their grandchildren.
So — is this real communism, then? So, do we still have communists in Finland today?
Well — was Anna Kontula real communism, and was the Soviet Union real communism? Isn't that the classic dodge? Let me grab a quote here that the book actually opens with. This is a sarcastic quote, of course — the old 'no true communism yet' line. This is from Antero Leitzinger, a long-time, sharp researcher, who once said this to me — this is from an email exchange between us —
actually, this isn't the exact quote — I've fixed a couple of typos in it: 'Marx would be spinning in his grave if he heard so-called communists' talk of a rogue-state axis [scoff] running from the Sahel's military juntas, through Iran's theocracy, to North Korea's dynasty — an axis more aptly described as fascist or totalitarian than communist. But I've already gotten used to calling anyone a communist who serves as a Kremlin lackey or a credulous mouthpiece, regardless of what they think about economics or the number of genders.'
'What they have in common is that they're all pushing the same cause, whether knowingly or out of sheer stupidity.'
'And that cause isn't theoretical — it's advancing global organized crime. Maybe one day we'll get to the point where Anna Kontula gets to define communism — but only once she's woken up from her hatred of NATO.' [laughter] So, yeah. That's, of course, sarcastic and pretty polemical — the book overall isn't nearly that polemical; someone even said it's actually a bit dry,
if anything. But one central factor in it is this: one mindset that clearly comes down to us from our communist and Marxist-Leninist heritage is precisely the legacy of Lenin's theory of imperialism, which we already touched on a bit — this idea that the West is evil, and so, in effect, anything that's against the West,
no matter how imperialist, or at least semi-imperialist, it is in itself, gets treated as part of the so-called axis of resistance. And right now in Finland, there's a fairly broad political consensus and understanding that Russia is a threat to us — and we understand that, partly because we're right there on the border ourselves — Russia's imperialism is understood very broadly, even well into the left. Mm. But then, if we talk about Russia's
close allies, like Iran or China, this whole thing becomes considerably more complicated — especially when it comes to Iran. There's a complete lack, in our public discourse, of any understanding that Iran has massive regional hegemonic ambitions. It's an Islamist dictatorship that seeks to spread its ideology, above all in its immediate neighborhood, but globally too, it's a very
central player in spreading this extreme form of Islamism worldwide, and also in outright funding terrorism. And, well, if we look at this — I won't take a position here on what US policy toward Iran has been lately, that's a topic of its own — but the fact that we very
largely forget about this entirely, and instead view the Middle East, at most, purely through the lens of the Israel-Palestine conflict in public discourse — how much do we actually know, for example, about what Iran's and Russia's closest allies did in Syria?
How — how many people, exactly, are we talking about there?
It's a terror regime fully comparable to the Soviet Union — in many ways maybe even more brutal than the Soviet Union. The Assad regime, the al-Assad regime, was like that in many respects, but because it was part of this so-called axis of resistance, the brutally killed Arabs and Kurds and others there just don't seem to interest anyone nearly as much as when civilian casualties occur in the Gaza war, which is of course a regrettable thing. I understand
if Israel's use of force is criticized as disproportionate. That's a discussion you can certainly have, and criticism is fair game. But the way we completely forget the other side of it — that there's an expansionist great power there trying to seize control of at least its entire neighborhood, all the way to the Mediterranean — that's actually where this comes from.
Well, this kind of Arab communism is interesting in its own right. Maybe let's bring religion into it too — in a way, Homo sovieticus, at some stage, at least professed atheism, and in a sense that was class hatred directed at the Orthodox Church. But nowadays, Putinist imperialism gets along perfectly well with the Orthodox Church. So could you say that, in the Middle East,
Islamist religion is also somehow synergistic with this communist ideology — or is it all just totalitarianism, fascism, plain and simple?
Well, the reason there's this sympathy for it is, of course, that it gets seen as anti-imperialist — but there are, of course, a number of different religious
movements too. On one hand, there are Islamist movements that are similarly anti-imperialist — some of them — and then there are these Arab-socialist movements, which have varying, shifting alliances among themselves. But no, I don't think you can really approach it purely through ideology like that. The basic point is that there's this Leninist idea that there's
an oppressed and an oppressor, and world politics gets seen the same way as that class division — the exploiter and the exploited. World politics is seen in a way where the West exists as the ultimate exploiter, and whatever anybody else does becomes kind of secondary — a secondary matter — so, in Iran, people are dying, and there are various figures for how many,
but apparently tens of thousands of protesters within a few days.
It's kind of a case where nobody does anything about it. And then, on the other hand, if the United States doesn't do something in a situation like that, then the US gets criticized for being hypocritical, for only going into countries that have oil. Well, what would the reaction have been if the US hadn't struck there at all — what would have been said in that case, given that Iran does have oil after all? What would the explanation have been then? But surely, at that point too, people would have said
something like, 'so the US doesn't stand up for democracy and humanism after all?' Well, in my view, this attack by Trump and Netanyahu was a bit of an opportunistic move, and personally I think what Iran now learns from it is that it can shut the Strait of Hormuz tactically whenever it feels like it — and that's a pretty big club to wield, one it didn't really have before. And I don't think we can properly assess this ten
years from now — only then will we be able to make some kind of assessment of what the final outcome of this policy approach was. But whether this whole Trump-Netanyahu operation was sensible or not is, in itself, actually a separate question from this. This mindset itself is the problem — and, of course, that doesn't mean, if we're talking about whether we've written, for example,
about these things — it can be due to many factors. I'm not trying to say there's some communist media conspiracy staying silent about what's happening in Iran. Of course it's perceived as distant. It's just not as media-sexy a topic as the Gaza war has long been. There are probably many reasons for that, but
the underlying mindset does, in part, come from this Soviet foreign-policy tradition, which tried to present every movement opposing the West as, if not exactly freedom fighters, then at least as some form of legitimate resistance. Yeah. Now, thankfully, this American — no, sorry, Russian — imperialism has, outpost by outpost,
been kicked out of Syria, kicked out of Africa, and its proxies and the rest aren't very strong anymore either — the war of aggression against Ukraine is going really badly for them right now, so it looks like the Russians are really in trouble here. Then again, Putin — I recall, again citing Martti J. Kari, who said a couple of years ago that Putin has the readiness to pull Russians off the internet entirely — they've
actually been dumb enough to have already done it — so, in effect, their answer to any popular uprising is that the internet just doesn't work. So somehow this really does feel like the end times for this imperialism — yes, it's quite possible we'll see some pretty interesting months ahead, and of course we hope things don't take too unpleasant a turn for us before the last crashes happen, the last battles. And meanwhile,
the Ukrainian farmers seem to have the upper hand in drone technology and are shooting that imperialist, communist-dictatorship economy's infrastructure to pieces, and with that planned economy of theirs, they're not going to get it back up and running very quickly — so there might yet be victory days ahead for the Western defense movement.
Victory days, or days without victory, as Pertti Jarla might put it here. I don't know. Yeah. Well, thanks, Pekka Virkki — An Autopsy of Finnish Communism, a hefty book, full of lackeys and archive references, and there's still plenty left to clean up — and it's also available as an audiobook, if you like this kind of rambling — and I can vouch that the narrator is a real professional [laughter]
listening to this kind of chatter. Great, thanks Pekka. And if you've watched and listened all the way to here, go ahead and subscribe to the channel.
Thanks for having me. Thank you.