Nironen, Jarmo Suomalainen Pietari kuvina [The Finnish St Petersburg illustrated] Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2003. 185p., ill. ISBN 951-746-420-7 € 43, hardback Seppälä, Anu Jääkukkia keisarinnalle. Alma Pihlin uskomaton elämä [Frost flowers for the Empress. Alma Pihl’s fantastic life] Helsinki: Ajatus, 2003. 191p., ill. ISBN 951-20-6352-2 € 29,50, hardback Londen, Magnus & Mård, Anders & Parland, Milena S:t Petersburg – metropolen bakom hörnet Helsinki: Söderström & Co., 286p., ill. ISBN 951-52-2091-2 € 27, paperback In Finnish: Pietari, metropoli nurkan takana [St Petersburg, the metropolis round the corner] Helsinki: Tammi, 2003. 250p., ill. Translated by Helena Autio-Meloni & Christiane Eriksson ISBN 951-31-2723-0 € 27, paperback         The former president of Finland, J.K. Paasikivi once said in reference to the geopolitical pessimism which arose during the fraught years immediately after the Second World War that Finland can do nothing about its geography. He could just as easily have said: Finland can do nothing about St Petersburg. When the city was founded 300 years ago, for Finland it automatically became a magnetic centre point of sorts, around which the political compass needle often spun in unexpected directions.      Finland’s destiny has long been tied to St Petersburg. The city was founded on sparsely populated land plagued by floods and swamps, where Finns and other Finno-Ugric peoples had once lived – at least, this is how Alexander Pushkin described the legend of the city’s birth in his poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’ – and was built largely upon the bones of Finnish prisoners of war. To protect Russia’s new coastal metropolis, Finland’s eastern border was moved many times from the 16th century onwards, first to the bay of Viipuri (Vyborg), then to the Kymi river and finally as far back as the Gulf of Bothnia on the west coast, when the whole of Finland was subjected to St Petersburg’s sphere of interest and at the same time, in 1809, gained unprecedented autonomy protected by the tsar himself.      Thus Finland’s new capital city, Helsinki, was built as a front garden for St Petersburg, its cour d’honneur exuding neoclassical coolness and austerity, slightly more modern and functional, cleaner and more open than its model.      Alongside its newfound freedom, there also grew a tension, and all that remained of the promises of the emperor’s grandfather or great-great uncle was a thin, symbolic memory, when at the end of the 19th century the process of russification was due to commence. In Eino Leino’s handsome resistance poem from February 1899, a choking, poisonous fog smothers the gleaming image of St Petersburg and finally consumes the statue of the ‘liberator’ Tsar Alexander and his tyrannical division marching across the square. Several decades later a Finnish science-fiction writer was prepared to blast the whole of St Petersburg from the face of the earth with an enormous bomb.      Jarmo Nironen’s book Suomalainen Pietari kuvina (‘The Finnish St Petersburg in photographs’) shows a different side of St Petersburg; a cosmopolitan city growing to encompass ten times the population of Finland, offering skilled, hard-working or plain lucky Finns – and even simple country folk from the Karelian Isthmus – a living or sometimes even a splendid career in the highest echelons of society. The sphere of influence around St Petersburg was clear from the start. Peasants went there to sell butter, chopped wood and ruff’s roe, and then drank what they had earned and sold their horses before they even left to go home. A long line of generals, academics, officials in high positions and industrialists is nonetheless testimony to a rather more prolonged drive towards success in the city.      After the Russian occupation of Finland in 1808–09, one of the first Finns to reach high office in St Petersburg was Gustav Mauritz Armfelt. The close friend of Sweden’s King Gustav III soon become a confidant of Alexander I. During the century of Finnish autonomy several other Finns also became close to the Tsar. In many cases, a high-ranking position in St Petersburg became a very valuable tool in diplomatic and military services in independent Finland. The most famous example of this was the 50-year-old lieutenant-general of the Tsar’s cavalry, Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim – the future marshal and president of Finland – who fled the revolution and returned to Finland to lead the White army during the Civil War. The governor of the naval base in Kronstadt, Admiral Robert Viren, met with a fate Mannerheim managed to escape: in 1917 he was executed in Kronstadt’s Anchor Square.      The road leading women to the top was far steeper, since there were no places reserved for women in high society, with the exception of marrying into the upper classes or the court. Exceptional talent and beauty may have helped on the way; examples are the beautiful Finnish of€cer’s daughters Emilie and Aurora Stjernvall, who through their marriages reached the top of St Petersburg society, Emilie as Mme Musin-Pushkina and Aurora as the wife of the fabulously rich Pavel Demidov. To this day, portraits of the women are impressive. Later on, Aurora Karamzin was well known in both Russia and Finland for her charitable work.      At the time of Aurora Karamzin’s death in 1902, Edith Södergran began her education at the newly founded German school; in the decades to come she became one of the pioneers of Finland–Swedish modernist poetry.      The astounding career of Alma Pihl, born as the daughter of the director of Moscow’s Fabergé jewellery workshop, has been recorded in a biography, Anu Seppälä’s Jääkukkia keisarinnalle (‘Ice flowers for the Empress’). It is in fact a miniature biography, typographically expanded to the size of a book, but indeed the career of this wonderful jewellery designer was also short. It was cut short by the Russian revolution before she turned thirty. Life as an art teacher in the industrial town Kuusankoski in Finland could not have been further removed from the world of her St Petersburg customers. Alma Pihl is particularly remembered for two Easter eggs she made for the Emperor’s family – the Winter Egg and the Mosaic Egg – which number amongst the most exquisite pieces of international jewel handicraft.      Alma Pihl’s story in many ways exemplifies the significance St Petersburg held for Finland. Once the revolution had wiped away the thin but affluent cream of society and closed the borders, bringing a halt to everyday interaction, all that remained between Finland and St Petersburg was a mutual suspicion. It is easy to understand why Alma Pihl never told any of her students about her time in the city, which had by then come to be hated. The Russian language was another bone of contention in Finland at that time, so Alma and her husband were forced to speak their home language in whispers.      The Bolsheviks held power in St Petersburg, amongst them many Finns who had fled with the Red army at the end of the Civil War. Nironen’s book deals with the Finnish perception of St Petersburg up until the end of the 1930s, when the majority of Finnish communists in Leningrad and Karelia had been wiped out in Stalin’s process of cleansing.      This rich and colourful epoch has produced a rather grey and conventionally put together book, reminiscent of a photograph album. Albeit somewhat brief, the introduction written in Finnish, English and Russian is an excellent summary of a subject, which is so often blurred by a political agenda. Finns accounted for approximately one to three per cent of the population of St Petersburg – there were lots more Germans – yet the capital of the Empire was still home to more Finns than any city in Finland except Helsinki.      Is this all? It is unfortunate that the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg has not got many more Finnish historians and writers on the move. For instance, the story of post-war Leningrad, which became the first destination for mass tourism from Finland and a favoured place of study, has never been told. S:t Petersburg – metropolen bakom hörnet (‘St Petersburg, the metropolis round the corner’) depicts another side to the city.      The book, written by three young Finland-Swedish authors with many ties to post-communist St Petersburg, is a rather romantic, anecdotal work, though it does provide a good number of addresses and contacts. It is also one of the first guides to St Petersburg to open the door to finding further information by listing a variety of interesting websites.      The text is characterised by an unprejudiced approach, a freshness of ideas and a love of the city, which has become their second home. It takes the reader to the city’s trendy nightclubs, on guided tours of a prison, to the gambling clubs of the nouveau riche, describes terrible memories of the 900-day siege and famine and the landscape of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Most impressive are perhaps the chapters dealing with living in St Petersburg: life in a former luxury house, under the constant beady eyes of greedy estate agents, now shared between a number of different families, a description of the time of Stalin’s ‘new Leningrad’ and the arrival of the wealthy middle classes to the former bastion of party cronies.      The depiction of life in villas (dachas) on the outskirts of St Petersburg, in formerly Finnish villages, is particularly charming. Reading this section of the book, one cannot help thinking that it is in precisely these communities of equal villa inhabitants, the idyll of shared duty and communal responsibility, that the future civil society of Russia may first emerge.   Translated by David Hackston       Top of page