The Cold War Reaches Lapland:
HAMORI, LASZLO
THE COLD WAR REACHES LAPLAND By Ladszlo Hadmori STOCKHOLM THE NEWS from Scandinavia in the past six months has featured a series of sensational Communist spy trials. All have had one thing in...
...If the governments of the three northern nations do not awaken to the peril, the West may one day find a strategic fifth column in the mountains and forests of Lapland...
...The mail-order houses of Oslo and Helsinki send leftover goods of poor quality...
...The girls leave northern Sweden at 16 for the South, where high-paying jobs and all the advantages of city life await them...
...Postal service is slow, and the movies are far away...
...Curiously, a more powerful ally of Communism above the Arctic Circle is the physical environment...
...The radio, which is often blacked out anyway by the nearby iron deposits and the polar storms, never carries programs of local interest...
...And taxes seem to bring few benefits to Lapland...
...Their data told merely how the fishing families Andersen and Bjarke or the peasant families Hukkalainen and Leino lived and thought, but somewhere in the Soviet Union these seemingly trivial facts were being card-indexed and made the basis for political infiltration of Lapland...
...And whom are the fishermen of Norwegian Lapland, on their rocky islands, to marry if the girls go off to places where they can find movies, beauty parlors and human company...
...Apart from the Kiruna iron mines in Sweden, Lapland can scarcely be of much economic interest to Moscow...
...This "long night" causes an alternating mood of melancholia and rage among the inhabitants which Swedish psychiatrists have named "Lapp sickness...
...The chief defense of far northern Finland, Sweden and Norway is provided by Nature...
...To be sure, the Swedish iron miners of Kiruna are among the best-paid in Europe, and many Norwegian fishermen carry bankbooks with substantial entries along with their Communist-party cards...
...However, Lapland is unquestionably one of the potentially decisive areas in any future war...
...in the far northern province of Finnmark, however, 23 per cent voted Communist...
...Why is this desolate and forbidding part of the world receiving so much attention from Soviet espionage agencies...
...The blanket of snow that covers everything for ten months is bad enough, but far worse is the terrible darkness...
...Behind the fishing villages and hamlets of northern Norway rise bare mountain peaks, and not a trace of vegetation is to be seen amid the all-enveloping grey-brown stone...
...Nor are there military installations of any importance in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland...
...The revelations at the recent spy trials painted a fantastic picture: Under cover of the 20-hour winter night, fishermen from Kirkenes in Norway and peasants from Sala in Finland had been crossing into Russia on their skis, carrying information for waiting MVD officers...
...In Norway, the Communists won barely 5 per cent of the votes at the last election...
...The Red Army learned in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40 that only small groups of ten to twenty men can operate effectively in the northern regions, and, even then, the support of the local population is often decisive...
...It is this population at which current Soviet infiltration is aimed...
...but to those who live out their lives here 100 or 150 miles from the nearest human habitation, the long, dark winter brings only a feeling of mute rebellion against the world...
...Formerly, these emotions were channeled into a fanatical religiosity, but today it is primarily to Communism that the Laplanders look for a promised sunlight and human companionship...
...Another cause of discontent is the shortage of women...
...In Sweden, where the Communists won only 4.3 per cent of the national vote, they registered 17.1 per cent in the northern province of Norrbotten...
...The election results show that these Soviet efforts have not been in vain...
...But what arouses justified resentment is the feeling of neglect...
...Yet, this Communist strength in the Far North is not due to Soviet efforts alone...
...The sun is completely below the horizon for three months out of the year and appears merely in the form of a pale twilight for another three...
...In Swedish Norrbotten, scrawny birches barely sustain life along the shores of ice-bound lakes...
...All have had one thing in common: The defendants' assignments took them north of the Arctic Circle, to the region commonly known as Lapland...
...Tanks and motor vehicles cannot traverse the vast pine forests, and the absence of roads and rail lines makes even large-scale use of infantry impossible...
...The vast pine forests of northern Finland offer tourists a vista of quiet charm...
...The Scandinavian airline SAS has just opened regular service over the North Pole to Los Angeles--the shortest air route from Europe to the West Coast of the United States...
...The people of the northern regions also have more or less realistic reasons for discontent...
...The young men go to less prosperous Finland for their brides, but then the peasants and forest workers of northern Finland are left high and dry...
...And in Finland, where the powerful Communist party captured 21.6 per cent of the ballots in last March's election, the Communist vote in Lapland was even higher...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
