Great American West

1997

 Minot Fairgrounds

There was no foreign travel for me in 1997 so I got to see a big chunk of the Great American West. The main event on my agenda was FinnFest-USA scheduled in a remote location in the West at the old railroad city of Minot, North Dakota, Finn country in the sense that many 19th Century immigrant Finns had settled as homesteaders in the North Dakota plains to farm. Minot was founded in the north central part of the state in 1886 which became the terminus of James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad when winter came and more track laying was made impossible to go westward until the next spring. It grew fast in the next few months and became know as “Magic City.” It became a major trading center serving the northern part of the state, southwestern Manitoba, and southeastern Saskatchewan. It achieved notoriety in the 1920s when Al Capone used it as a center for Prohibition bootleg liquor distribution and prostitution and became the crime capital of North Dakota called “Little Chicago.” All that bad stuff had been cleaned up by FinnFest time as an Air Force base had been built nearby in the 1950s and the population had grown to about 40,000.

FinnFest-1997 was located in the Minot’s huge fairgrounds with large meeting tents installed to supplement its permanent infrastructure for our annual celebration. The programs were our usual fare of lecturers from both USA and Finland, music, art, the annual dance and dinner and the Tori or Marketplace to sell books, records, films, clothing such as national costumes, puukko knives and various handicrafts. The usual coffee bars with their food services abounded in cafes throughout the premises. After all, no FinnFest would be complete without plenty of coffee to drink all over. My favorite happening was a dramatic enactment of Aleksis Kivi’s classic 19th Century novel, Seitsemän veljestä or “Seven Brothers” in a robust physicalized presentation by a young Finnish male troupe from Nurmijärvi in Southern Finland. Some older readers may recall the American motion picture, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” based on Kivi’s novel.
 

GREAT NORTHERN RAILROAD RIDE WEST

Following FinnFest, I boarded the transcontinental Great Northern Railroad train westward to Montana to view some of most scenic sights I had ever experienced in the American West. I had driven across the country as a callow youth of 23 on a different highway in my 1941 Chevy Club coupe back in 1949. But this time I didn’t need to keep my hands on the wheel and eyes peered on the road ahead, and could leisurely behold the magnificent panorama unfolding before me through the large windows of a passenger train. Montana was certainly a glorious state to behold and wasn’t called the Big Sky Country for nothing. My seat partner for much of the trip was a Western cowboy type, complete with ten gallon hat and boots of about 40 years with a rugged well-tanned face which spoke of the outdoors. Courteous and pleasant but shy on the small talk. When he got off at a way station I had a romantic notion that a saddled-up horse was waiting for him by the platform on which he’d jump and go riding off into the desert. But no, it was some buddy standing by with a pickup truck.

I detrained at a Northwestern Montana station at Flume, where I was met by prearrangement by my old ITU union brother Eugene Jack who was living in Cascade, Montana, with his second wife Patty. They were with Gene’s schoolboy grandson by his first wife in their camper van to spirit me a couple of hours due south to their ranch.
 

MY LIFE ON THE MISSOURI

My father’s favorite book in Finnish translation had been Mark Twain’s nonfiction “My Life on the Mississippi,” which he had read over and over again. My life on the Missouri lasted only about three days as that magnificent waterway flowed alongside the county road that ran below the Jacks’ spread a few miles east of Cascade. Gene sold his electronics shop for a good sum in Denver and wanted to retire to a spread similar to the cattle ranch on which he had grown up in Colorado. So he had scouted for a place for several weeks in different parts of the West until he found the place in Cascade which he bought for cash. It was a retirement home for them for the summer months where their only attempts at an agrarian lifestyle was a cornfield fenced in with chicken wire to keep the wild deer from eating up all the corn. Winters they’d hole up in Southern Arizona in their camper or with access to fishing waters in Baja California. I stayed in a bunk house down the hill from the ranch house where a woodchuck would keep me awake for a couple of hours a night burrowing beneath the floor boards. We had some great conversations about the world situation and politics during my stay. Gene also taught me enough about computer usage so I could read the New York Times every morning on line in their study. Far away in the wide expanses of Montana! But time came for them to drive me to that greatest of the Western Finntowns of Butte.
 

ADVENTURES IN BUTTE

Butte Uptown
 

“Look for me in Butte / Where the mountains meet the stars / And I’ll be drinking with the miners / at the Old Helsinki Bar.”

— Song by Wobbly folksingers Mark Ross and the late U. Utah Phillips.

And the Helsinki Bar was the first stop for the Jacks and me as we hit the old mining town of Butte. It was the last of the old Finntown bars which once lined a whole block of the city which its Finns called “The Mannerheim Line” along with its whorehouses during its mining heyday long gone, according to my old San Francisco Longshore buddy, the late Reino Erkkila, who grew up there. Our thirst was quenched by a couple of ginger ales at this remnant bar owned by a young half-German, half-Finnish barkeep. He told us that every St. Urho’s Day on March 16, an ersatz Finnish holiday invented by some good ole Minnesota boys, to rival the Irish Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17. On St. Urho’s Day he’d load his juke box up with some old Finnish pop tunes as the Irish boozers would join with their Finnish counterparts for some serious holiday drinking. Next day the Finn crowd would join the Irish at their emporiums to drink and listen to some sentimental music of the Old Sod to honor the venerable St. Pat. It was said that the Irish were the largest ethnic component during Butte’s copper mining days at the Anaconda pits with Finnish immigrants second in number. But it wasn’t just fun and games and boisterous bar life that marked the history of the Butte workers. Violent class war between labor and the mine bosses and their politicians was central to Butte’s history starting in the 19th century and well into the 20th,. For instance, on June 23, 1914, the union hall of the Butte Miners Union had been blown up in the middle of a bitter strike that was then being waged.

After the Jacks dropped me off at a rustic motel at the south end of downtown, I called up Dennis Georg, the longtime IWW delegate living in Butte. Dennis was a roving union electrician on Montana’s railroads who picked up Wobbly dues from bindle stiffs, miners, and gandy dancers along his service routes. He took me to various old mining sites in Butte including the contaminated Berkeley Pit (a former open pit mine, with open pit mining spreading after incidents like the underground Speculator disaster of 1917.) which would kill any migratory birds that might swoop down on its lethal waters to quench their thirst. Dennis drove me to the grave of the great IWW martyr Frank Little, the Union’s legendary organizer, who had come to Butte during the 1917 copper mining strike to address a union rally at the community baseball park. That night a Anaconda bosses’ lynch mob dragged FW Little out of his Finnish-run hotel room, tied a rope around his neck with the other end wrapped around the bumper of a car and dragged his body five miles out of town. He was already dead by the time they strung him up by his neck from a tree branch.

The mining community rose up as one as 5,000–10,000 miners and their families walked Frank Little’s coffin for several miles to the cemetery in a torchlight procession. Reino Erkkila, whose father Herman was then an IWW Butte copper miner, walked in that procession with his parents and siblings, at about ten years old, in one of the signature memories of his life. Reino, who became a longshoreman like his father, who had moved his family to San Francisco in the late 1920s, was bound to become a strong union man because of these graphic childhood experiences and was a long time activist on the Bay Area docks in the ILWU, serving at various times as dispatcher, business agent, secretary-treasurer, and president of the Longshore Union’s powerful Local 10 during his working life.

In 1920 during a strike of the Butte Miner’s Union, Anaconda Company armed guards suddenly opened fire on a group of strikers in what was called the Anaconda Road Massacre, Sixteen men were hit in the back as they ran away. One of them, Tom Manning, died of his wounds. Because of poor handling of the ensuing court cases his killer was never identified. That sealed the death of the labor movement in Butte until the New Deal reforms made it possible to organize again, but through the Twenties Butte was pretty much an open shop town.

The copper mining was really extinct during my 1997 visit and practically all of Butte appeared as an ugly museum of an industrial era that had run its course in which death had been a constant visitor. I visited a huge monument on a plaza overlooking a devastated area below. On the monument were 168 names of miners who had been killed in at the underground Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine fire on June 8, 1917, emanating from a cable that had ignited . “The copper bosses killed you, Joe, they killed you, Joe says I,” ran the classic labor song, “Joe Hill.” Joe Hill may never have worked for Anaconda but many of his fellow workers met their doom at Butte at Speculator. It was the deadliest hard rock mining disaster in the history of the United States. I saw countless names of my fellow Finns among the victims who had perished in that tragedy. I recall the great hopes in America that many of my brethren had for a new life as they migrated here from the misery of their lives in the “old country.” Some succeeded in the New World, others like in the copper mines of far-off Montana were not that lucky. With heavy heart I left this great wasteland of capitalist America.
 

OVERNIGHT IN RED LODGE (“RETULAATSI”)

Red Lodge Main Street
 

Lännen Lokari

“Täss on lokari lännen risukosta / Olen kulkenut vaikka missä / Olen käynynnä Piutissa, Louisissa / Retulaatsissa, Miamissa.”

The Western Logger

“Here is a logger from the Western brush / I’ve travelled around all over / I’ve been to Butte and St. Louis / Red Lodge and Miami.”

(Finnish lyrics by Hiski Salomaa, Finnish-American folk singer and songwriter, 1891–1957. English trans. by H.S.)

I had run into Yrjo (George) and Taimi Nygard at the Minot FinnFest. George’s sister Aune Hendrickson was a chorus member and Lodge Sister at my Berkeley Finnish Hall. I told them about my planned travel in Montana on this trip and they immediately invited me to visit them at their home in Red Lodge, called “Retulaatsi” in the Finglish of Hiski Salomaa’s song. I rented a car for a round trip from Butte to Red Lodge and barrelled down the excellent sparsely travelled highway southwest at speeds up to 100 miles an hour, which seemed to be the average speed, to my destination which lies in the Billings metropolitan area.

Red Lodge was a town now of about 1200 residents which was once a prosperous coal mining town which was opened for its operations by stealing the land from the Crow Indian Reservation which had been granted its status by US government treaty with the Crows in 1854. However, in 1866 rich coal deposits were found and the Crow Reservation Treaty was amended to allow some white settlers within its bounds, amended further in 1892 to make the whole territory open to paleface settlement. So King Coal took over for the next several decades as a source of great profit for capital investment. Immigrant miners who worked the mines came from Italy, Scotland, Wales, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Austro-Hungary. Red Lodge grew to about 5000 inhabitants during the boom. In 1896 there were 200 saloons in Red Lodge. But in the Great Depression many mines began to close down, with the economy then sustained by illegal bootleg booze called “syrup” which found markets as far away as San Francisco and Chicago. Between 1931 and 1936 the Beartooth Highway was built to connect Red Lodge to Yellowstone National Park which turned the town into a seasonal tourist and cultural center, bustling with motels and restaurants with the mines now extinct. Upon arrival I checked into one of these motels.

I immediately looked up the Nygards but couldn’t spend as much time as I wanted with them because that evening they were to attend the annual banquet of the Red Lodge Historical Society of which they were active members. But they invited me to breakfast the next morning. They did introduce me to another elderly Finish couple with whom I shared a rewarding evening with coffee, pullaa (a Finnish coffee bread) and conversation. I recall hearing about a Finnish Workers Hall in Red Lodge during the mining days. In 1997 the only Finnish organization in the area was a chapter of the non-political Ladies of Kaleva, headquartered in Minnesota. It operated along the lines of Masonic ritual and belief in god was mandatory for membership in the Knights and Ladies of Kaleva. Not my cup of tea.
 

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

Yellowstone Falls

After breakfast with the Nygards, I headed south straight up the mountainside on the Beartooth Highway toward Yellowstone National Park which was established by Congress in 1872 and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1. It was the first National Park founded in the United States and covers 3,468.4 square miles, mostly in Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho, covering lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges. It also encompasses the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest super-volcano on the continent. Lava flows and volcanic rock emanating from it cover a good part of the land area of the park. Wildlife within its bounds include grizzly bears, wolves, free-ranging herds of bisons, and elk, Yellowstone is also heavily forested, and subjected annually to raging forest fires. I remember barely escaping firefighting press gangs during one of these fires in 1949 on my first trip West in Montana which were savaging the Yellowstone to the south of us that summer. Yellowstone’s human history began 11,000 years ago when markers indicate Native Americans were hunting and fishing in the region. When Lewis and Clark were travelling through the area in 1805, they encountered Nez Perce, Crow, and Shoshone tribes.

I had left Red Lodge in the blazing summer heat but as I ascended to the highest reaches I saw massive snow banks on both sides of the plowed roads towering perhaps 20 feet above me! Yet the roadbed below my wheels had been kept clean of ice and snow by highway snow removal crews. But as the day progressed the traffic slowed to a crawl on the park roads as Americans by the millions were touring the country’s spectacular sights during this summer vacation season in their cars, campers, pull-along trailers, and metropolitan luxury vans for those with big bucks. Yet the sights were splendid and made the West a grand place to be during vacation months. I did see bears, elk and deer from time to time. It was the most magic trek for me that summer, as I pulled back onto the superhighway to Butte to bed for the night.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

SALT LAKE CITY

Joe Hill’s Last Will

(Written in his cell , September 18, 1915 on the eve of his execution)

My will is easy to decide.\ / For there is nothing to divide. / My kin don’t need to fuss and moan — / “Moss does not cling to rolling stone.” / My body! Ah, if I could choose, / I would to ashes it reduce, / And let the merry breezes blow / My dust to where some flowers grow. / Perhaps some fading flower then / Would come to life and bloom again, / This is my last and final will, / Good luck to all of you

— JOE HILL

My next stop was in Salt Lake City, which lives in infamy as the state of Utah murdered IWW organizer and troubadour Joe Hill (b. Joel Emmanuel Hagglund) by firing squad on a bum rap! Before Mormons had ever been thought of, the Great Salt Lake been peopled thousands of years before them by wandering tribes of Shoshones, Utes, and Paiute. In 1847, Brigham Young and his Latter-Day Saints coreligionist white settlers with their strange dogmas arrived on the scene to eventually establish the State of Utah by 1857. For readers interested in the history of Mormonism in the region, please consult Wikileaks. I will plunge directly into my visits with my Fellow Workers living in Salt Lake City.

I had met Fellow Workers Tony and Hazel Roehrig and Michael (Moondog) Garcia at an IWW Convention in the Bay Area and will focus on my visits with them. Checking into a motel, I visited Moondog at the saloon where he worked as a bartender and who gave me the lowdown on working conditions in Utah. Next day I stopped by the Roehrig home where they lived with their young school girl daughters. Hazel herself was a school teacher by profession. That evening I enjoyed my evening meals in a restaurant with the adult Roehrigs and Moondog Garcia and his life partner. As usual there was a lot of discussion about our favorite union we all had in common. That night I slept at Moondog’s home where he lived with his lady friend. Lots of convivial talk of world affairs on the state of the labor movement on the world scene. No real sightseeing in Salt Lake City except the Great Mormon Temple in City Center bathed in bright lights, my first night in town when I stayed at my motel. I had drunk a couple of mineral waters at Moondog’s bar, and had a terrible need to pee just as I was passing that sacred shrine to true believers. No gas stations in sight and the motel was too far away to reach in time. I was not about to wet my pants, so I pissed by the sidewalk fence bordering the temple, with not a soul in sight. I did not see it as sacrilege, just aware of a full bladder that needed to be purged. Were Joseph Smith and Brigham Young in severe disapproval over my overdue call of nature? I have yet to experience their wrath from Mormon heaven.
 

WINNEMUCCA, RENO, SACRAMENTO, OAKLAND

After the traditional elegant four-star gourmet breakfast at the Greyhound Station restaurant in Salt Lake, I mounted The Dawg for the long dreary, desert ride toward the SF Bay Area and home. About the only intervention to break up the tedium came from a couple of loudmouth Western yokels who sat together in the rear row of the bus who served as our tour guides commenting about the brothel scene in every whistle stop that we passed through. We learned the names of the joints, even some of the names of the madams and women who plied their trade in them whether any of their fellow passengers were interested or not, including elderly women visiting their grandchildren en route. Nobody seemed to object to these inventories of lascivious offerings, even the bus drivers who just drove on with nary a peep. We had one forty-ish tough-looking redhead in mini-skirt and heels get on board in Salt Lake carrying a hatbox who got off the at some obscure hamlet well along the way. Our back row foghorns let out a hoot and a wolf whistle and loudly announced the name of the house in which she’d be working. We had a rest stop in Winnemucca, historically one of the largest and most notorious of the whoretowns of Nevada. But even our most jaded passengers ignored such options, and many made a beeline for the nickel slots to seek their paltry fortunes before the loudspeakers made their first call for the riders to return to their seats.
 

EVENING STROLL IN RENO

My legs were pretty cramped when we hit the great gambling Mecca of Reno, Nevada with its round-the-clock quickie wedding chapels and attorneys who specialized in divorce cases for a quick buck for countless visitors who saw it as an easy way to splitsville from incompatible spouses. I decided to continue West on a later bus to loosen up my legs and joints from their agony of many hours of sitting on the bus without adequate respite. After a decent supper in a restaurant other than a Greyhound Post House, I climbed on board on a later transport toward California.

I stayed overnight in a shabby hotel in downtown Sacramento in hopes of seeing my stepdaughter Danette and my two grandsons Nicolas and Jacob. She had given me two contact phone numbers to reach her earlier, but she never did respond to my frequent calls, during my hiatus in the city so with a touch of sadness I resumed my journey to Oakland and home to Berkeley.

Nothing of any pitch and moment marked my life for the rest of 1977, except election as recording secretary for 1998 of the Tenants Association at Strawberry Creek Lodge senior housing, not a popular job in almost any organization.

1998

LECTURE ON SANTERI NUORTEVA

Santeri Nuorteva

Being raised in a Finnish immigrant Socialist Party family, discussions among my parents, relatives and their friends were frequently about the politics of the radical Finnish Left. My parents and my uncle August Siitonen and his wife Aino until her premature death in 1936, were avid readers of the Finnish language social democratic newspaper Raivaaja published in nearby Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Uncle August also subscribed to Säkeniä (Sparks) a newsprint monthly theoretical magazine published by Raivaaja and edited by Santeri Nuorteva, a Finnish Socialist who had fled to the United States in 1911 to escape treason charges for his critical articles in Finnish newspapers on Czarist Russian political oppression, with Finland still being Russia’s Grand Duchy at the time. Every so often Uncle August would bring a batch of these magazines to store in our farmhouse basement. Always a curious kid whose first language was Finnish, by age 12 I could read the lingo and dug up a bunch of mouldy, smelly old Säkeniä from the cellar. So Nuorteva became an early teacher of Marxian socialism for me through his well-reasoned essays in its pages. He even wrote a Finnish-to-English dictionary printed by Raivaaja which my mother had but with the pressures of politics was never able to write its English-to-Finnish counterpart. Actually, this international revolutionary had died in 1929 at the young age of 49 in Leningrad when I was only three years old. But by bits and pieces of published information I became fairly well-versed about the highlights of his political life. Yet it wasn’t until I read Turku University history professor Dr. Auvo Kostiainen’s 1983 biography of him: “Santeri Nuorteva — An International Finn,” published by the Finnish Historical Society, that I bought in Helsinki in the Eighties. that gave me a comprehensive account of his political life and significance. (It was written in Finnish with a concluding summary chapter in English.)
 

1998 FINNFEST IN GORHAM, MAINE

Since the 1998 New England FinnFest was scheduled in Maine I decided to attend as a native New Englander. Since I had missed the first New England celebration held in Fitchburg, MA in 1984, I made sure to sign up for this one. Since one of the early remaining Finnish-American newspapers Raivaaja was still published there, it would be appropriate to have a lecture about it at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham. I had never done a researched lecture at one of these FinnFests so I approached the organizers to get on the program and as a regular contributor to the paper I had the solid backing of its editor Marita Cauthen and business manager Jonathan Ratila for the project. I picked my theme as Santeri Nuorteva who had been connected with Raivaaja as an editor in the teens of the 20th Century. Most of the first generation Finnish-American Socialists who might have known him politically had passed on, and few of those in the second generation had never heard of the once prominent Nuorteva. My proposal was heartily accepted and I tackled the research in earnest. I lectured from an outline at Maine. (Detailed bibliographical references can be found in: SCANS)
 

SUMMARY OF MY SANTERI NUORTEVA TALK

Nuorteva was born in 1881 in Viipuri, Finland (then as now part of Russia) as Alexander Nyberg to telegrapher Claes Fredrik Nyberg and his Russian-Jewish wife Anna Aleksandrova Sanarova. After high school in 1904–1907 he worked as a primary school language teacher in Forssa in Southwestern Finland and edited the Forssa News, 1904–1906. (He was said to have been conversant in nine languages.) Nyberg changed his name to the pseudonym Santeri Nuorteva during the Russian Revolution of 1905. He was a socialist magazine journalist in Turku in 1908 and in Tampere from 1909–1911. In 1909 he was in prison briefly on a charge of Lese Majeste against the Russian crown. He served two terms as a Social Democratic MP in the Finnish Parliament between 1907 and 1911. (In fact, Nuorteva served in the first Finnish Parliament in 1907 after universal franchise was recognized for both men and women following Finland’s 1905 General Strike. The Social Democratic Party, founded in 1904, became the largest political party, electing 80 members, including a sizeable showing of socialist women!) But Nuorteva, an eloquent speaker and writer who was not afraid of criticizing the Russian state of which Finland was a quasi-independent grand duchy, again faced a treason charge with certain imprisonment, so he and his wife actress Sanni Nuorteva fled the country for the United States.

They settled in heavily Finn-populated Astoria, Oregon where Nuorteva became editor of the Finnish language SP newspaper Toveri (The Comrade). His Finnish political fame had preceded him to the States and quickly he became a leading member of the Finnish Federation of the Socialist Party of America. With his English language fluency he was the first Finn to be elected to be elected to the National Committee of the Socialist Party itself. The Nuorteva’s firstborn, daughter Kerttu, was born in Astoria in 1912. As I remember, Sanni Nuorteva continued her acting pursuits with the Finnish Socialist Hall’s drama society in Astoria.
 

NUORTEVA-VIITA LABOR CONTROVERSY

Trouble seemed to follow Nuorteva everywhere he went. Because of his English language fluency, an AFL lumber workers union hired him as an organizer. They sent him as far off as California to organize loggers. This did not set very well with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which was popular with Finnish immigrant workers in the forests. IWW organizer John Viita* attacked Nuorteva mercilessly as betraying the revolutionary unionism of the IWW by being bought off as a craven piecard for a conservative reformist union federation which they called the “American Separation of Labor” because of its craft union legacy. Meantime, Nuorteva didn’t fare so well in California, either, as the lumber bosses’ thugs threatened to kill him. So the Nuortevas thought the West Coast was not the place they wanted to be. Their next stop was Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1914 where Santeri was hired by the social democratic Raivaaja (The Pioneer) to edit its theoretical periodical Säkeniä (Sparks) plus assisting Raivaaja in general.

(*John Viita did not disappear from sight after his lambasting of Nuorteva. He later joined the Communist Party after its formation in the United States and was one of the few Finns to serve on its National Committee. In 1940, he quietly dropped out of the CP and spent the remainder of his working life as an insurance agent in the Finnish community of Northeastern Connecticut. During his political days he also used the pseudonym Henry Puro. For a more detailed account of this Viita-Nuorteva controversy see my paper “The Finnish-American Labor Movement — An Historical Outline.”— HS.
 

NUORTEVA AIDS FINNISH REDS IN CIVIL WAR

The Nuortevas deeply involved themselves in their new life in Fitchburg. Säkeniä became highly valued for its intellectual level in the Finnish socialist community. Nuorteva was busy on the political lecture and class circuit and seen as a well-reasoned and more of a moderate Marxist. He was also a personable, likeable person to know. Sanni soon found herself as a fine actress on the Saima Hall stage where I had seen numerous plays later while growing up as my parents were devoted theater fans. Two sons, Matti and Pentti, were born to them during their happy Fitchburg years. Then came the bloody Finnish civil war in 1917–’18 which galvanized the American Finnish ranks in support of the Finnish Socialist Republic which had assumed power in the southern part of the country over the ruling White bourgeoisie. My parents were strong supporters of the new workers’ republic and deplored the atrocities of the White Guard forces advancing from the North let by General Carl Gustave Mannerheim whom they and their comrades called the Lahtarit (or Butchers) although all the atrocities weren’t limited to one side. As a former member of the Finnish Parliament, Nuorteva with his administrative and rhetorical talents quickly established himself as the chief spokesman in the United States on behalf of the Finnish Red government. With his considerable powers of persuasion he was able for a time to have some leverage in some US government circles in favor of the Finnish workers’ government as the best option for a democratic Finland. But the tide turned when Finnish capitalism with the assistance of their Swedish counterparts, with an armed expeditionary German force landing in Southern Finland and advancing to capture Helsinki and other cities to end the war. Mannerheim had persuaded the Finnish conservative rural folks to join his armed ranks to prevent Russia from conquering Finland, whereas the new Soviet government had made peace with Germany with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk to escape their own bloody war and promising not to intervene in the Finnish Civil War. In fact the Finnish Red government wanted Russian military forces to leave the country dating from its old rule over Finland to demonstrate that Finnish workers were fighting their own independent war without Soviet intervention, except for some Russian volunteers, including a small contingent of Russian anarchist marines who were slaughtered in the decisive battle of Tampere which ended the war in the Whites’ favor in three months. With the Reds’s defeat, Nuorteva with his Russian language background became the new Russian State’s contact person to the world thus aligning himself with Communist politics for good. He thus became the first significant defector from the Raivaaja’s traditional Second International social democracy, followed only by staffer Onni Saari who also opted for Bolshevism for many years. Finally, Soviet operative Ludwig Martens became the “unofficial Soviet ambassador to the US” along with Nuorteva’s continuing his role in being a “good guy” in developing positive relations between the two countries. This aroused more suspicion in the US ruling circles of Soviet intentions which ended with Nuorteva’s deportation there in 1920. After a brief imprisonment in his new country in the early 1920s, he served in many political and administrative functions in both Moscow and Soviet Karelia where he served as President of the Republic for a time. Wife Sanni and the children followed him to Russia where they lived in Petrozavodsk where the kids went to school. His nonstop workaholic lifestyle played havoc with his health and after a brief illness Santeri died suddenly in Leningrad in 1929 at the youngish age of 49.

Nuorteva remained loyal to the Soviet Union to the end despite the fact that Stalinism was emerging as the ruthless governing force in the USSR, sidelining Leon Trotsky and rightist Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin so Joseph Stalin would become absolute sole dictator, finally killing off the old Bolsheviks in the 1930s Terror. Nuorteva appeared to be totally blind to all of what was happening, this most decent of all the Bolsheviks. Why? Oskari Tokoi, one of the best-known Finnish Mensheviks who emigrated to the United States and became a long term Raivaaja editor had the best answers. Both men had served as Social Democratic MPs in the first Finnish Parliament of 1907, Tokoi becoming an early de facto prime minster. Following the Russian Revolution, these former colleagues split. with Tokoi’s democratic socialism becoming strongly anti-communist. In his memoirs Tokoi regarded Nuorteva as an honest, principled human being but hopelessly naive in the realpolitick of the world in which they lived. The conspiratorial manipulations of Lenin and his cohort completely escaped him that eventually morphed into Stalinism, of which Tokoi was critical from the early 1920s on. Nuorteva was incapable of that incisive a criticism. He showed a childish gullibility that accepted the most superficial and dangerous nonsense as truth, according to Tokoi, in the world of revolutionary politics.
 

TRAGEDY OF NUORTEVA CHILDREN

Santeri and Sanni Nuorteva’s children who grew up in Petroskoi suffered a tragic fate. During the Continuation War Matti and Pentti Nuorteva were inducted into the Red Army in 1941. They were sent as disguised Finnish ski troopers behind Finnish Army lines, were discovered almost immediately and shot by firing squads. Daughter Kerttu became a Communist like her father and ended up in a Soviet prison for three years for some alleged political crime, But in 1941 she was released when she was enlisted as a spy to operate in Finland, gaining secret access into the country by parachute drop, for which she was trained by the Red Army. in March of 1942. Operating as a secret radio operator in Helsinki for Russia, Kerttu was arrested in September, 1942 by Valpo, the FBI of Finland, and sentenced to death as a spy. While waiting for the inevitable, Valpo found other uses for her as the daughter of Santeri Nuorteva. They sent Arvo (Poika) Tuominen, former secret head of the underground Finnish CP who was a Comintern spy in Stockholm prior to the Winter War but who changed sides when Russia attacked Finland in November, 1939, to the prison for a series of conversations with Kerttu to convert her away from Communism. He argued that the real world of the Soviet Union was entirely the opposite of the society that her father fought to build his entire life. He finally convinced her of his arguments in some exhaustive exchanges. She went one step further; she named names of pro-Soviet agents in Finland. Eleven went to prison due to her testimony, including the popular feminist playwright, pro-Soviet fellow traveler Hella Wuolijoki. Wuolijoki never forgave Kerttu Nuorteva for this. Finnish authorities offered Nuorteva Western asylum for her cooperation, but she refused. She was deported to the Soviet Union in 1947 where she was arrested and sentenced to ten years but released in 1954, one year after the death of Joseph Stalin. She studied construction engineering afterward and worked on hydroelectric power stations in what became Kazakhstan. She died of meningitis in 1968.

(Director Jörn Donner produced an excellent Finnish film Kuulustus (Interrogation) in 2009 on the life of Kerttu Nuorteva, available on DVD with English subtitles.

—HS)

End of Installment 35