HELSINKI, host to the Olympic Games, a city of 400,000, was abustle. Shop shelves were heavy with wares. Flaxen-haired girls in bright print frocks ate ice cream in the Mannerheiminiie. In the busy streets, pedestrians hailed taxis and visitors alike with their "Hej!" (pronounced hay), which, like America's "Hi!", serves equally as well as a greeting, a toast, or a bid for attention.
Many of this week's visitors (see SPORT) were as interested in seeing how Finland, in the role of little David, stands off the big Goliath on its right, as in watching slim young men in gym suits do the running broad jump. They saw little in Helsinki to remind them of a menace ever present. As in West Berlin, the people who live closest to danger are calmest about it. Less than a dozen miles from spotless, gleaming Helsinki itself, Russian guns firmly emplaced on Finnish soil are ready, if necessary, to reduce the pale architectural spectrum of Finland's capital to rubble. "Please don't write about that," a Finnish civil servant told a TIME correspondent in Helsinki last week. "We in Finland never mention Porkkala."
Porkkala is the name of a 150-sq. mi. enclave just west of Helsinki (see map) that Finland was forced to "lease" to Stalin by the Russian-dictated peace treaty of 1947. There on Finnish soil, behind a secrecy no Finn is al lowed to penetrate, the Russians maintain a division of troops and train their long-range guns on the water lanes to Leningrad. The Russians allow Finnish trains from Helsinki to Turku to pass through Porkkala, but Russian locomotives (actually U.S.-made, sent under lend-lease) pull them, and the windows are sealed with sheet steel on the trip through the fortified zone.
There are other indignities forced upon them by victorious Russia: Petsamo (Pechenga) in the north and timber-rich Finnish Karelia on the east, both annexed by Russia in 1944. The Finns prefer to think and talk of the land they have left, vast (130,000 sq. mi.), rugged and beautiful, stretching high into the Arctic, where the sun shines day & night in summertime. It is a land of 60,000 gleaming lakes set in dark forests that sprawl over 80,000 square miles, a land of granite-strewn farms stingy in yield, of busy, sober towns and endless stretches of bleak, inhospitable marsh and tundra. "We gave them 17,000 square miles of our territory and perhaps a quarter of our national wealth after the war," explained a Helsinki editor last week. "But we will close our eyes to all the little slights and sacrifices as long as we can preserve the essence of our in dependence." "Dollar-Type." A nation of northern ostriches? Far from it. The Finns are not stupidly hiding their eyes from their future, but they are determined not to fall into another fight with a powerful and predatory next-door neighbor 66 times their size (in area, Finland is the sixth largest country in Europe; in population it is the third smallest). Under popular, 81-year-old President Juho Kusti Paasikivi and able, unpopular Agrarian Premier Urho Kekkonen, the Finns have learned to walk the nerve-racking path of independence like tight-rope walkers.