The Rising Bear

As someone pointed out last night, it was exactly 200 years ago that Russian Cossacks occupied Helsinki, then a thriving metropolis of some 4,500 Swedes (since Finland was still part of Sweden). The cathedral I posted about earlier today was built for the Russians soon thereafter. Russia, as one might imagine, is never far from the minds of the Finns today. The lengthy border between the nations is one of the world’s starkest dividing lines, in terms of measures income and life expectancy. A Finnish male today is expected to live roughly two decades longer than a counterpart across the border. While the Soviet Union was still in existence, roughly 27 percent of Finnish trade was with Russia, but after the end of the Cold War that number dropped to just three percent