Lappeenranta: A Travel Essay

In Kauppakatu, the pedestrianised main street of Lappeenranta, there is a granite statue of a seal lying on a low granite pedestal. It looks winsomely at passers by, as if hoping for mercy and life from those who might be inclined to consign it to imminent extinction. This is a monument to the Saimaa seal, the freshwater ringed seal that was left behind in Lake Saimaa at the end of the last ice age. The Saimaa ringed seal in Finland is one of only three populations of freshwater seal in the world. The other two are in Russia, one in nearby Lake Ladoga and the other far from salt water in Lake Baikal in Siberia. How the Baikal seals, nearly 100,000 of them, came to be in Lake Baikal - hundreds of kilometres from the sea and at 455 metres above sea level - remains a mystery.

I asked several people I met in Lappeenranta where I might have the best chance of seeing one of these local Saimaa seals. The answer was always along the same lines: "I have lived in Lappeenranta all my life and I have never seen one. How do you say? Almost extinction?" Conservation efforts and breeding grounds protected from motorised lake traffic have so far yielded little result in terms of population growth. Of the three species of freshwater seal, the population of the Saimaa ringed seal, at just over 300 individuals, is the smallest. I would have to content myself with the photographs in shops and museums and the stone seal on its pedestal. Or would I?

Not far from the granite seal I spotted what looked to be a hairless man in sunglasses. At a first glance, however, the smoothness of the skin covering his skull gave him an appearance not unlike that of a pale wet seal. He was seated at a table outside a café and held a mobile phone tightly pressed to what I assumed was his ear. Now in the country of Nokia, a phone pressed against an ear, even against the ear of an almost-extinct seal, is not a surprising sight. What drew my attention was that the seal, the bald man, seemed at first to have an entirely featureless face: no nose, no mouth, no eyebrows and, quite possibly, no eyes behind the dark glasses. It took me a few moments to realise that he had his glasses on the back of his head. When he stood, I saw that emblazoned across his chest - actually, of course, across his back - his black t-shirt shouted out the words, in bold white capitals, "Jesus is a Cunt". What, I wondered, other than a complete lack of understanding of the English that is hard to credit in Finland, could have led him to sport such a slogan? What history or inner turmoil lay behind it? Perhaps I should have gone across the street to speak to him. But I didn't. From an early age, we are brought up not to speak to strangers in the street; more, I sometimes think, for the protection of strangers rather than of our childhood selves. So, like the Levite and the priest in Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan, I walked silently by on the other side of the road. I was beginning to like the feel of this little Finnish town on the wooded shores of Lake Saimaa very much indeed - seals or no seals - and I did not, selfishly, want the man with the featureless face to spoil it.

We walked down Kauppakatu then straight ahead up the street that leads into the fort. This is where Lappeenranta began. In a flat land full of lakes and waterways, it is an obvious place to build a stronghold. The fortress sits atop a hill surrounded on three sides by the blue waters of Lake Saimaa. Sweden fortified the promontory when this country was part of the Kingdom of Sweden. But that did not stop it being taken by the Russians in 1743 and from then, until 1918, Lappeenranta was part of the Russian Empire - albeit from 1809 part of the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, with its own more gentle rules, and laws derived from old Swedish practice.

From 1743, the new border between Sweden and Russia ran down the middle of Lake Saimaa. Lappeenranta was a border town and as such the recently captured fort here was strengthened. In due course it became one of a series of border fortifications in south-eastern Finland linked by lakes and military canals with the aim of protecting the then newly established Russian capital in St Petersburg from Swedish attack. The brick and wooden buildings that remain in the fortress today still bear, despite their coats of bright paint and the occasional pot of faded summer flowers, a utilitarian military air.

Within the Fort

Among the buildings within the perimeter of the Lappeenranta Fort is the oldest Orthodox church building in Finland. It's on the left as you walk along the main street within the fort. The first Orthodox church on the site was built when the Russians arrived. The Church of St Mary the Virgin that you see today dates from 1785. We went in.

Almost every active Orthodox church of any size that I have visited has a little shop just inside the main door where you can buy postcards and candles and reproduction icons. The church in Lappeenranta proved to be no exception. The woman behind the stall spoke in a gentle, barely audible voice. When we were leaving she said, "I wish you a good holiday and may God bless you." A welcome change from message on the bald man's shirt. Did she also say that General Suvorov had sung here and that he had had a very fine singing voice? She spoke so softly that I couldn't be sure; but, as we walked back out into the sunshine, it seemed to me that that was what she had said.

General Suvorov was Russia's greatest soldier, rivalling in Russian legend even Alexander Nevsky. Some who study war put him on a par with yet another Alexander, Alexander the Great, as one of the two greatest military leaders of all time. Today, one of Russia's highest military honours is named after him. Yet, in his youth, few would have put money on him rising anywhere near to such a position. He was born into a military family, but was, by all accounts, a sickly child and as such destined for an alternative desk-bound career - until he was discovered, as it were, by General Gannibal. Gannibal was the remarkably able African ancestor of Pushkin, who had taken the name of his great African predecessor whom history remembers for his feat of crossing the Alps with an army of elephants. Gannibal, under the patronage of Tsar Peter the Great, had worked his way up through the ranks of the Russian Army, from slave purchased in the bazaars of Constantinople to serf-owning nobleman himself.

Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov was born in 1730. The thin, pinched face in his portraits is not that which you would normally associate with a military genius. Yet, in his entire career, he never lost a battle; indeed, he won more than sixty significant engagements often against numerically superior forces. His years in the field coincided almost exactly with the expansionist reign of Tsarina Catherine the Great.

Suvorov fought the Prussians in the Seven Years War (1756-63) and the Poles later in the decade, capturing Cracow in 1768. He led several campaigns against the Ottomans. At the Battle of Rymnik in 1789, he was commander of the victorious combined forces of Russia and Austria over the Ottoman Turks and in recognition of his role was made a count in both the Russian and Holy Roman Empires. In 1791 he captured the supposedly invincible Turkish fortress at Ismail, near the mouth of the Danube. In his history of the Ottoman Empire, Lords of the Horizon, Jason Goodwin writes:

In the summer of 1774 General Suvarov appeared as Russia's genius, and the bayonet's devotee. 'The ball is a fool - the bayonet a hero!' was one of his maxims. He taught his soldiers to attack instantly and decisively: 'attack with the cold steel - push hard with the bayonet!' His soldiers adored him, and he never lost a single battle. He joshed with his men, called the common soldiers 'brother', and shrewdly presented the results of detailed planning and careful strategy as the work of inspiration. He announced the capture of Ismail in 1791 to the Tsarina Catherine in a doggerel couplet, after the assault had been pressed from house to house, room to room, and nearly every Muslim man woman and child in the city had been killed in three days of uncontrolled massacre, 40,000 Turks dead, a few hundred taken into captivity. For all his bluffness, Suvarov later told an English traveller that when the massacre was over he went back to his tent and wept.

From the Ottoman Wars, Suvorov went on to lead the suppression of the Polish uprising. At the Battle of Warsaw in 1794, Kosciuszko's Polish troops were defeated and the Russian troops, allegedly by then out of their commander's control, went on to massacre some 20,000 civilians in the Warsaw district of Praga.

Sand sculpture, Lappeenranta

Tsarina Catherine the Great also at that time gave Suvorov charge of reinforcing the lines of defence against Sweden in southeast Finland. The war with Sweden in 1788-90, simultaneous with that against the Ottoman Turks in the south, had shown how vulnerable St Petersburg could be to Swedish attack. Not only were forts on Lake Saimaa (Lappeenranta among them) reinforced, but four short military canals across the necks of peninsulas jutting into Lake Saimaa were dug to enable the Russian flotilla on the lake to move from one end of it to the other without passing through Swedish waters. Short in aggregate length though they are, 10,000 workers are said to have died in the construction of these canals. On deaths numbered in their tens of thousands do the reputations of great generals rest.

The Suvorov Military Canals, as they are known, are still there. The Finnish authorities have, not so long ago, rescued them from the claims of nature and made them available to boaters and tourists.

And the voice? Perhaps I had heard the woman on the desk in the church correctly. Catherine the Great died in 1796. Her son Tsar Paul, had an intense dislike of his mother, quite possibly related to the fact that she had had his father, Tsar Peter III, killed when he was a lad of eight. So much did he dislike her that he altered the laws of succession to the Russian throne to ensure that no woman would ever sit on it again. Among other breaks with his mother's policy and circle of advisors, Paul sent General Suvorov into retirement. It is said that during his retirement at his country estate of Konchanskoye he tolled the church bell on Sunday mornings and sang in the village choir alongside his peasants.

I had come across traces of General Suvorov, if not his fine singing voice, before. There is a monument to him in a most unlikely high mountain valley in Switzerland - at Teufelsbrücke (Devil's Bridge) in the Schöllenenschlucht gorge on the north side of the St Gotthard Pass. The Devil's Bridge monument was erected in 1899. Another, Suvorov on his horse, was erected a hundred years later, in 1999, atop the pass itself. Why are these memorials there?

In 1799, the crowned heads of Europe were under threat from the armies of Revolutionary France. In its war against France, Austria specifically asked Tsar Paul for the services of the old general, their old ally against the Turks. By then he was nearly seventy years old. Thus recalled, Suvorov took his army into the field in northern Italy. He defeated Moreau at Cassano and again at Marengo. He defeated MacDonald at the Trebbia River - near to the site of Hannibal's famous victory in 218 BC. He defeated Joubert at Novi - effectively driving the French from Italy. For his role in this campaign Suvarov added the title of Prince of the House of Savoy to his Russian and Holy Roman Empire titles.

Then the Allies changed their plans. They decided to invade France from north of the Alps. Suvorov was ordered to join the other Allied armies on the other side of the mountains, but before he could do so, the Allies suffered a major defeat by a French Army under Masséna at Zürich. It was September when Suvorov began his trek across the Alps. Battling rain, snow and French troops, and hauling its heavy field artillery, Suvorov's army reached the upper Rhine exhausted but largely intact on 7 October 1799.

Today, an eleven-day walking trail - the Via Suwarow - follows the route of Suvorov's Army through the Alps. Starting at Airolo in the upper Ticino, you cross the St Gotthard Pass and descend to Hospental where Suvorov briefly set up his headquarters. From there the route takes you past the Devil's Bridge - built originally in the 12th century to open the route to the St Gotthard Pass from the north through an otherwise impassable gorge - and past 1899 monument marking the centenary of the Russians pushing the French north through this inhospitable valley. When he reached Lake Lucerne, Suvorov found his way blocked again - the French had taken all the boats - and had to strike out east over the mountains (over the Chinzigpass, the Pragelpass and the Panixerpass and harassed by the French all the way) as the days grew shorter and colder. The Via Suwarow continues on eastward from Altdorf, following the same route.

The Via Suwarow hiking trail today is ranked as "difficult". The Russian army's original crossing of the Alps by this route was the marvel of the age, a feat unlike any since Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with his African elephants 2000 years earlier. In recognition of this feat Suvorov was made a Generalissimo of the Russian Empire, the fourth and last to carry this accolade; though Stalin would later award the title to himself in Soviet times.

Suvorov died the next year at home in St Petersburg, spurned by the Tsar who had never really liked him. His funeral was poorly attended. Tsar Paul, however, outlived him by less than a year. He was assassinated on 23 March 1801, quite possibly with the connivance of his son, who, on his father's death, became Tsar Alexander I.

*

Beside the church in Lappeenranta where Suvorov once sang is a low-lying one story wooden building painted dusky yellow. This house dates from the same period as the Orthodox church next door and in its day housed families of officers stationed in the garrison. Since the Russians left, the building has been put to a variety of uses, including a plague hospital in the 1930s; but none, I expect, as welcoming as the café that now occupies the premises. Here we sat, in soft armchairs by a shiny tiled stove, in lace-and-soft-light surroundings that would not have been out of place in an elegant middle-class parlour of the 1950s, sipping coffee, eating home-made cakes served by a gorgeous girl and googling General Suvorov on our phones.

In the café 

Back in the centre of the modern town, near the seal on its plinth, is another wooden building of the same era and similar colour. Since 1993 the home of the Wolkoff family has been a museum to a now-vanished, though not-so-long-ago vanished, way of life. Katja, a student from Tallinn, across the Gulf of Finland in Estonia, showed us round.

Ivan Wolkoff (Volkhov) came to Lappeenranta in the 1840s, from a "serf background" in Russia, to work in the fortress, first as a gardener and then as a butcher. After thirty years he had earned enough to set himself up as a merchant in the town with a substantial house behind the shop. The family business did well - until 1917. Then he lost his supply route, from Russia, and his main client base, the Russian garrison. The shop was leased out and run by others, for others; but his descendants continued to live in the house until 1983. The older people of Lappeenranta remember that when Johannes Wolkoff and his wife lived here, on Sunday mornings he would walk to the Orthodox church in the fort, bidding farewell to his wife who would turn and walk in the opposite direction - to the Lutheran church. After Johannes Wolkoff died his wife converted to Orthodoxy - in order to be buried alongside her husband.

*

On a Sunday morning, when the streets of Lappeenranta were still deserted, we pulled our wheeled suitcases though the streets and along the quays to the M/S Karelia. At 7:30 we set off out onto the lake. The morning air was crisp and there was not a cloud in the deep blue sky, something that made the plume of vapour rising from an enormous lakeside factory all the more prominent. This is the UPM Kaukas pulp and paper mill, one of the largest paper makers in the world. With three-quarters of Finland's land mass covered by forests, it is not surprising that pulp and paper is a major industry here. There has been a paper mill on this site since 1892 and today it produces 740,000 tonnes of pulp each year. More recently, from early 2015, it has become the site of the world's first wood-based diesel refinery. 120 million litres of bio-diesel are to be produced here annually from crude tall oil (from the Swedish tallolja, meaning "pine oil"), a by-product of the pulp making process. The plant also generates electricity (more than it uses in the pulp-making process) from waste bio-mass and exports it to the grid.

The Pulp and Paper Mill

Wood, though, is fundamental to Finland in a deeper way than pulp, paper and bio-diesel. Quite simply, were it not for the trees, this land - and much of Norway, Sweden and adjacent northern Russia - would be uninhabitable. In Old Norse mythology, the first people were made from wood (Ask from ash and Embla from elm) and wood has long provided the fuel to keep their descendants from freezing in winter. Until recently, the houses - like that of the Wolkoffs, like that of the café beside the Orthodox church in the fort - were all built of wood. Finland consumes 390 kg of wood per person per year. As long as the forests are replaced, it is a carbon-neutral form of domestic space heating. Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. They release the carbon back into the atmosphere when they die and decay on the woodland floor - the same amount of carbon as if the wood had been burned in a wood burning stove. There are, of course, the polluting particulates in the smoke from a wood fire. But modern wood-burning stoves, engineered mainly in Scandinavia, nowadays keep the smoke dust entering the atmosphere to a minimum.

During the period of the Second World War, when Finland was fighting the Soviet Union, wood was the country's main source of energy. In each year, more than ten million tonnes of wood were felled. Hakaniemi Market Square in Helsinki became the nation's log pile. The wood piles were four to five metres high. Wood was essential to defending the country's independence. Finland had been independent from Russia for less than a quarter of a century then and the country was determined not to fall under its larger neighbour's sway again.

We went past huge booms of logs, covering almost the entire surface of the lake between the M/S Karelia and the shore where the silent UPM plant and its white vapour plumes rise. Then, a couple of kilometres farther on, we entered the Saimaa Canal that would take us to the sea at Vyborg - or Viipuri as the Finns still know it. The difference in height between Lake Saimaa and the sea is 76 metres. The canal is 43 kilometres long. It would take us into the afternoon to complete its length.

When the original Saimaa Canal was built, between 1845 and 1856, the land through which it passed all lay within the Russian Empire. When Finland became independent in 1917, the canal was entirely within Finnish territory. That all changed in 1947 when Finland had to cede large tracts of Karelia to the Soviet Union, including Viipuri, capital of Karelia and inter-war Finland's second largest town.

In places you can still see the course of the old canal, its disused stairs of small locks alongside the big automated locks of the new canal. But it is no longer used. Traffic ended when half of the territory through which it passed became part of the Soviet Union.

In order to restore access from Lake Saimaa to the sea, Finland arranged to lease that part of the canal now on Russian territory from the Soviet Union in 1963 and set about building a more modern canal, wider and with fewer, but higher and automated, locks. The new canal was opened in 1968.

Along the Saimaa Canal

Today's canal passes between forested banks. In places it crosses natural lakes where exposed granite slopes steeply into the water. You see few houses, either in the Finnish stretch or in the Russian - until the waterside dachas multiply as you approach Vyborg. Other than to descend through the locks, the M/S Karelia only stopped once - at the border. Although passengers were formally admitted to the Russian Federation only on the quayside in Vyborg, the ship was checked here by men (and a woman) in big red-striped khaki hats that have not change in shape since the days of the USSR. Only here were we asked not to take photographs.

Approaching Vyborg

Most of the historic province of Karelia today lies in Russia. Its historic Finnish inhabitants were removed to Finland a generation ago, replaced by a population that was settled here from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. While we were in Lappeenranta there was a temporary exhibition at the museums in the fort - Barefoot: Ten lives in the Karelian Isthmus - that traced the lives in photographs, paintings and documents of ten individuals who had lived quite ordinary lives in Karelia when it was part of Finland. It was quite simply one of the best conceived and most moving of such exhibitions that I have ever seen.

Here we met Hilma Ylä-Outinen, a maid at Niemenlautta Mansion in Vyborg Bay, who posed in a doorway, barefoot and holding a lamb. She was twelve years old in the summer of 1913 when Hugo Simberg painted her. We saw another Hugo Simberg painting of a family walking naked across a plank to a bathing hut perched on stilts above the water. We made the acquaintance of Toivo Kuula, a musician who, in the turbulence of 1918, was accused of being a Bolshevik at a drunken Vyborg party, beaten up, taken outside and shot in the head. We met Emilia von Zweyberg from one of Vyborg's Swedish-speaking merchant families. Emilia's father mysteriously disappeared during a trip to St Petersburg. Her then single mother provided for the children with income from a shop she opened in Vyborg's market hall selling Finnish fabrics and cotton thread made by Finlayson. Finlayson was a Finnish cotton manufacturing firm. James Finlayson, a Glaswegian who lived in St Petersburg in the early 1800s, had founded the firm named after him in Tampere. One of the first industrial-revolution era plants in Finland, it grew to be Tampere's largest employer. The Finlayson cotton mill closed only in 1995. We met Matti Ilonen who earned his livelihood smuggling (goods and people) in the 1920s across the border between Finland and the USSR. We saw a copy of the fake identity card Lenin used when hiding in Finland. We saw evocative 1940s photos of Vyborg - Viipuri, the capital of Finnish Karelia - in ruins.

Viipuri

During the days we were in Vyborg we went out to a nearby dacha village in the Kirovsky District. Land here was given to favourites during Soviet times. It was close to the centre of Vyborg - within walking distance along the railway tracks - and thus much sought after. Today the right-angled streets of the village are unpaved and rutted. Mud fills the ruts.

"It was much better in Soviet times," said Oleg, whose father had grown up here. "The roads were paved then." The former village shop is a gutted black concrete shell today. A few of the village's wooden dachas are painted and have flowers growing in gardens around them. But most are falling down. They look abandoned, but they are probably not. In some plots modern, ostentatious, but ugly, houses are under construction. There are few cars. But one, the shiniest of them all, was a Fiat painted, along both its sides, with the famous photograph of the hammer and sickle being raised over the Berlin Reichstag in 1945.

1870 train timetable from St. Petersburg to Vyborg

"Sometimes," Oleg said, "I bring elderly Finnish tourists to the fields around here to see the farms where they came from. But there is nothing left to see. A few foundation stones, maybe. Nothing else."

*

I went below deck to the M/S Karelia's bar. The barman had been doing a good trade in half-litre plastic mugs of beer since before we left the dockside in Lappeenranta. He told me that he did the trip down the canal to Vyborg and back again five days a week in summer. "Long days," I commented. He smiled. He was always smiling. His dark skin and curly black hair suggested a distant origin. In fact, he looked remarkably like some of the imaginative portraits of General Gannibal, Pushkin's African ancestor.

"From Ethiopia," he replied when I asked where he came from.

"Have you lived in Finland long?"

"Since I was six months old."

"Have you ever gone back to Ethiopia?

"Only once. When I was ten."

There, I thought, is another story. There, in this summer of 2015, in this summer of perilous sea crossings and long treks through foreign lands, go a million other stories.

I went back up on deck just before the Cvetotchnoe Lock, just in time to see a cargo ship pass us, going from the Baltic to Lake Saimaa, from Russia to Finland, the opposite direction to us. It was the only other large vessel we saw that morning in the Saimaa Canal. It was the Sylvia, registered in St John's and flying the red maple leaf of Canada from its stern. I imagine it felt very much at home among the lakes and the granite and the woods of Karelia.