For a variety of reasons - starring roles in some William Gibson novels, a rising interest in energy policy and politics, the sheer insanity of the place, a fondness for news from Finland, the jaw-dropping cyberattack on Estonia last spring - I've been reading a lot of stuff about Russia lately. A friend passed along (via science fiction thinker Bruce Sterling) an article by a Russian analyst on the rise of the "siloviki" - "the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies." According to the article's author, "Never in Russian or Soviet history has the political and economic influence of the security organs been as pervasive as it is now." Think about that: Putin's network of current and former agents apparently exerts more power than the Cheka in the heyday of the tsars or the NKVD at the height of Stalin's power.
A few days ago, I read this International Herald Tribune piece on the way both the European Union and Russia are brandishing "the energy weapon" as part of the EU's attempts to limit the economic influence of Russia's giant Gazprom "company" in the EU member states. It's a bona fide trade war. And then there's this essay in the Times Magazine about the new Kremlinology, guesstimating the course of Russian politics based on observation of the leadership's public activity and behavior. The new Kremlinology is especially hard because Putin is very much inclined to set his own rules - as when, a couple weeks ago, he suddenly fired his prime minister and appointed an unknown official to that post.
Amidst all this hubbub, news emerged in Finland that Boris Yeltsin had, in the cash-starved early 1990s, considered selling back to Finland the territory of Karelia, just east of Finland's current border with Russia. Finland had ceded much of "Karjala" to the Soviet Union in order to end the Winter War in 1940, giving up a tenth of its territory, its then second-biggest city, a major industrial zone, and of course a lot of national pride. The 1992 price for recovering this huge chunk of Suomi was to be a healthy $15 billion then (or about $19 billion now). According to Helsingin Sanomat, "None of these plans got beyond the paper stage. The leadership of a country that was on the verge of disintegration decided that selling parts of Russia to Western countries would be too dangerous an experiment."
Alas, Finland might not have been able to accept the offer, even if it had been extended. As observers have pointed out, the county was in dire economic straits at the time, and the cost of absorbing Karjala would have been staggering - on a par, in relative terms, with the cost of unifying the two Germanies. Pekka Hakala at the Helsingin Sanomat: "The multi-billion-dollar Karelia Purchase would soon have been seen alongside all the belt-tightening and cuts being urged upon the public sector and set against the bread-lines that had recently appeared at Finnish Salvation Army citadels."Yeah, sure, we got Karelia, but it cost us the Welfare State" would have been a familiar jibe, whether or not it was strictly true.