Phenomenal women

For those who thought Finland was just a world leader in mobile telephony, the country’s foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja records in this memoir how a bygone generation was skilled in negotiating its way through the minefields of politics, diplomacy, dramatics, and business. Behind every successful man is a woman, the MCP saying goes. The bygone generation profiled by Tuomioja is female — his maternal grandmother Hella Wuolijoki and her sister Salme Dutt, both of them born in the middle class Murrik family.

It is difficult for women to make a mark in a male-dominated world even in the best of times. It would have been extraordinarily difficult for two women born in 1886 and 1888 to do so in the first half of the 20th century when much of the world, especially Europe, was being ripped apart by two World Wars, and nation-states were being destroyed and recreated. Estonia, where the Murrik sisters were born, was a part of the Swedish and the Russian Empires, becoming independent in 1918, only to be occupied by Russia in 1940, taken over by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944, and then reoccupied by the Soviet Union for almost 47 years before regaining its independence in 1991. Finland (where Hella relocated in 1903 to study in the University of Helsinki before marrying a Finnish citizen Sulo Wuolijoki in 1908, followed by Salme who studied in Moscow University, and was a Finnish athlete in 1913) had quite a volatile history, as a Duchy which was part of the Czar’s empire that became independent in 1917 after the Russian Revolution.

It was an era when the lives of Hella and Salme and millions of others was like the proverbial grass which suffers during an elephant fight. Finland had to maintain an uneasy balance between Nazi Germany’s search for lebensraum (more living space at the cost of smaller neighbouring nations) and Stalinist Russia’s attempt to checkmate Hitler and dominate post-war Europe. Finland found itself sucked into the internecine conflict.

The author narrates how Hella and Salme not just survived the conflict, but remained steadfast to their ideals. From her student days in Moscow University, Salme was associated with the revolutionary movement and subsequently became a secret member of the Comintern, the international Communist organisation initiated in Moscow in 1919 and whose objective was to fight ‘by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie.’ After the dissolution of her first marriage, Salme married the ethnic Indian Rajani Palme Dutt in 1924, who, after securing a first class in Cambridge University, was arrested as a conscientious objector in World War I. He went on to became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.

Despite being influenced by a Russian revolutionary, Meer Abramovich Trilisser, with whom she fell in love shortly after the Finnish General Strike of 1905, Hella was not as doctrinaire as Salme. In the turbulent times in which she lived, Hella moved from career to career. After becoming the first Estonian woman to get a degree from Helsinki University, Hella was interested in not just academics, but also politics, theatre and business. She passionately pursued her interests to become one of Finland’s most popular playwrights (at one point of time, 60 per cent of all royalties to Finnish playwrights went to her) and also a successful businesswoman whose commodity-trading skills were sought after by not just Scandinavian or European business firms, but American ones as well.

All this was in an era where the concept of the multi-tasking woman had not yet been defined. However, in the power play between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, Hella took an unambiguous position on the Soviet side, and this saw her being arrested as a Russian agent during the Continuation War, when Finland was aligned with Nazi Germany. During Finland’s subsequent Lapland War against Germany, Hella was appointed as the first woman director-general of the country’s national broadcasting channel, Yleisradio.

The title of Tuomioja’s book, A Delicate Shade of Pink (the colour being the term for socialists of that era), was perhaps inspired by Hella and not Salme who was an unabashed Red. She was so focused on party work that her creative writing was published under the title, Lucifer and other poems after her death. Although A Delicate Shade of Pink has won the Finlandia Prize for non-fiction, the author is not just a recorder of familial Finnish history. In 1968, when student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Rudi Deutschke and Tariq Ali protested against the Vietnam War on campuses throughout Europe, Tuomioja and his classmates stormed the Old Student House in Helsinki and forcibly occupied it. The revolutionary fervour of the Murrik sisters lingers on.