Finland has more than 50,000 lakes. In the summer, Finns go there to let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes or take a sauna (there are thousands of wooden cabins by the lakes). In winter they practice fishing. They pierce the ice with a giant filaberquin, throw a line with a hook into the water and sit in a folding chair to wait.

Helsinki is the easternmost of the Nordic capitals and has a magnificent art nouveau railway station that looks like an exit from Gotham City. If you also want to know something about the gentle Finnish character, go see Fallen Leaves, a recent love film between simple people by Aki Kaurismäki.

The Finns are practical and have come out of the worst moments in their history. Their problem has always been Russia. Helsinki is six hours from Saint Petersburg. And only the metropolitan area of ??this Russian city has more population than all of Finland (5.5 million).

After centuries of Swedish sovereignty, Finland was annexed in 1808 by the Tsarist Empire. It declared independence in 1917, taking advantage of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. The Soviets insisted on invading it again in 1939 and again between 1941 and 1944. Finland survived as a state but at the price of a neutrality monitored by the Soviet security services. Hailed as an imaginative formula for surviving alongside the empire, few Finns today feel nostalgic for that period known as “Finlandization,” which ended during the end of the Soviet Union.

The fall of the Soviet Union left Finland without its largest market and plunged it into a crushing recession. The country was reborn as an innovative economy admired by half the world. These were the great years of Finnish globalization, summed up in the rise and fall (1998-2011) of Nokia, the world leader in mobile phones.

This Sunday Finland elected the conservative Alexander Stubb as president. He will lead a new stage in the country’s history, this time as the youngest member of NATO, where he entered in April 2023 increasingly worried about the new Russian expansionism. Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, in which Moscow practices a peculiar hybrid war: it keeps sending asylum seekers to put pressure on the Finns.