Four men on the ice of the Gulf of Finland
In the spring of 1918 four Estonians fled across the ice to Finland. Jüri Vilms was one of the men who declared Estonia's independence, and he served as Minister of Justice and Deputy Prime Minister in the country's first government. With him were Arnold Jürgens, twenty-six, and Johann Peistik, twenty-four, young athletic men already holding posts of consequence, and as their guide Aleksei Rünk, thirty-three, a farmhand with long experience of travelling on ice. Their task was to work through Finland towards the forming of an Estonian government-in-exile, now that their homeland had fallen under German occupation.
Vilms and his companions did not know that the troops under General Rüdiger von der Goltz held Helsinki. The Germans had helped the Finnish Whites take the capital from the Reds. The men were seized and handed over to the Germans.
A report someone wanted commissioned
A few private individuals in Finland, working for money, drew up a report for the Estonians according to which the four men had been shot on 13 April 1918 at the Töölö Sugar Factory — on the shore of Töölönlahti bay, where the Opera House stands today — which von der Goltz's troops were using as their quarters. In Estonia the report acquired official standing, because it fitted the pattern of the moment so neatly.
The Germans flatly denied any part in it. Since Germany was occupying Estonia at the same time, Estonians in the resistance found the Finnish report easy to believe.
Bones into coffins, questions left open
When the German Empire collapsed, Estonia was freed from occupation and regained its independence. The fate of Vilms and his comrades troubled the young state's government. With Germany still denying its guilt, in December 1920 Estonia sent investigators to Helsinki to establish what had really happened.
In Helsinki they were shown a burial site where some forty Reds executed by the Germans had been laid. The excavation brought up the bones of bodies already turned to earth, along with shoes and pieces of clothing that had survived. On the evidence of a few rags, and with no forensic investigation, the Estonians satisfied themselves that the bones of their freedom fighters lay in the grave as well. The inquiry remained as superficial as the bought report six years earlier. The bones were gathered into coffins, the coffins were sealed and taken to Estonia. The dead were buried in cemeteries across the country.
Karl Pokk is given a mission
The novel's protagonist is Karl Pokk — Pokka in the Finnish form. He arrives in Helsinki from Tallinn as an unemployed cellist, but the real reason is a secret mission: to find out what happened to Jüri Vilms and his three comrades.
His principal is the Labour Party, heir to Vilms's liberal-minded tradition, which wishes to honour the memory of its founder and to learn the truth about the fate of the four men. At the same time Estonia wants to be rid of the friction these unexplained deaths cause in its foreign relations. Handing over the assignment, Ants Piip, an old friend of Vilms, stresses one thing: the work must be done in secret. The guilty are not necessarily only the Germans. They may be Finns as well.
Two times, two voices
The novel runs on two time levels. Karl Pokk moves through the Helsinki of 1930. In our own time Aili Järvinen writes — Karl's granddaughter, piecing her grandfather's story together from the traces that survive.
Aili examines the documents with the help of Claude Shannon's information theory. The idea is simple and chilling: a genuine document is ragged. It contains randomness, needless detail, noise. A commissioned report, by contrast, is too smooth, too predictable — its entropy is suspiciously low.
The tidier the official truth, the more certain it is that someone has tidied it.
Why this had to be written
Originally I meant to write about the kidnapping of President Ståhlberg. Once I had studied that oddity of Finnish political history thoroughly, I came to feel that the country's first president has already received the vindication he deserved and needs no further one. From the far right's point of view the kidnapping was a perfect blunder. And if it was in fact the far right's opponents who stood behind it, the act was one of the most successful counter-provocations in Finnish political history. Nor did any great harm come to the Ståhlbergs.
Jüri Vilms and his three comrades have received no redress in Finland for their deaths. On the contrary: the Finns have washed their hands and forgotten the whole affair. It would have gone differently had four Finnish freedom fighters vanished without trace in Tallinn and had their bones been dug out of a mass grave of executed men.
The forgetting here is deliberate. It is a crying injustice.
Thanks
In 1997 Professor Seppo Zetterberg published Jüri Vilmsin kuolema (The Death of Jüri Vilms), a thorough academic study of the events that gave my novel its inspiration. Without it this book would not exist. I make no attempt to trespass on the scholar's ground — I stay in fiction.
The manuscript is finished and with a publisher.