MY TIME IN LONDON WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE. I had to come back to Finland for two reasons. First, I had to do my military service. After that I would work at Citibank’s Helsinki office, which was still awaiting its official license from the Finnish finance ministry.
In Finland all men had to join the army or begin their civilian service before their thirtieth birthday. They still do. At the end of the 1970s the army was extremely popular. Even extreme communists joined up with enthusiasm, apparently to learn leadership skills in preparation for the revolution and its aftermath. I didn’t have strong feelings about the army, for or against. I respected the need for national defense and I wanted to do my duty as a citizen. In going to London I had of course taken the army into account in my plans. It would have made completing my dissertation a little more complicated, but I couldn’t do my military service in London, by correspondence course. I would have to spend some time crawling about in the woods, and I would need to come to grips with the basics of Finnish defense strategy.
Liisa had found a job at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. She had to be in Finland a few weeks before me to start work, so she and our three-year-old son flew home ahead of me. We had bought our first car in England and wanted to take it to Finland. So when the time came I got behind the wheel of the Audi 100 and drove across Europe. From London I drove to Dover, took a ferry to Oostende, and drove on to Travemünde, where I took the Finnlines ferry to Helsinki. During my journey I crossed the Belgian, Dutch, and German borders. At each border the guards took an interest in me. They understood why my passport was valid for only a couple more days: I was on my way to the army. Whenever I crossed a border I had to put up with taunting: “Ah, you’re in a hurry to get home, are you? It’s a date you mustn’t be late for.” I reached Finland on 14 October, and my passport expired the same day. I really had left things to the last moment.
Private Ollila reported for duty at Hyrylä barracks, just north of Helsinki, the following day. Since I had studied physics and math, and so was obviously good with figures, I was dispatched to the air defense regiment. A month earlier I’d been sitting in an office in a pinstripe suit crunching numbers. Now I was in a barracks, in the Finnish army’s everyday gray uniform, learning how to dismantle and reassemble an assault rifle. There were twelve men in our hut, most of them between eighteen and twenty years old. Our conversations lacked a certain finesse. The men were from the Helsinki area and seemed a sensible bunch. The barracks block was a sixties box, already in poor shape. The dominant internal features were linoleum, gray concrete, and an endless row of notice boards. Beside the doors the duty officer sat at his desk, controlling the flow of people into the barracks and, more importantly, out.
In the evenings the blue-and-white-checked bedcover had to be folded as neatly as possible into a square and placed on a stool at the foot of the bed. If the bedcover hadn’t been folded crisply enough the corporal would notice and it would have to be folded again. My personal diary had been replaced by a schedule pinned to the notice board that told us when we needed to muster for drill, when we needed to be on the firing range, and when we could go to the mess. My life was as tightly timetabled and programmed as that of . . . well . . . the chief executive of Nokia. (Though I had more free time in the army.)
We spent a lot of time out in the open practicing maneuvers. We dug ourselves little foxholes, practiced throwing grenades, and tried to put up our tents as fast as we could. Fortunately the ground hadn’t yet frozen for the winter. The contrast with my previous life couldn’t have been greater. But I couldn’t complain. I had postponed the army as long as I could, and now I had to get it over with. When I had done that I could pick up the threads of my real life. Since I had to spend time in the army I should regard it as a mix of experience and sporting achievement.
Liisa lived in our old home in Herttoniemi. Our stuff had been in storage for two years while we were in England; now we were putting things back in their place. Liisa was delighted with her new role as senior advisor in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, from where she recently retired as Deputy Director-General of EU and International Affairs. We adapted with fresh optimism to life in Finland: our feelings were very different from when we had fled the country two years earlier. We had enjoyed a close family life in London, which my time in the army forcibly interrupted, and which wasn’t nice for anyone. But I returned to Herttoniemi every few weeks, whenever I had leave.
Within a month of joining the army I’d applied to become an officer. I had graduated, after all, and I wanted to make use of my abilities in the army. A few weeks later I was told I’d been accepted. So after two months at Hyrylä I went straight to the Reserve Officer School in Hamina, on the south coast near the Russian border. I left the sixties barracks behind and went to live in the nineteenth-century main building at Hamina. The atmosphere there was very different from Hyrylä – the officer cadets were ambitious and motivated.
I was elected the chairman of our cohort. The rival candidate was Lauri Kontro, whom I had gotten to know when we were studying, and again later in the Centre Party office, when he had worked in the party’s youth organization. Lauri later became a journalist, a diplomat, and a newspaper editor. Since the army and the Reserve Officer School were my point of re-entry into Finnish life, and particularly to ordinary Finnish male life, it felt good to receive a vote of confidence from my peers.
Kontro was elected our secretary and everything ran smoothly. The cadets took care of many of the practical aspects of the course. Social events were important too; indeed for many they seemed to be the high point. In previous years a star performer had sometimes been hired. We decided to dispense with this expensive intrusion into the evening, to widespread relief. Instead the cadets, some of whom were very gifted performers, would take care of everything. We began a new trend.
In Hamina I learned what the Finnish Army’s professional officers thought about defense and about society more widely. I met generals and other senior officers, who had to be careful what they said on account of the Cold War but were generally open on their views about the future. The Reserve Officer School was a good experience.
The real world was a more chaotic place than it had been for a long time. Fundamentalists had seized power in Iran. The staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were held hostage and the world was following their fate closely. President Jimmy Carter ordered a rescue attempt, which failed; the American prisoners were not freed until 1981. Finland was still dependent on the Soviet Union and on Soviet trade. The signs of President Kekkonen’s illness were becoming apparent and people were starting to discuss who would succeed him. Uncertainty was growing, and many well-educated servicemen had to prepare themselves for unemployment, which was something quite new in Finland.
In my last months in the army I held an office job in Helsinki, at the National Board of Economic Defense. I prepared a study of the economics of Finland’s defense at a time of crisis. In the evenings I sat in the library and worked on my dissertation for the University of Technology; the subject was “Economic Growth as a Theoretical Problem of Regulation.” It applied systems theory to economic growth. I received the best possible grades for it. I suppose it came in useful later on, too, when I had to understand the processes at work in a large enterprise. At least it helped me develop useful ways of thinking.
Both my dissertations had been thought experiments that proved useful later. But the greatest benefit of my time at the University of Technology was practical: I learned how Finnish engineers think, and I gained credibility in their eyes. They saw me as one of themselves, though my qualifications for that status were rather slender. Much later, at Nokia, I desperately needed that credibility.
Thanks to the army I received a crash course in what Finland was all about. Up until then I had lived an elitist life, isolated and insulated from my fellow Finns. As a student leader I had spent my time in agreeable surroundings with other student leaders. Before that, Atlantic College had