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Former Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken participates in a flag raising ceremony for Finland at NATO Headquarters, in Brussels, Belgium, on April 4, 2022. | State Department photo by Chuck Kennedy/ via Flickr
A couple of days ago, I was in a tiny town above the Arctic Circle in Finland in search of a place to work out. The town's website said there was a gym in the municipal building. The price was 40 Euro, which struck me as high, until I realized it was 40 Euro for a year.
I rode my bike to the building, not far from where I was staying on the Tornio River that divides Sweden and Finland. The office was closed, and as I was about to leave, a group of sweaty women in workout clothes emerged from a side door under a sign that read "Pommisuoja." I asked if they were coming from the gym and if I could buy a day pass. This being Finland, I assumed correctly that they spoke English. They laughed and said I didn't need to buy a pass and motioned down the stairs leading into the basement.
At the bottom, I went through two thick steel doors to find a very well-equipped gym in a large open space. A guy in his early twenties was squatting an absurd amount of weight. I watched him, trying to do the kilos to pounds math. It was a lot.
When he finished, we nodded at each other in that pleasant but not overly friendly way that is the Scandinavian norm. As the joke went during Covid, the Finns couldn't wait until the mandatory two-meter distance ended so they could go back to their normal three meters. I looked around. The walls and ceiling were reinforced steel. It was like standing inside a bank vault. "What is this place?" I finally asked.
It was the town's bomb shelter, he explained. With a shrug and a fatalistic smile, he said, "We're 30 minutes from Murmansk." I didn't get it. We were on the Swedish border, as far East as possible from Russia and still in Finland. It was hundreds of miles from Murmansk, Russia. "By Tupelov," he explained, naming the Russian bomber that is bringing hell to Ukraine every day.
I shouldn't have been surprised. Unlike Sweden and Norway, Finland never forgot that the Soviet Union/Russia was a dangerous neighbor. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded with a force of over a million men, 6,000 tanks, and 3,800 planes. The Finnish army had 300,000 troops, 40 tanks, and 100 planes. Four months later, in one of the great feats of arms in modern history, the Finns had inflicted 400,000 casualties on the Soviet force to their own 70,000.
The Finnish gym in a former bomb shelter | Stuart Stevens...
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