On 3 November, Finland will close the Lenin Museum in Tampere: the wax statues of Lenin on a motorbike with Stalin standing next to him will be melted down. Provided for in the Moscow Peace Treaty at the end of the bloody war against the Soviet Union (1939-40), by which Finland renounced some territories in order to remain independent, the museum had been opened in 1946 in the former headquarters of the Finnish labour movement to commemorate Lenin’s historic visit to Finland in 1905. Opponents of the Tsars found refuge in Finland and Lenin was welcomed as a friend in Tampere: Finland had been ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1812 and remained a territory with relative independence. During the Cold War, the Tampere museum was visited by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and even Gagarin.
Lenin met Stalin for the first time in Tampere, encouraged Finnish workers to support their demands, and on a second visit in 1906 promised to fight for Finland’s independence: it was granted in 1917, but the country remained independent for only a few years. In the post-war period, the opening of the museum was also judged positively by the Finns, as a gesture of friendship: according to President Urho Keokkoen, it bore witness to ‘the good side of the Soviet Union’. Relations between the two countries had always been contradictory: neutrality had been imposed on Finland, and Helsinki was forced to make continual concessions for years due to the need to maintain good relations with the Kremlin during the Cold War. Trade was vital for the Finns, and relations of interest also gave rise to friendly ties, so that today some 150,000 citizens of Russian origin live in Finland. On 31 March 2023, Helsinki joined NATO and today Finland is building a fence along the 1,300-kilometre border with Russia. In 1991, after the end of the Soviet Union, the Lenin museums were closed everywhere, even in Moscow, and only the one in Tampere remained: the museum will undergo extensive renovation and will be reopened as ‘Nootti’, the Finnish word for a diplomatic correspondence between two countries, and dedicated to relations with the East, no longer remembering Lenin.
