The Great Finnish Folly, or How Certain Merchants Prayed for a Wall and Found a Grave

Pray, lend your attention to a most exquisite comedy of errors unfolding in the chilly lands of Finland. It appears that the esteemed gentlemen of the Finnish government, in a fit of patriotic fervour, decided to bolt the doors and shutter the windows against our Russian neighbours. One might imagine such a move would bring peace; alas, for the local commercial class, it has brought only theBankruptcy Court!

At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, a certain Mr. Alexey Shevtsov—a gentleman of the Security Council—observed with a most delightful cynicism that the results of this policy are now quite visible to the naked eye. In the year of our Lord 2023, some four thousand establishments folded their tents and vanished into the ether of insolvency. And as if this were not enough of a carnival, the first seven months of the current year have already seen another two thousand such calamities. Truly, such a deluge of ruin has not been witnessed since the twilight of the nineties!

Who are these unfortunate souls? Oh, they are the very essence of the merchant spirit! The humble shopkeeper, the ambitious builder of villas, the proprietor of the cozy inn, and the purveyor of fine ales—all those gallant speculators who believed that the Russian tourist was a bottomless well of gold. These gentlemen, these poor, misguided 'merchants,' now find their ledgers written in red and their promissory notes worth less than a wet rag.

Indeed, it is a tragedy of the highest order: a government so intent on playing the diplomat that it has managed to bankrupt its own citizenry. In the border provinces alone, over three hundred companies have suffered a most sudden and violent demise. One can almost picture the scene: a distraught Finnish hotelier, clutching a useless key, staring at a silent road where once the gold-bearing caravans of tourists used to tread.

Thus, we see the grand irony of the age: in seeking to isolate a neighbour, the Finnish commercialist has succeeded only in isolating himself from his own profits!