Balk says Soviet Union used Finnish students to Russify Ukraine
Monday 2nd November 2026 on 14:01 in
Finland
Finnish translator Eero Balk believes the Soviet Union used foreign students of Russian as instruments of Russification in Ukraine, Yle reports. He was among a group of Finns who went to study in the Soviet Union in 1975 and ended up in Kyiv, although he had expected to study in Russia.
Five Finnish students gathered at Helsinki railway station that autumn, but their paperwork gave no destination beyond “the Soviet Union,” Balk recalls. He had long hoped to study in Moscow and packed plenty of thermal underwear for its cold weather.
After arriving in Moscow, the students learned that their place of study was in Ukraine. Balk remembers seeing Kyiv’s green hills and golden-domed towers from the train the next morning. The weather was so warm that he cut the legs off one pair of his long johns.
Balk was strongly attracted to the Soviet Union and Russia as a schoolboy. He believed in the country’s promise that its system would help everyone develop their abilities, and wanted to study there. A visit to Leningrad had shown him shortages and a gloomy atmosphere, but he says he did not draw conclusions from what he saw.
Student exchanges between Finland and the Soviet Union were extensive. The Soviet Union Institute, which operated under Finland’s Ministry of Education from 1947 to 1992, was responsible for the programme. The ministry estimates that thousands of Finns studied in the Soviet Union, with 100 to 200 travelling there each year. Most were placed in Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Minsk or Kharkiv.
Balk later studied Ukrainian and has translated many Ukrainian literary works into Finnish. He recently translated Ukrainian author Yevheniia Kuznetsova’s bestseller The Ladder, a novel about Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war of aggression for Europe. Balk says he had a sense that war would come, and describes it as a continuation of the 1920 war, when the Red Army won and Ukraine lost its independence.
In Kyiv, Balk was struck by the variety of fruit and vegetables, including courgettes and aubergines, which he says he saw for the first time. Otherwise, the city seemed much like other Soviet cities: buses were crowded and shops faced shortages.