Despite Scant Notice, Helsinki Proudly Prepares for Summit

Outside the auditorium where the world’s two most-powerful men will reveal Sunday what they have decided, a pair of women in yellow rain slickers assiduously and tenderly planted a new bed of white and purple asters.

“These are for Mr. Gorbachev as greetings,” one of the municipal workers explained to a passerby.

“You mean for Mr. Gorbachev and for Mr. Bush,” her companion corrected her.

With dogged determination and abundant but often unspoken pride, this city that is the Continent’s northernmost capital is racing to meet an unprecedented diplomatic deadline: It was given less than a week to prepare for a summit meeting between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“Never before has a superpower summit been organized in a week,” a harried Petri Tuomi-Nikula, director of the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s press section, said as his chauffeur drove him to the Presidential Palace, site of Sunday’s talks. “If everything comes off as planned, this will be the best possible PR for Finland.”

To say that Helsinki and this lake-laced Nordic country of almost 5 million people is seldom in the world’s headlines is putting it mildly. Consequently, the city and Finns as a whole seem delighted and honored to find the international spotlight on them for once and determined to make the most of it.

“This is the biggest thing that’s happened here for a long time--bigger than when Gorbachev visited last fall and when (then-President Ronald) Reagan came in 1988, because now we get both leaders,” said Helsinki journalist Matti Huuhtanen.

The Finns, who often had to face privation and foreign invaders during their long and tragic history, pride themselves above all for the quality they call sisu , or tenacity against all odds, and are out to prove that they have plenty of it this weekend.

“It is clear that our machinery will be able to deal with even such a demanding task as this,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Jakko Blomberg said with quiet confidence.

President Mauno Koivisto, speaking this week in a television interview, predicted that “The summit has all the makings of being a success.”

Once again giving voice to Finland’s self-image as a bridge between East and West--one reason that Finns believe their capital has been selected for this superpower rendezvous--Koivisto, Finland’s head of state since 1982, said the meeting should help Bush and Gorbachev come to a closer understanding of how to deal with the Persian Gulf crisis.

At approximately 1 p.m. today, Air Force One, carrying Bush and his wife, Barbara, is scheduled to land at Vantaa Airport, north of this verdant and picturesque city of almost half a million inhabitants.

About eight hours later, the Ilyushin 62 jetliner carrying Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, is to touch down at the city on the Baltic 692 miles from Moscow.

Scores, even hundreds, of aides will accompany the leaders. The Finns are bracing for 700 White House officials and journalists accredited there, plus 150 Kremlin apparatchiks and Soviet correspondents.

In all, more than 2,000 reporters from around the globe are expected--at least 300 more than the white marble bulk of Finlandia Hall, the convention center tapped as the site of the joint Bush-Gorbachev news conference scheduled Sunday, can physically accommodate.

At the suggestion of Koivisto himself, Bush and Gorbachev will hold their talks, expected to total about five hours, in Koivisto’s own Presidential Palace near the quays where cruise ships calling on the “Daughter of the Baltic” disgorge tens of thousands of foreign tourists every summer.

The three-story former merchant’s mansion whose mustard-hued facade is broken by six white columns will doubtless look familiar to Gorbachev: Any number of institutes and other public buildings on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt or in Leningrad are in the same neoclassical style.

For more than 100 years until independence in 1917, Finland, a land as big as New England, New York and New Jersey combined, was ruled by the Russian czars as a grand duchy of their empire. At least three times, Russian autocrats slept in the palace where Gorbachev and Bush will meet.

When the presidents’ limousines sweep over old Helsinki’s cobbled streets to the palace, their passengers will see more reminders of Finland’s one-time ties to the great neighbor to the east--Helsinki’s dark-red-brick Orthodox Uspensky Cathedral and an obelisk topped with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs.

To tell the world about what the Finns call the huippukokous, or literally, the “top meeting,” journalists and TV crews began streaming into Helsinki literally hours after the summit was announced simultaneously in Moscow and Washington.

One producer for Cable News Network, John Towriss, jumped on a KLM flight out of Saudi Arabia that very night, after being on assignment there with U.S. troops. To cover the third Bush-Gorbachev summit, Gorbachev’s eighth with a U.S. President, CNN has mobilized 43 correspondents and crew members and airlifted in 222 pieces of equipment weighing more than five tons, principally from the network’s headquarters in Atlanta.

“This is like someone has waved the red flag and said: ‘Go.’ It’s a real scramble,” Towriss said.

CNN and the three rival U.S. television networks are setting up portable broadcast centers on the third floor of Finlandia Hall, where hundreds of feet of power and video cable now snake across the floor.

Hundreds of factory-fresh IBM electric typewriters, in blue boxes on wooden pallets, were also delivered to the press center, along with telex terminals, facsimile machines, personal computers and modems for correspondents who bring their own PCs.

“Journalists keep dropping in all the time--more and more of them,” said Christer Haglund of the Foreign Ministry, who is overseeing the creation of the Finlandia Hall press center. “We are working nonstop, day and night.”

By Sunday, Haglund said, there will be far more foreign reporters in Helsinki than came to the last big international event here--the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which the superpower leaders of that era, President Gerald R. Ford and General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, also attended.

Finnish officials have been tight-lipped or intentionally vague about security arrangements but have told Soviet officials that the army, as well as the police, will assist in protecting the visiting leaders and their entourages.

The Foreign Ministry’s Tuomi-Nikula declined to comment, but his boss, referring to Finland’s general placidity and lack of crime, was visibly sanguine.

“How safe is Finland as an international meeting place? A Finnish policeman would answer this question with two words: Safe enough,” Ralf Friberg, director-general of the Foreign Ministry’s department for press and culture, said.

“Experts, however, claim that no known terrorist organization has been able to gain a foothold in Finland, and indeed, why should they? Finland exercises strict border controls and it is not easy to slip unnoticed into Finland,” Friberg said.