Finn noir

BACK IN THE LATE 1980s, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, I found myself in a bar in Leningrad, as the city was then still. Mikhail Gorbachev — remember him? — had decreed an anti-alcohol campaign, but there was no shortage of beer and vodka in the homely tavern where we settled down for the evening.

The people-watching was engrossing. The atmosphere in the city was quite different to that of closed, claustrophic Moscow. Leningrad looked out to the sea, to Scandinavia,