by Steve Rockwell
I travelled with my family to Gothenburg, Sweden in 1951, leaving Espoo, Finland, which had been home to my father’s side of the family for at least four generations. My grandfather had been part of a movement to adopt Finnish names, legally shedding his Kristiansson identity for Salomaa. When I adopted Rockwell for Salomaa, it had been done for purely creative reasons. My mother held the opinion that Salomaa was entirely the outcome of the 1918 conflict between the Bolshevik Reds and White Finns, where Johan Nestor Kristiansson defected to the Whites. “He rammed his rifle barrel into ground at the base of a tree, and bolted,” my mother recounted.
Kuusta Rovio, the Helsinki police chief, figures into the story here. Rovio not only sheltered Vladimir Lenin in his Helsinki apartment in August of 1917, but supplied him with Russian newspapers and passed on secret deliveries to his party comrades.
The anti-socialist forces under Carl Gustaf Mannerheim prevailed with a White victory in May 1918. Rovio fled to Soviet Russia, becoming a Communist Party official. A victim of Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, he was arrested in 1937, and executed the following year. Meanwhile in Helsinki, the police department had been bleached of its Reds sympathizers and released the Sisu “Black Maria.” After the war in 1945, my father had a job painting “Black Marias” at the Helsinki Police Department. He would have familiar with the armored Sisu since it had been service until 1951, when we left for Sweden.
(To be continued)