alexnikolbackup | Проституция в Сортавале.

Приводил тут в порядок архив своего сортавальского журнала и наткнулся на статью о проституции в городе, датированной 2001 годом. Она была опубликована в англоязычной версии Хелсингин Саномат.

Sex from Sortavala - Finland and the Karelian Pattaya

By Mika Parkkonen in Sortavala
Photos: Liisa Takala / HS and Timo Villanen / HS

A greying Finnish man, probably in his mid-sixties, kisses a young and very attractive Russian girl in the middle of a cafe & bar car park at the crossroads leading to the village of Värtsilä, just over the border in Russian Karelia. The tongue-kiss goes on and on. The cafeteria customers grin through the windows and laugh at the couple: frontier erotica.

It turns out that it is a farewell kiss. The grey-haired Finnish man jumps into his car. As he does so, another equally young girl opens the rear door and gets out of the car. She has been saying her goodbyes to another elderly Finnish man. The car drives off towards Finland. I write down the registration plate, but we'll come back to that later.

The girls, meanwhile, walk over to the road leading south to Sortavala and start hitching. They get a ride immediately from another car arriving from the Finnish side of the border.

Even weekday nights there is action in Sortavala.

Over the last six years I have made 28 trips to Karelia in the course of my work. Each summer the road from the border has been lined by an increasing number of prostitutes, and they have become progressively younger. In this time, Sortavala has developed into a sex-tourism centre to which the Finns flock in search of skirt and strong liquor. It is impossible not to notice the prostitution in Sortavala, unless one keeps one's eyes tightly closed.

New girls appear all the time. The Sortavala authorities are unwilling to disclose the precise number, although each and every one is registered. I try to do the numbers myself. My rough estimate is around 200. The great majority of them are seasonal: many students turn tricks during the summer months, when there are plenty of tourists around and no other work is available.

The clientele are normal Finnish men, with a large part of them pensioned and unemployed. I've met a good few of them. They keep the border-area prostitution trade buoyant.

The best girls pick the best customers, but there are enough women to go round to supply those Finns who are not choosy about broken teeth, dirty clothes, or track-marks in the forearms. The men may boast of having had sex with very young girls, but they do not regard themselves as paedophiles.

“It seems as though we have another Thailand right here next door”, says Chief Inspector Lauri Leppänen, from the Joensuu unit of the Central Criminal Police. Leppänen does not remember that any Finns would have been sentenced for buying sex from under-16-year-olds abroad, although this has been a crime under Finnish law for a year or more. The State Prosecutor also has no cases registered.

“We'll take the necessary action if the Russian authorities give us a list of suspects' names or otherwise provide us with the sort of information we need to start an investigation”, says Leppänen.

Let's go back now to that registration-plate. On the basis of the three letters and three numbers, it is possible to determine quite quickly that the owner of the vehicle is a retired border guard who lives in a detached house in a village close to the frontier. Checking up on one or two other vehicle registration numbers produces a similar result: they, too, appear to be local. Tohmajärvi (10km), Kitee (20km), and the village of Värtsilä, just over the Finnish side of the border. One is from Joensuu, one has come down all the way from Ostrobothnia on the west coast.

Walking the dog near Sortavala bus-station.

I go back to have another look. Just across the border, three young locals in black leather jackets try to wave down passing cars. From under the jackets cardboard signs flash briefly into view, bearing the word for gasoline. The boys are attempting to persuade drivers onto a side road to buy cheap and illegal fuel. They sell the gasoline as 95E Unleaded, but usually the product is 92 octane cut with some water.

Since it is now winter, the road from the border does not offer much by way of girls plying their trade. If one is in need of a woman, the best bet is to ask the gasoline boys. They always have a girlfriend to offer, either their own or a mate's.

Standing in the market square in Värtsilä (the Värtsilä on the Russian side) are two girls, of 11 and 13. They complain that elderly Finnish men are forever attempting to secure their services. By the road we meet an 18-year-old girl, from whose teacher I have heard that she dropped out of school a couple of years ago and began to fish for Finnish drivers along the road from the border. The girl's ailing mother receives something like FIM 100 a month from the state, and it is not enough to live on. She has no father.

“I dreamt that I would find myself a good husband who would take care of me and get me out of here”, says the girl, who lives in an unheated shack. Water has to be melted from snow, and the toilet is a beam slung between two trees out back.

In Sortavala's Hely Hotel the three-piece band tune up their instruments. It is early, and a quiet winter's evening. There are only around a dozen Finnish men present. At a corner table a group of overweight Russian women ply two Finnish men with vodka shots. The party begins to clap its hands in time with the music. The band's soloist has supplied bizarre new lyrics to a Russian chart hit from last autumn. In it the Jamaican national team loses 5-0 to Argentina on the soccer field, and their defeat is due to the weakness of Negroes.

The next song is about love-making night and day, and right on cue, the first woman leads her prey off to a hotel room upstairs. Hotel Hely can look forward to a lively evening later on, as an EU-funded seminar is in town, discussing environmental protection issues on Lake Ladoga. The delegates arrive to spend an evening in the hotel bar and restaurant. Prostitutes begin to arrive. A pair of them who come up to the door and disappear again look to me to be clearly under 14.

When the border opened up roughly a decade ago, the Russian Karelians' knack for business kicked into gear and they began to bring in professional ladies from the country's metropolises to entertain the Finns. Finnish war veterans visiting the battlefields and those on trips to look at “the old country” that had been ceded to the Soviet Union after 1944 were astonished at what they saw. Well before evening, every lamp-post on the main street of Sortavala was patrolled by women in flimsy low-cut blouses and mini-skirts.

The only inn in Russian Värtsilä got two Muscovite hookers handily placed outside the entrance. Sortavala's big tourist attraction was a girl from Azerbaijan who would have graced any basketball team. Roughly six feet in height, she was described by the Finnish men as “The Chinawoman”. Her fame spread all over Eastern Finland.

Before long, the local Karelian girls learnt how money was to be made. In particular the visits by war veterans were a call to arms and a source of revenue. With their help, a pretty girl could earn upwards of FIM 1000 in a single evening. Nowadays on Sortavala's streets it is quite unusual to see non-local “belles de nuit”, as the Russians call them.

On the other side of the street, almost opposite the Hely, is the Sortavala District Polyclinic for dermatology and sexually-transmitted diseases. “Unfortunately Sortavala is in the front rank of VD cases in the whole of Karelia. We also have child-prostitution here, as is proved by the number of syphilis infections among girls under 15", says the deputy chief physician Lidia Ivanova.

Syphilis is a strange thing in Karelia. When the border was closed, there were no cases reported on either side of the border. When the Finns came, so did the syph. The Russian view is that the Finnish customers brought it with them. The Finnish response is that syphilis has always been present in Russia. Locals here suspect that girls shipped in from the far eastern provinces of Russia brought long-forgotten venereal diseases back to Karelia.

The Sortavala clinic has shortages of equipment for taking samples. The doctors would also like to see more effective disinfection resources and better microscopes. This would for instance allow them to give an on-the-spot reading on suspected chlamydia samples.

The laboratory doctor Marina Gudlai wants to show me the sort of primitive conditions under which she has to work. She leads her visitor from the reception area into the lab, via the canteen. Two young girls are sitting at a table, spooning down a thin soup. They immediately turn their faces away.

A standard office desk and a number of spice shelves are packed with glass phials from blood and urine samples taken that morning. To protect her hands, Gudlai has a pair of loose-fitting rubber gloves that look reminiscent of plastic bags for salads or vegetables. “We don't have any real hospital gloves”, she says.

In the meantime, the two young girls have left the canteen. Lidia Ivanova reports that the clinic has a ward with 25 beds to treat the more serious cases. VD infections are such an embarrassment to the girls that in many cases a trip to the doctor is put off until the point where the only treatment is one that requires hospitalisation.

“We have one 15-year-old girl in here at the moment”, sighs Ivanova. She refuses point-blank to ask her patient for permission to do an interview. “Hey, this is a small town, and she has to live here after this.”

According to Ivanova, it is unemployment, poverty, and often the alcohol problems of their parents that drive young Karelian girls to prostitution. When there is no money around, it has to be found from somewhere. “They carry on this profession of theirs in apartments, even in stairways.”

The number of VD cases in Sortavala is spiralling also because of the fact that condoms are not much used. In a city of 35,000, last year saw more than 70 new syphilis cases and more than 40 new cases of gonorrhoea. One in ten of those infected was under 16 years of age.

Last autumn, the health authorities tested all the city's girls between 11 and 16 for sexually transmitted diseases. The results have not been released.

Outside the clinic, two young nurses are having a cigarette. They actually work in the nearby city hospital. According to their estimates, there are probably several dozen child prostitutes in Sortavala of 14 years and younger. They can reel off a list of half a dozen prostitutes by name without any trouble. “The parents drink and the kids wind up on the street”. You can hear the same story from almost anyone in town.

In all quietness, the Russian Ministry of the Interior has set up a special police unit in Sortavala, charged with monitoring prostitution in the city. As a result, young girls are not as openly for sale as they were earlier. The problem has not gone away, however. Child prostitution is now less easy to keep tabs on.

The lower age limit in the Russian Federation in these cases is 14 years. In practice, only sexual interference with a child younger than this constitutes a serious enough offence for a charge to stick in court. The penalties can go up to 4 years' imprisonment. In Finland the age-limit for sexual abuse of a minor is 16 years.

The Chief Prosecutor in Sortavala Vladimir Kuznetzov states that living off the immoral earnings of children under the age of 14 is also an offence. He notes that one or two such pimping cases have come to court in Sortavala, but no Finnish clients have come up on charge-sheets.

The Ministry of the Interior are watching the situation carefully. “New girls go into the Miliis registers”, says Kuznetzov. He will not divulge exact figures, but estimates that there may be around a dozen prostitutes in Sortavala under the age of 14.

“Everyone in Sortavala wants to sweep this one under the carpet. The general feeling is that the girls earn their markkas and the customers get what they want. Why should anyone poke their nose into a rather unpleasant business? It is very difficult to bring a charge of interference with a minor and make it stick”, says Kuznetzov with a weary shrug.

Friday night is already well on its way. A girl in a mini-skirt has appeared in the window of the Kippari bar. The parking lot of the neighbouring Ladoga Hotel is filled with Finnish cars. Their owners are sitting in the bar, surrounded by young girls.

Things are really warming up over at the bar in the Hely. Again, the parking lot is jam-packed with cars carrying Finnish plates. By my own crude calculations, in the space of three hours around 70 women come and go in the cramped bar. From time to time there are minor scuffles, as there are not always enough johns to go around.

There are only around thirty of us men in the bar. I recognise several of them. Some unemployed, some pensioners, one active in the local congregation at home, a wealthy businessman, a teacher of forestry studies, and a reporter from a provincial paper. Sitting in air so thick with tobacco smoke you could cut it with a knife, surrounded by a terrible din, in an overcrowded bar - why? Even the beer costs FIM 25 a can.