Hella Wuolijoki's "Pipe Dreams," Finland to Russia, 1917

Hella Wuolijoki (1886-1954), playwright, diplomat, entrepreneur, activist, was born Hella Murrik in Älä, near Helme, Estonia. She studied folklore at the University of Helsinki and became involved in the Finnish socialist-nationalist movement, participating in the General Strike of 1905, in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution. She met and married a member of the new Finnish Parliament, Sulo Wuolijoki, in 1907, gave birth to a daughter Vappu, and began working as a secretary and business translator after completing her Master's degree. During World War I she became a leader in international trade. Her considerable language skills (she spoke seven languages) facilitated this endeavor. She had major successes with Latin American, American, and Swedish firms, in sugar, coffee, wheat, and timber trading. Later describing herself as "a capitalist employer with a Marxist view of the world and a belief in the bankruptcy of capitalism" (qtd. in Cleve 1997, 548), she was able to finagle a way for her firm to become the sole source of coffee for Russia and the early Soviet Union, as this document shows, negotiating profitable deals with the American firm W.R. Grace & Company. Several differently incorporated companies—Kontro & Kuosmanen, Scandinavian Trading Company, San Galli—were all a part of W.R. Grace. Some of the correspondence with New York was written in code, but the New York City addresses were all the same, 104 Pearl Street, and the men on the boards of directors were mostly the same (W.R. Grace & Company).

Wuolijoki was the sole Western woman trade negotiator in the early days of the Russian Revolution; as a woman, she could not go out alone at night and had to eat meals in her hotel room, because a woman on the street alone was not safe. Often traveling to Russia with large sums of money, she decided that public transportation would be safer than hiring a car, which could be easily hijacked. She writes, "There was one difference between me and the men. Try as I might, I couldn't bring any seriousness to this game with the money tiger" (1987, 180-1). She writes in her memoirs about playing with traditional business language, showing that she considered the work just a game: "Where a normal business letter would say, 'subject: eleven thousand tons of sugar to Finland,' or, 'subject: six thousand sacks of coffee,' I wrote, 're: pipe dream number three in the coffee series,' or, 'pipe dream number one in the sugar series'" (1987, 181). She used the English expression "pipe dream" in her Finnish-language memoirs to suggest the schemes she cooked up in order to spend time with her intimate American friend and business partner, Murray Sayer. She did in fact earn millions during this period, buying and maintaining the Marlebäck estate in southern Finland as a salon for left-leaning literati, business people, and politicians from many nations. But she lost much of the money during the Depression, and had to sell Marlebäck soon after she sheltered Bertolt Brecht in his flight from Germany in 1940.

Wuolijoki is certainly a modernist woman, in her understanding of the game of money, in her actions as a transgressive female, and in her evident attempt to gain from the political situation. She took up her pen as a Finnish dramatist in the 1930s; however, her plays were realistic and often political (e.g., Law and Order [1933]), with none of the ambiguity of consciousness or narration of Stein or Woolf. She became a people's dramatist, in the style of Brecht, as her leftist background perhaps demanded. In fact, her Niskavuori plays (such as The Daughter of Parliament [1937]) are still the most-often performed dramas in Finland.

In this letter, written in Helsinki (Finland) to Sayer who was in Stockholm with the Scandinavian Trading Company, she lays out the plan, her expected commission, schemes for power grabbing, travel arrangements, and how the two of them...