At the easternmost end of the Baltic Sea, between the Gulf of Finland and the vastness of Lake Ladoga, lies the rugged, narrow Karelian Isthmus. Although the land is sternly beautiful—cut laterally by numerous clear blue lakes, tapestried with evergreen forest, and textured by outcroppings of reddish gray granite—it has little intrinsic worth. The soil grows few crops, and those grudgingly, and the scant mineral resources are hardly worth the labor of extraction. Yet there are few comparably small areas of land in all Europe that have been fought over so often and so stubbornly.
The reason is geographic. Since the beginning of European history the Karelian Isthmus has served as a land bridge between the great eastward mass of Russia and Asia and the immense Scandinavian peninsula that opens to the west. The Isthmus has been a highway for tribal migrations, a conduit for trade and cultural exchange, and a springboard for conquest. Armies have washed across it—Mongol, Teutonic, Swedish, Russian—and empires have coveted it, either as a defensive breakwater or a sally port for aggression.
An unopposed army, for example, driving eastward across the Karelian Isthmus from the point where it widens into the Finnish mainland, would be at the city limits of Leningrad in a matter of hours. That is precisely the reason why, in the waning days of 1939, the world’s largest military power launched a colossal attack against one of the world’s smallest nations. Soviet Russia against little Finland—history affords few examples of a conflict so overwhelmingly one-sided. And yet, for more than 100 days, Finland waged a David-and-Goliath defensive struggle of unequaled valor and determination, a backs-to-the-wall stand that stirred the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere and that enabled Finland, though ultimately and inevitably defeated, to remain a free and sovereign nation.
Conflict between Russia and Finland became inevitable in May 1703, when Peter the Great selected a swampy, bug-infested river delta at the eastern tip of the Baltic Sea and proclaimed it the site of his new capital, St. Petersburg—his long-sought “window to the West.” The fact that the land he had chosen, as well as all of Finland to the west of that point, belonged to Sweden did not deter the tsar at all. The annexation of the River Neva delta was just one more move in the power struggle being waged between the Romanov dynasty and the Swedish monarchy; the prize was domination of the Baltic and, with it, lucrative trade routes to the West.
More than 100,000 Russians died during the ten years required to drain the malarial swamps and drive the pilings on which Peter’s grand city would rise. Some 236 years later, another quarter-million or so Russians, along with 25,000 Finns, would die, just because the Finnish border ran so close to that same city, now called Leningrad.
Both Russia and Sweden used Finland as a convenient battleground, much to the harm of its peaceful and bucolic inhabitants. And until Peter finally bested the Swedes, there was always a danger that Sweden might successfully attack St. Petersburg across the narrow Karelian Isthmus. “The ladies of St. Petersburg could not sleep peacefully as long as the Finnish border ran so close,” Peter would later write. In order to ensure the ladies’ rest, he forcibly moved the border back by conquering Viipuri, the main Swedish port on the Isthmus, along with a vast stretch of mainland Karelia.
The rest of Finland remained under Swedish suzerainty until 1809, when the entire country was ceded to Russia as a function of the general reshuffling of European boundaries that attended the Napoleonic Wars. The Swedish yoke had been both loose and benign: during much of the time that Finland was a Swedish province, its citizens enjoyed religious tolerance, freedom from censorship, and as many political rights as the citizens of most European states. All things considered, if one had to be ruled by an outside power, Sweden was not a bad choice.
After he had inherited Finland, Tsar Alexander I also left the Finns to their own devices by and large, permitting them to have autonomous schools, banks, and legal institutions. Finnish citizens who wished to advance their personal careers, or to sample a more cosmopolitan life-style than what was available locally, were able freely to enter the tsarist armed forces or climb the ladder in the vast Russian civil bureaucracy. Military service for the tsars was a favorite route for ambitious young Finns: from 1810 to the revolution of 1917, Finland supplied more than 400 generals and admirals for the Imperial forces, not the least of whom was a hero of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 named Gustav Mannerheim.
A series of repressive and heavy-handed tsars, however, ignited the nascent fires of Finnish nationalism. All traces of the former easygoing relationship between the two nations vanished when the stubborn and reactionary Nicholas II assumed the Romanov throne in 1894. Nicholas appointed as governor-general of Finland a genuinely loathsome man named Bobrikov, who quashed any manifestation of Finnish nationalism with a ruthless hand. For the first time, Finns could be conscripted unwillingly into the tsarist army; strict censorship placed a boot on the neck of Finland’s ardent class of artists and intellectuals, including the young firebrand composer Jean Sibelius, whose early tone poem Finlandia roused its audiences to a delirium of patriotic fervor. In 1904, to the surprise of no one, a young civil servant ran up to Bobrikov on the steps of the Senate building in Helsinki and shot him dead. Finns everywhere applauded the deed, but the immediate result was increased repression and a much greater involvement in all levels of Finnish affairs by the tsar’s secret police.
The outbreak of the First World War gave the more militant Finnish nationalists a window of opportunity—now, they argued, was the time to prepare for the armed overthrow of the Russian yoke. In seeking military assistance, the Finns operated on the time-honored but dangerously simplistic theory that the enemy of one’s enemy is also one’s friend. They sought aid from both Germany and the Bolsheviks; both connections would haunt them for decades to come, in very different ways.
About 2,000 young Finns went to Germany for professional military training in 1915 and 1916, where they were carried on the Imperial army’s order of battle as the “Twenty-seventh Prussian Jaeger Battalion.” Almost every successful Finnish field commander in both the Civil War and the Winter War received his basic training in the Twenty-seventh Jaegers; veterans of that unit became, for all practical purposes, an elite professional caste.
On November 15, 1917, the Finnish Parliament openly assumed responsibility for Finnish affairs, internal and external. Lenin could spare no troops and very little attention for this sideshow of secession. Instead, he purchased Finnish neutrality vis-à-vis Russia’s internal power struggle by recognizing the new Finnish government just three weeks after Finland’s formal declaration of independence.
Finland did not escape the widening class struggles that threatened to tear European society apart in the closing months of World War I. Its working class had endured years of worsening conditions, wartime shortages, famines, and a declining standard of living. Constant Bolshevik agitation had aggravated the situation to the point that two rival armies had formed. Domestic Communists, discontented workers and peasants, and a small but volatile assortment of homegrown anarchists all went into the ranks of the Red Guard, which was armed, trained, and fleshed out by some 40,000 Russian soldiers stationed in Finland, many of them flaming revolutionaries. The White Guard was the militant arm of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie; their commander was Carl Gustav Mannerheim, a former tsarist general recently returned to his native land.
Although the Reds held the best ground—Helsinki and the industrial center of Tampere—the Whites had an edge in terms of military professionalism; many White units were led by former tsarist officers, and the Jaeger Battalion alumni quickly demonstrated a tactical expertise that the Reds could not match. Although Mannerheim opposed it—believing that Finland was in danger of mortgaging her political future—the White government requested aid from Imperial Germany, and an expeditionary force landed in April 1918. With this new infusion of firepower, the Whites proved unstoppable; six weeks after the Germans landed, the Reds surrendered.
The Treaty of Tartu, signed in 1920, formalized a state of peace between Finland and the USSR. From the Soviet government, Finland gained recognition and the arctic port of Petsamo; for its part, Finland destroyed all the fortifications on the islands in the Gulf of Finland. The questions of what to do with the denizens of East Karelia, Finnish by heritage but Russian by law and circumstances, remained unresolved and would exert a baleful influence on Finnish diplomacy in years to come.
Thus ended the long and peculiar relationship between Finland and Imperial Russia. What had mostly changed by 1920, aside from the configuration of the border, was the two nations’ attitudes toward each other. Trust had been badly eroded on both sides. The Finns had learned to fear Bolshevism, and the Soviets were uncomfortable with a neighbor that had opted for a thoroughly bourgeois system of government, had violently suppressed its own workers, and had made room in its diplomatic bed for the German enemy.
The men who ran Finland’s postwar governments did much for their country. They moved to bind the internal wounds, to lay the foundations of economic growth, and to improve—in some respects very dramatically—the standard of living. But in the realm of foreign relations, they tended simply to mind their own business and assume other states would mind theirs. Their postwar policy with regard to the Soviet Union was one of shutting their eyes and hoping it would go away. During the early years of Lenin’s regime, when the Soviet state was fragmented by internal strife and beset from without by interventionist armies, that approach was sufficient. But by the end of the 1920s, with the Soviet system consolidated and Russia once more becoming a powerful factor in international affairs, the Finns should have seen clearly that sooner or later their giant eastern neighbor would want to have words with them about some sensitive issues.
Seeds of future war had in fact been planted at the moment of Finland’s birth. Lenin’s government had bitterly resented having to give up Finland so compliantly, but at the time it was done, Lenin was beset by so many other and far more dangerous and immediate threats that he simply had no alternative. The Politburo assumed that propaganda, internal domestic unrest, and a bit of routine subversion would ultimately be enough to bring Finland back into the Communist sphere.
When Joseph Stalin came to power, he did so with diplomatic perceptions that were deeply and permanently colored by his memories of the early days of the Russian civil war, when the White government of Finland had allowed both the Russian Whites and some units of the British Navy to launch attacks from the Finnish coast against Bolshevik targets in the Baltic. Stalin viewed the demilitarization of the Baltic islands—in particular the huge Aaland archipelago, a vast and beautiful necklace of hundreds of islets that lies between the land mass of Sweden and the southwest coast of Finland—with a skeptical eye; it was clear to him that any great power who wanted those islands could seize them at will, and Finland could do nothing to stop it. Control of the Aalands and of the islands in the Gulf of Finland meant control of the flow of naval traffic in the Baltic, including ship movements in and out of Leningrad and Kronstadt.
Furthermore, the discovery of large nickel deposits in the Petsamo region had altered the strategic picture considerably. Mining concessions had been given by the Finns to a British Empire consortium, and it was well known that much of Germany’s iron ore came from the not-too-distant mines in northern Sweden. Thus, when Stalin came to power, there were already two Great Powers—the two, as it happened, that Stalin most feared—keenly interested in the bleak and barely habitable Arctic coast of Finland.
Completion of the Murmansk Railroad, connecting Leningrad with one of Russia’s few ice-free ports, was a further source of anxiety. The land through which this vital rail line passed, in East Karelia, was often the subject of loud irredentist claims made by right-wing elements in Finnish politics. Stalin was enough of a realist to know that the Finns themselves would never dare attempt the annexation of that region by force, but it seemed at least theoretically possible that another hostile nation—Germany, for instance—might offer the Karelian provinces in exchange either for Finnish military cooperation or for simple acquiescence to the deployment of foreign soldiers on Finnish soil. Finland’s protestations of neutrality, however sincerely meant, counted for little in the harsh equations of realpolitik. It was the Kremlin’s belief that, in the event of another big European war, Finland would simply not be allowed to remain neutral. And the Finnish border, at its closest point, was still a mere thirty-two kilometers from the outskirts of Leningrad.
From 1918 until just before the outbreak of war in 1939, Finland’s ruling politicians seem to have been remarkably obtuse when it came to understanding the Russian point of view. Not until about 1935 did the Finns realize that everything they did and said was subject to Soviet misinterpretation. It was largely in an effort to redress this attitude that the Finns launched, with great public fanfare, a policy of pan-Scandinavian neutrality. The Soviet intelligence service read the papers and heard the speeches on the radio but drew the wrong conclusions from the data they perceived.
Hitler also came out in support of Scandinavian neutrality, particularly for Finland, and postwar research has shown that he did not in fact have any territorial ambitions in that region. All he desired was for the Baltic to remain open for German shipping and for the Swedish iron ore to flow into the Ruhr factories without interruption. But as Stalin saw things, there was something decidedly suspicious about the way the Germans were making such a fuss over Finland’s new regional orientation. Was Finland secretly acting as a broker between Germany and the Scandinavian states? Stalin’s suspicions were aggravated by the fact that the extreme right wing in Finnish politics was soon advocating just such a duplicitous policy; theirs was all a lot of hollow imitation-fascist rhetoric, and responsible Finns dismissed it as such, but the Soviet intelligence service did not write it up that way in their reports to the Kremlin.
The Russians consistently overestimated the influence of both extremes of Finnish domestic politics. When the Great Depression finally reached Finland, its effects spawned a fascist party called the Lapuan Movement (named after a town where a mob of conservative farmers had beaten up a rally of the League of Communist Youth in late 1929), led by a rather pathetic Mussolini clone named Kosola. Most of the Lapuans’ activity was mere hooliganism—taking leftists for a ride to the Russian border and bodily chucking them over the fence, smashing their mimeograph machines, and the like—but they captured sensational headlines in 1931 and 1932 with a kidnapping and an attempted putsch.
The kidnapping was the work of some right-wing thugs led by an ex-White general named Kurt Wallenius, and its victim was the elderly and widely loved first president of Finland, a Wilsonian law professor named K. J. Stahlberg. Threats of execution were issued when the Lapuans’ demands were not met, but in the end the whole thing degenerated into a nasty little farce: Wallenius and his henchmen were too incompetent to handle the kidnapping without bungling it and too irresolute to carry out their murder threat. The Finnish public was shamed and horrified by this pointless act of lawlessness, and a general backlash against the Lapuans greatly eroded their already dwindling popular support.
A tide of rumors ushered in the year 1932, the darkest of them concerning a planned coup d’état that Wallenius was anxious to mount before the Lapuans lost all their followers. The charismatic little scoundrel had been scandalously acquitted of his role in the Stahlberg kidnapping and was now in league with a clique of fascist officers in the Civic Guard, Finland’s territorial militia, totaling some 100,000 men, that traced an unbroken line of descent back to the White Guard of 1918. Finland’s various Communist parties had been outlawed in late 1931, so there was no longer any highly visible leftist threat for the right wing to focus its energies on; the new Lapuan objective was nothing less than the overthrow of the duly elected constitutional government.
The uprising fared no better than had the presidential kidnapping. A core of Lapuan fanatics jumped the gun and caught Wallenius’s gang of conspirators off balance. Wallenius’s group hurriedly tried to mobilize its forces and succeeded in putting into motion about 6,000 armed but hopelessly confused men. An impassioned radio speech by newly elected Finnish president Svinhufvud, an authentic hero of the civil war, took the backbone out of the uprising and left the hapless Wallenius in command of no more than 300 die-hard fanatics. The rebellion expired without a shot being fired.
By the end of 1932, Finland’s brief flirtation with fascism was all but over. The nation’s economy had improved, and the Lapuans, largely by virtue of their brutish tactics and staggering incompetence, had managed to alienate the propertied class from which they had previously drawn both financial support and a degree of borrowed respectability. The movement fragmented into a welter of impotent crank groups, such as the minuscule Military Force party, led by a man who openly worshiped Hitler, or the dreamy-eyed Academic Karelian Society, an association of fanatical irredentists who printed maps of something called “Greater Finland,” which included all of Estonia and stretched eastward as far as the Ural Mountains. One can easily imagine the impact such documents had when they fell, as several specimens did, into the hands of Stalin’s intelligence operatives.
Stalin was unrealistically influenced by the headline-grabbing antics of the Lapuans, the grotesque fantasies of the Karelian irredentists, and the exaggerated reports of agents who were eager to tell the Kremlin what they thought the Kremlin wanted to hear. From remarks made during his later negotiations with the Finns, it seems clear that Stalin really did believe that the interior of Finland seethed with class antagonism and fascist plotters and that all of Finnish society was undercut by smouldering grudges left over from the civil war days. Ill feeling persisted, of course—the conflict had been too bloody for all the scars to have healed in just two decades—but Moscow’s estimate of its extent, importance, and potential for outside exploitation was wildly inaccurate. In fact, the old wounds were healing faster than even the Finns themselves realized; with the onset of a massive contemporary threat from the Soviet Union, those old enmities looked remote and historic.
1. Northern Europe in 1939
In April 1938 came the first sign that Russia was no longer satisfied with the status quo of its relations with Finland. An MVD agent named Boris Yartsev, ostensibly a minor diplomatic official in the Helsinki embassy, approached the Finnish foreign minister, Rudolf Holsti, and suggested that it might be in Finland’s best interest to agree to some secret discussions with the Soviet Union, with the aim of “improving relations” between the two countries. The reason, Yartsev claimed, was the gradual worsening of the international situation. The Soviets did not trust Nazi Germany, and if war between those two mighty powers should erupt, a glance at the map would reveal the obvious advantages Germany would gain if Hitler could use Finland as a base for operations against Russia. If such a threat were to develop, Yartsev stressed, it would not be the Red Army’s intention to wait passively behind its fixed defenses but rather “to advance as far as possible to meet the enemy”—a veiled reference to the strategy of preemptive attack. If Finland were prepared to resist German pressure, then Russia would be prepared to extend all possible economic and military assistance. Russia needed some “positive guarantees” from Finland that Germany would never be allowed to use Finnish territory as a springboard to attack the USSR.
Holsti wanted to know what those “positive guarantees” might consist of, but Yartsev had reached the limits of his empowerment to speak. He could not nor would not say more. At this point Holsti brought Finnish prime minister Cajander into the discussions, and both men assured Yartsev that Finland was indeed committed to a policy of strict neutrality and would resist any armed incursion to the best of its ability. Yartsev indicated that Stalin was not likely to be impressed by that statement, given Finland’s military weakness. But if the Finns backed up their protestations with some kind of tangible gesture, it was entirely possible that trade relations between Finland and Russia would suddenly improve. The most suitable gesture would be for Finland to cede, or lease, to the Soviet Union a number of intrinsically valueless islands in the Gulf of Finland along the seaward approaches to Leningrad.
Holsti and Cajander agreed that this move was out of the question. Even though the only people who ever went to those islets were summertime fishermen, they were still Finnish soil, and the domestic political climate would not permit them to be given to Russia.
Yartsev went back into the diplomatic chambers from whence he had emerged, and nothing further was heard about the matter until the spring of 1939. In March of that year, another Kremlin emissary broached the idea again, in somewhat more concrete terms. If Finland were willing to lease to Russia the island of Suursaari and four smaller islets in the gulf for a period of thirty years, then Russia would demonstrate good faith by offering a large slice of the disputed Karelian borderland in exchange.
Gustav Mannerheim was one of the handful of Finnish leaders privy to this second round of discussions, and he advocated giving the Russians what they wanted. The islands themselves were without value, and their loss could therefore hardly be interpreted as a blow to national prestige. It was folly, Mannerheim insisted, to adhere to such a stubborn policy vis-à-vis their giant eastern neighbor when the Finnish armed forces were not in any condition to back up that policy.
As Finland’s leading soldier, Mannerheim knew what he was talking about. In the spring of 1939, the Finnish Army did not yet possess a single operational antitank gun. There were only a dozen or so modern fighter planes in the entire air force. Communications equipment was primitive; the field radios used by Finnish ground troops weighed 300 pounds, and their tubes had a tendency to explode in cold weather. Machine gun ammunition was in such short supply that gunners were restricted to a dozen rounds of live ammo per training session. The Civic Guard and reserve units drilled with wooden rifles or rusty old tsarist relics. Stocks of shells for the artillery were alarmingly low, and many of the guns themselves dated from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Mannerheim tried to make the politicians see the bitter truth: zeal and patriotism were fine, but those were the only commodities his army had in abundance. The army was in no condition to wage war against the biggest and most lavishly equipped army in Europe.
Mannerheim’s gloomy reports were dismissed as no more than alarmist griping by an old militarist, and once again the politicians ignored this second batch of Soviet overtures. Time was growing short, however, and Russian pressure would continue to increase as the weeks went by.
That was because the Russians themselves were feeling pressured. To a Soviet strategist sitting in a map room in the Kremlin in the spring of 1939, no direction on the compass looked reassuring. And nowhere was the potential danger quite as glaring as it was in the direction of Leningrad—and Finland. Not only was Leningrad a major industrial center, it was the spiritual and cultural heart of the Communist state, the cradle of the revolution. The city had become a powerful symbolic entity; its loss, in a war with Nazi Germany, would hurt Russia more than the loss of a million infantry. The hypothetical Russian strategist, then, would have surveyed the situation with emotions not markedly different from those that had prompted Peter the Great’s concern about the sleeping ladies of Petersburg.
Stalin was no longer worried about Anglo-French cabals against him. By the spring of 1939, it had become clear that the only nation Stalin had genuine reason to fear was Nazi Germany. Already Hitler had moved into Austria, closer to the Balkans, closer to the Ukraine’s wheat and the oil fields at Baku. Stalin could see as clearly as the next statesman that such bankrupt concepts as “collective security” offered no comfort, and he could certainly see that no European state, not even one as militarily contemptible as Italy, need fear the moral condemnations of the League of Nations. In view of the Western powers’ long tradition of anticommunism, there seemed only the remotest chance of joining with those nations in a unified anti-German front. For Stalin and his generals, the conclusion seemed obvious: for the moment, given the realities of the day, Russia would have to go it alone. So, given the very real threat posed by Hitler, the record of close German-Finnish cooperation in 1918, and the realities of geography, the Russian viewpoint concerning Finland was not entirely unreasonable.
While events were accelerating in the northland, Hitler had been putting out secret feelers to the Kremlin. Hitler knew that Stalin needed two things: time in which to strengthen Russia’s defenses, and freedom from outside intervention if Russia felt obliged, for the sake of improving its defensive posture, to gobble up some neighboring country. Alone among European leaders at that moment, Hitler was in a position to offer him both, at no additional risk to his own designs. Given Hitler’s contempt for the Slavs, and his not-so-secret territorial ambitions to the east, it was obvious to both parties that this would be a marriage of convenience rather than mutual affection. Sooner or later, the deal would be revoked, probably by force, when it suited the führer to do so. Until that day came, however, the Nazi-Soviet pact was a most satisfying arrangement for both signatories.
As far as Finland was concerned, the agreement signed between the two dictatorships in August 1939 opened the way for Stalin’s plans by means of an “Additional Secret Protocol,” which defined the two signatories’ spheres of interest in the Baltic region:
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the USSR.
One week after the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed, Hitler invaded Poland. On September 17, Russia attacked Poland from the east, absorbing enough territory to give Stalin a “buffer zone” on that part of the USSR’s frontier. The foreign minister of Estonia was invited to Moscow on September 22, and only one week later an agreement was signed that gave Moscow the right to station troops, aircraft, and naval units in that small Baltic nation—in effect, to annex Estonia as a satellite. The foreign ministers of Latvia and Lithuania were invited to Moscow during the first week of October, and on the fifth and eleventh of that month, they too signed “mutual assistance” treaties with the USSR that would lead to their absorption into Stalin’s empire.
Another and similar summons went out on October 5, to the Finnish government in Helsinki. In form it was an invitation; in substance, it was a demand: a Finnish delegation should come to Moscow to discuss “concrete political questions.” In the words of Finnish historian Max Jakobsen: “For eighteen months, Finland had conducted a muted dialogue with her great neighbor; the Russians had from time to time softly asked a favor or two, and the Finns had politely whispered their refusal. Now the tone was changed: this time, there had been steel in Molotov’s voice.”1
At the first high-level meeting in Moscow, on October 12, Stalin wasted no time putting his demands on the table. His main strategic problem, he said, was the vulnerability of the frontiers around Leningrad. In order to improve the city’s security, he needed—indeed, he must have—the strongest possible assurances of continued good relations with Finland. Given the chaos that had recently engulfed Europe, he had serious fears about the possibility of an attack against that sensitive part of the Soviet Union, either from the Gulf of Finland or from the Finnish mainland.
The Soviet Union therefore demanded:
• that the frontier between Russia and Finland in the Karelian Isthmus region be moved westward to a point only 20 miles east of Viipuri, and that all existing fortifications on the Karelian Isthmus be destroyed;
• that the Finns cede to Russia the islands of Suursaari, Lavansaari, Tytarsaari, and Koivisto in the Gulf of Finland, along with most of the Rybachi Peninsula on the Arctic coast. In compensation for this, Stalin was willing to exchange 5,500 square kilometers of East Karelia, above Lake Ladoga;
• that the Finns lease to the USSR the peninsula of Hanko, and permit the Russians to establish a base there, manned by 5,000 troops and some support units.
In practical terms, such concessions would mean the abandonment of Finland’s main defense, the Mannerheim Line, leaving the country gravely weakened. Moreover, it was the opinion of nearly everyone in the Finnish government that these demands, as stunning as they were, were only the prelude to other, more severe demands—demands that the Finns would be powerless to reject because they would have already lost their strongest line of defense.
Foreign Minister Erkko in particular was convinced that Stalin was bluffing and that Finland needed only to stand fast and the Russians would back down. There were acrimonious discussions in Helsinki between Erkko, those who thought as he did, and Marshal Mannerheim, who kept insisting that the Russians meant what they said, would not hesitate to take what they wanted by force, and could not be stopped by Finland’s armed forces.
All through the rest of October and into November, negotiations continued. The Finns were willing to compromise slightly on the Isthmus border and were willing to cede some, but not all, of the gulf islands. As for giving the Russians a base at Hanko, on the Finnish mainland, that was quite unacceptable.
Subsequent events made Stalin look so much the villain in this unfolding scenario of intimidation that it is hard to shift one’s point of view to his side of the issue. But the effort reveals that some of his assumptions seem less paranoid than logical, and his demands, therefore, less outrageous than brutally realistic. He was, for example, absolutely accurate in his prediction that Germany would turn on the Soviet Union as soon as Hitler had achieved dominance in mainland Europe; his only mistake was in underestimating the timetable of events.
It is true that never in history had Leningrad (or St. Petersburg) been successfully attacked across the Karelian Isthmus, but the contingency existed, and the dazzling conquest of Poland had proved that if any army in the world could bring it off, it was the Wehrmacht. Stalin’s proposals were a direct attempt to head off that possibility, and from his point of view the demands on Finland were both moderate and made in transparent good faith. But the Finns believed that the wily Georgian, like some shrewd Oriental merchant, had merely initiated a process of haggling by setting his price much higher than what he was really willing to settle for.
Such does not appear to have been the case. When Stalin informed the Finnish delegation that those were his minimum demands, he was quite serious, and his dismay at the Finns’ hardheaded rejection was probably sincere. The stubborn and unrealistic stance adopted by the Finns appeared to Stalin as both perverse and downright suspicious. Surely the Finns must have had some kind of hidden motive for adopting such a provocative and belligerent policy; and since Finland’s own armed forces were so weak, that hidden motive might well be a secret alliance with Hitler.
For their part, the Finns too believed that things could not possibly be as straightforward as they were presented to be. Stalin’s proposals must have masked some darker and more sinister intention. One of Mannerheim’s best staff officers, General Öhquist, was brought into the picture to study the list of Russian demands from the military point of view, and he dismissed them: “No officer with modern training could take seriously the grounds for the demands they have put to us. More likely, what they are demanding now is only the preparation for further, far-reaching demands.”
His was a perceptive, if orthodox, analysis, as far as it went, but it overlooked one crucial fact: Joseph Stalin was not “an officer with modern training.” Every historical indication is that the Russian negotiators were genuinely thrown off balance and deeply surprised by the Finns’ intransigent response. If these original demands had been met, would Stalin then have tried to subjugate all of Finland? Would the Winter War have been fought? It is at least possible that Stalin himself did not know what his ultimate intentions toward Finland might be. The strongest argument against such a strategy of outright conquest is that it did not, in the event, happen—not after the Winter War nor even in 1944 when Stalin had every legitimate excuse to overrun the country, and could have done so with comparative ease.
Whether Stalin would truly have been satisfied with his initial “shopping list” is almost beside the point; ultimately, of course, these issues came back down to an irreducible case of right versus wrong. Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory. And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression. Even Nikita Khrushchev admitted as much, decades later, although in the next breath he rationalized the invasion in the name of realpolitik: “There’s some question whether we had any legal or moral right for our actions against Finland. Of course we didn’t have any legal right. As far as morality is concerned, our desire to protect ourselves was ample justification in our own eyes.”2
Russo-Finnish negotiations at the Kremlin went back and forth, round and round, and in the end got nowhere. At one of the final meetings, on November 3, Molotov dropped his mask of cool professionalism and snapped at the Finns: “Since we civilians don’t seem to be making any progress, perhaps it’s the soldiers’ turn to speak.”
On the morning of November 9, the Finnish delegates went for their final meeting with Stalin and Molotov. They communicated their government’s final, inflexible rejection, restating only the relatively minor compromises that had already been put on the table and turned down by the Russians. Stalin seemed unwilling to believe his ears and continued to explore possibilities for further compromise, speaking informally and with what seemed like urgent sincerity. But after an hour of futile discussion it was obvious to everyone that the whole business had come to a dead end. Each side bade farewell to the other. Since the Finnish delegates were clearly just as upset by this outcome as the Russians, the final meeting ended with remarkably little display of animosity by anyone. The actual parting, in fact, was almost jovial. Molotov waved and said, “Au revoir!” and Stalin shook hands all around and wished the Finns “all the best.” Then he went off to confer with his generals about how best to subdue this willful and obstinate little country.
It seems clear from Khrushchev’s memoirs as well as other postwar Soviet documents that the Red Army planners were caught off guard by the Finns’ intransigence. True, the Russians had made numerous military preparations, but those had been predicated on the contingency of a major European power moving into Finland. Little serious thought had been given to the prospect of a war against Finland alone. Now the situation had changed radically. Whatever Stalin’s personal inclinations toward Finland—and at the start of negotiations, they were comparatively benign—a war of some sort now seemed inevitable.
The very sketchy evidence to emerge from post-Stalinist Russian sources suggests that Stalin was being urged to take quick action by the fire-breathing Andrei Zhdanov, political boss of Leningrad, and a clique of Leningrad District officers allied with him. This faction based its hasty and slipshod operational planning on two misconceptions: one being the belief that Finland did not have the capacity to offer more than token, face-saving resistance, and the other being the hoary Politburo delusion that the Finnish working class would rise up and paralyze its existing government, if not actually turn its guns on them, just as soon as the Red Army came across the border.
This wishful thinking was certainly reflected in official publications. A typical specimen is this excerpt from a 1938 edition of Kranaja Gazeta: “The Finnish Army, which for the most part is made up of peasants and workers, has no desire to pour out its blood for the benefit of landowners and the bourgeoise. … It is certain that if war broke out with the Soviet Union, the democratic elements of the population are ready to turn their weapons against the Fascists.”3 In a similar vein was a Tass report dated November 8, 1939, which stated that the families of Finland’s recently mobilized reservists were so poor that many of them had neither shoes nor adequate clothing for the coming winter.
Of course Stalin, like every other isolated head of state, depended on information fed to him by a network of subordinate agencies. With the purges still fresh in every bureaucrat’s mind, there was a natural tendency to tell Stalin what one supposed Stalin wished to hear. Certainly that was the case with the Russian minister in Helsinki, a servile party hack named Derevyanski, who appears to have been the source of many misconceptions about conditions inside Finland.
At the same time that Tass was reporting massive unrest among the Finnish proletariat, reports also began to appear in print citing “evidence” that “the Imperialists” were preparing to use Finland as a base for an invasion of the USSR. This was, and to a certain extent still is, the official justification given to the Soviet public for why the war was fought. It permitted the Kremlin to rationalize the apparent lunacy of a nation of 3.5 million souls attempting to invade a nation of 171 million. These claims also laid the groundwork for later explanations of the failed offensives and staggering casualties suffered by the Red Army. They could be explained away as being the result of Imperialist aid to the treacherous Finns.
The returning Finnish delegation barely had time to unpack its bags in Helsinki when word reached them that the Soviet press had unleashed a savage barrage of attacks on the Finnish government. The worst epithets were directed at Foreign Minister Erkko, who was vilified as a crowing rooster, a writhing serpent, and a phobic rat.
In its final report to the government, the Moscow delegation stated that there were three actions the Russians might take: they might do as Erkko suggested and simply abandon their claims; they might actually declare war; or they might do nothing and just wait for the international situation to move in one direction or another. “The first possibility seemed too good to be true; the second too terrible to contemplate; therefore, most people plumped for the third.”4
As the month of November drew to a close and no hostile Russian acts occurred, a wave of relief swept over Finland. Perhaps Erkko’s gamble had paid off after all. Schoolchildren and other evacuees returned to the cities and the border districts, and the government announced that schools would reopen on December 1. The popular mood was upbeat: Finland’s cause was so self-evidently just that surely the Western democracies would step in to devastate the Russians if they tried an attack.
It was touching, this inchoate faith in the national cause; it was also tragically deluded. When a delegation from the intensely patriotic National Coalition party visited Marshal Mannerheim in early November to ask for his views as Finland’s leading military figure, Mannerheim gave it to them straight. Stalin was not bluffing, he said. Russia, too, felt that its cause was just. The Red Army was no pushover, in spite of all the horror stories that had leaked out about the havoc wrought by Stalin’s purge of the officer corps. And as for the armed forces of Finland, the Marshal stated bluntly that their condition was critically deficient in every aspect except morale.
The politicians listened respectfully to Mannerheim, thanked him for his time, then left his office whispering among themselves that the Marshal was too old, too gloomy, too afraid of Russia, and too cautious for a proper Finn.
Mannerheim had only conveyed the essence of the uniformly grim reports that were reaching his desk. A sympathetic German military attaché warned that unless drastic moves were taken to reopen negotiations, his information indicated that soon “nothing might remain of Finland except a tale of heroism.” Intelligence reports and aerial reconnaissance photos gave indications of massive troop buildups in the Leningrad area and of hundreds of tanks, guns, and planes massed openly within easy range of the frontier. Less concrete, but just as alarming, were vague reports of new railheads and unpaved roads that dead-ended in the forests just a few kilometers east of the border. The Finnish Army had just received its first shipments of Bofors antitank guns from Sweden, enough to parcel out one or two guns per regiment, no more. The situation was equally serious with regard to antiaircraft weapons. Ammunition stocks for all calibers of weapons remained critically low. Trickles of some essential items were beginning to come in, but so slowly and so haphazardly that Mannerheim finally reached a decision he had been putting off for weeks: he could no longer accept responsibility for the defense of Finland.
On November 18, and again on November 26, Mannerheim appealed to Finland’s political leaders in a series of passionate and private discussions, begging them to reopen negotiations. “You must come to a diplomatic solution,” he urged; “the Army is in no condition to fight!” Again the politicians listened to the Marshal respectfully, and some even agreed with him, but Erkko’s ruling clique was puffed up by the belief that they had called the Soviet Bear’s bluff and gotten away with it. Mannerheim had voiced similar jeremiads many times before; for the moment, Finland’s ruling politicians saw no reason to budge. In disgust, Mannerheim tendered his resignation on November 27. President Kallio accepted it.
A couple of days earlier there had been a dinner meeting at the Kremlin; Khrushchev left a vivid account of it. In Stalin’s apartment for the occasion were Molotov, Zhdanov, and the old-guard Finnish Communist O. W. Kuusinen, whom Stalin had already picked as his puppet ruler of a Finnish People’s Republic. According to Khrushchev’s account, plans for the attack on Finland had already been completed: “The consensus of the group was that the Finns should be given one last chance to accept the territorial demands which they had already rejected during the unsuccessful negotiations. If they didn’t yield to our ultimatum, we would take military action. This was Stalin’s idea. Naturally, I didn’t oppose him.”
No one in the room even voiced the possibility that the war would be anything other than a walkover. “All we had to do was raise our voices a little bit,” remembered Khrushchev, “and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work, we could fire one shot and the Finns would put up their hands and surrender. Or so we thought. When I arrived at the apartment, Stalin was saying, ‘Let’s get started today.’”5
The war’s first shots were fired on November 26. They numbered seven, and the fall of shot was pinpointed by three Finnish observation posts. These witnesses estimated that the shells detonated approximately 800 meters inside Soviet territory. That afternoon, Molotov sent Helsinki a furious note, accusing the Finns of firing an artillery barrage and claiming that the shells had killed four Russian soldiers and wounded nine others.
These were the famous “Mainila shots,” named after the village nearest the explosions. The Finns did not, indeed could not, have fired them. Mannerheim had long since ordered all Finnish guns drawn back out of range, in order to prevent just such an incident from happening. The wording of Molotov’s note indicates that he may not have known the shots were going to be fired; for an ultimatum, it contains some oddly conciliatory phrases.
For many years there was speculation that even Stalin may not have ordered the shots to be fired, and that Zhdanov did it on his own to precipitate a crisis and prove his zeal to his master. Again Khrushchev throws some light on the matter.
The Mainila shots, he claimed, were set up by Marshal of Artillery Kulik, a brutal and cretinous NKVD general whose military incompetence would cost the Soviet Union terribly during the first weeks of the German invasion. It is logical to assume that Zhdanov and Stalin both knew of the fabrication and condoned it. Khrushchev deals coyly with the question of who fired first at whom: “It’s always like that when people start a war. They say, ‘You fired the first shot,’ or ‘You slapped me first and I’m only hitting back.’ There was once a ritual which you sometimes see in opera: someone throws down a glove to challenge someone else to a duel; if the glove is picked up, that means the challenge is accepted. Perhaps that’s how it was done in the old days, but in our time it’s not always so clear who starts a war.”6
Helsinki replied to Molotov’s note with protestations of innocence, citing Mannerheim’s pullback order as proof. There was no response from Moscow. For several hours the northland held its breath. Then came the following note from the Kremlin:
As is well known, attacks by units of the Finnish armed forces against Soviet forces continue not only on the Karelian Isthmus, but also at other points along the Soviet-Finnish frontier. The Soviet Union can no longer tolerate this situation. By reason of the situation which has arisen, for which the Finnish government alone bears responsibility, the Soviet government can no longer maintain normal relations with Finland, and is obliged to recall from Finland its political and economic representatives.
A few hours later Helsinki was on fire from Soviet bombs.
1Jakobsen, Max, The Diplomacy of the Winter War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 106.
2Crankshaw, Edward, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 152.
3Upton, Anthony F., Finland, 1939–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1974), 45.
4Jakobsen, 140.
5Crankshaw, ed., 152.
6Ibid.