Since the day he had assumed power, Finnish Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner had attempted to reopen talks with Moscow by every means he could think of. He had made personal appeals, he had sent secret emissaries to the Baltic states, and he had tried to make contact through the offices of a number of sympathetic neutral nations. Moscow’s only response had been a chilly silence.
Then in early January, Tanner received a letter from a lady named Hella Wuolijoki, a feminist leftist playwright and prominent Finnish Communist who was known to have been a confidante of Boris Yartsev, the Russian agent who had first approached the Finns about leasing some territory to Stalin. Wuolijoki had connections, and among them was the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Kollontay. In her letter to Tanner, Wuolijoki offered to contact her friend and have a woman-to-woman conversation about the prospects of getting peace negotiations started. Tanner had never heard of a more unusual method of initiating diplomacy, but he was at a dead end in his own efforts, and even something so weird as this was worth following to its outcome. He consulted hurriedly with other top members of the Finnish government, and they agreed. It all sounded cockeyed, and there was one chance in a thousand of anything coming from it, but why not give it a try? Excited by the go-ahead, Wuolijoki soon departed for Stockholm.
She arrived on January 10. For the next three weeks she and Kollontay met secretly every day in a room at the Grand Hotel. Their method of conducting international diplomacy, in Max Jakobsen’s description, was “horribly unconventional and haphazard: they kept no records, they drew freely upon their own vivid imaginations to embellish and improve upon their official instructions, they freely spiced their reports with personal comments; in short, they acted like two matchmakers determined to lead, or if need be, mislead a reluctant and suspicious couple into matrimony. But, in the end, they succeeded where orthodox diplomacy had failed: they got Finnish-Soviet peace negotiations started.”1
Moscow’s initial response was cautious. Then on the last day of January Molotov finally sent a note through Swedish diplomatic channels that tacitly recognized both the existence and the legitimacy of the Ryti-Tanner government. With this brief letter the Kuusinen regime in Terijoki officially ceased to exist. With one stroke of Molotov’s pen, both the man and his entire government were consigned to the “limbo of lost Communist causes.” One can almost feel pity for Kuusinen, who was mothballed in a bureaucratic post in the Karelian SSR and rarely heard from again. For two long decades he had brooded over the lost civil war and faithfully toed the party line, yet his pathetic hour on the stage had come and gone in less than a hundred days. His reward had been empty, and his fall from grace was both sudden and pathetic.
This de facto abandonment of the Kuusinen apparatus was quite an opening concession. There is no hard evidence for it, but it seems likely that Stalin himself was never wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the Kuusinen charade and had let himself be talked into it while he was feeling angry and frustrated over Helsinki’s intransigence. The world had ridiculed the Kuusinen government without mercy, and its existence had become a gross stumbling block in the path of ending the war.
And end it Stalin wanted to do—after, of course, first redeeming the reputation of his armed forces. This whole Finnish affair had mushroomed far beyond Stalin’s original intent. Conceived as a quick-and-dirty sideshow involving regional forces, it had turned into a major military debacle whose diplomatic and material damage would prove costly to repair. The campaigning season in Europe was not far away. Who knew what military events might occur? Here Stalin was with a significant percentage of his total military resources sucked into a grueling campaign that still had no conclusion in sight, as of the end of January.
There was also a new and worrisome factor in the picture. The shadow of Anglo-French intervention, a remote and utterly theoretical possibility in December, had suddenly become tangible. Soviet intelligence reports whispered of contingency plans to attack the Caucasus oil fields as well as send troops to Finland itself. All in all, then, the Finnish campaign was not only an embarrassment, it had become a dangerous disruption, a wild card in the whole European equation, whose temporary balance was important to the security of the Soviet Union.
Yet it would not do for Stalin to rush into negotiations. He could not afford to be seen to fold easily; his original demands would have to be met with interest and penalties, and the Finnish Army would have to be humbled in order that the USSR might emerge from this bloody shambles with its credibility still intact.
France had been one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Finland’s cause. Even the French Socialists had come out against the Soviet Union in this episode. Seeing the depth and passion of public feeling, the French government concocted a much-too-subtle scheme for striking obliquely at Germany by weakening Germany’s major ally, Russia. The driving logic behind this plan was an overestimation of the importance of Russian exports to the Nazi war economy, and a ludicrously overoptimistic projection of how effective the Allied “blockade,” such as it was, might become if those exports were stopped. The neatest thing about the scheme was that the Russians appeared to be such military pushovers. What the whole concoction amounted to was a way to hurt the Germans without actually having to fight them.
Beneath this objective were still deeper motives: the desire to convert some remote part of Europe into a major theater of war, rather than France itself, and the possibility of converting the war’s main purpose from that of fighting Hitler, which many Frenchmen were not keen to do, particularly now that France was off the hook with regard to Poland, to that of aiding “brave little Finland.”
Two schemes were being plotted. One involved French help in rearming all the Polish exile units, transporting them up to Petsamo, and helping them join forces with the Finns, thus avoiding the nastiness of a direct violent confrontation with the Russians. The other entailed making a massive air strike, with Turkish cooperation, against the Caucasus oil fields. Matters got as far as discussions with Mannerheim’s staff about the Petsamo operation, which the Marshal regarded as feasible and potentially useful. The hitch was that it could not be brought off without British cooperation, and that was not in sight until late December.
The British became interested because one of the most crucial loopholes in the Royal Navy’s “blockade” of Germany was the flow of ore from the Swedish iron fields, which supplied up to 40 percent of Germany’s needs. In summer those ore shipments went through the Gulf of Bothnia and were therefore beyond Britain’s reach. But in winter they went to Narvik in Norway and thence to Germany in convoys that hugged the fjord-cut coastline well inside Norwegian territorial waters. Churchill had suggested as far back as mid-September that the Royal Navy plant mine fields along those inland routes and force the Germans out onto the high seas where they could be reached.
On December 16 he revealed a revised plan, fully aware that, on the British side, it involved a blatant violation of international law, and on the German side an almost certain military response somewhere in Scandinavia. Given the Allies’ naval superiority in surface ships, however, Churchill felt they would have a significant advantage if a major campaign should break out in the northern reaches. At first there was no mention at all of Finland in this mining scheme, which soon came to be known as “The Small Plan.” By the time the British cabinet met to discuss the issue on December 18, they had also been apprised of the French scheme to aid Finland and of the League of Nations’ expulsion of Russia. The cabinet’s decision was to back away from French proposals of immediate intervention and to refer the whole untidy Scandinavian business to the chiefs of staff.
Thus, when General Gamelin came out against direct military aid to Finland in a December 19 meeting of the Supreme War Council, the British were content to let the matter lie, for the moment anyway. The council did elect to send notes to Norway and Sweden, urging them to help Finland and promising them Allied support if they got into hot water for doing so. If things fell out that way, it would offer a perfect opportunity for cutting off the Germans’ ore supply without taking on the opprobrium of violating Norway’s territorial integrity. Such a note was duly sent on December 27, and on January 5 the two Scandinavian neutrals sent their reply. Individual volunteers for Finland and war materials donated by foreign states could freely transit Swedish and Norwegian territory. Beyond that, the two neutrals would not go.
While these first dance steps were being executed, the British chiefs of staff had concluded a study of Scandinavia as a potential theater of war. On January 2, they presented a new scheme for the region, an alternative to Churchill’s original ideas, which was soon to be dubbed “The Big Plan.” It was primarily the brainchild of General Sir Edmund Ironside, who saw in it a chance to redeem the Allies’ reputations, now badly tarnished by their failure to act on behalf of Poland, and to upset any German timetable for spring offensives. Obviously the Allies could not spare major forces for a Scandinavian adventure, but Ironside saw in that region a set of transient circumstances that might allow a relatively modest force to achieve a greatly disproportionate effect: “the chance to get a big return for very little expenditure” was how he phrased it in his diary.
The Big Plan called for the Allies to declare openly their intention to send aid to Finland, citing the League of Nations resolution as their justification, and then simply demand that Norway and Sweden give them the right of passage. The expedition would land at Narvik and proceed toward Finland by rail, along rail lines which, coincidentally, just happened to pass through the Swedish ore fields. A base would be established at Lulea, which, also coincidentally, was the port through which the Germans’ warm-weather shipments passed. Naturally the Germans would respond violently to this move, but by the time they got around to it, the Allies would be dug in and waiting for them with superior air and sea power.
For all its neatness, the plan did have some drawbacks. First and foremost was the assumption that both Sweden and Norway would permit themselves to be used as convenient battlefields. Second, the original expeditionary force of 30,000 men was clearly not large enough to guarantee success. By the time Ironside got beyond his rough draft, the “big return for a little expenditure” had metamorphosed into a major strategic operation. Finally, there was the bothersome fact that few if any of these forces would actually end up helping Finland. As Ironside admitted privately in his diary, “Any brigade that reaches Finland would have to remain near the railway and the frontier so as to avoid getting too close to the Russians, or being cut off by the Germans.”2
At first the cabinet found the Big Plan too big for comfort. The Small Plan was dusted off, and new notes were sent to Norway and Sweden on January 6, informing them that their neutrality was actually working to the Nazis’ advantage, a hint that dire consequences might result if they hewed too closely to the neutral posture. Those two countries replied on January 12, rejecting the British interpretation and affirming their intention to resist any infringement on their neutrality no matter whence it came.
But by that time the British cabinet, goaded by Ironside’s memoranda and by French pressure that seemed to increase every day, had switched directions again. On January 11 the chiefs of staff were authorized to work out operational details of the Big Plan. It was at this time that the concept of some kind of Scandinavian expeditionary force began to acquire a momentum of its own. The plans were drawn up by January 27 and were approved by the cabinet on January 29. France, whose generals had hitherto favored the Petsamo scheme, now swung in behind the British plan, making that decision formal at a Supreme War Council meeting on the same day.
The main points of the new plan were now these: Finland had to make an open appeal for assistance. The Allies would then ask Norway and Sweden for permission to move the expeditionary force across their territory. Technically the forces would be labeled “volunteers” for Finland, but in order to “secure their supply lines,” troops would have to be stationed at Narvik and at points along the rail line to the Finnish border. Finally, in order to protect this line from German action in the south, additional Allied units would have to be put ashore at Namsos, Bergen, and Trondheim. Narvik would get two brigades and the southern ports five battalions. At the narrow end of the funnel, Finland, for whose benefit all this was ostensibly being done, would get a single brigade group. It would be no small operation: 100,000 British troops, 50,000 French, and considerable naval and air resources. The supply convoys would sail on March 12, and the landings themselves would begin on March 20.
The lily-white cause of aiding brave little Finland had now assumed in truth the secondary role that was always implicit in these deliberations. As Ironside noted in his diary, “We are quite cynical about everything, except stopping the iron ore.”3
Viewed as a flanking threat against Germany, the plan sidestepped the whole issue of declaring war on the USSR; Hitler, it was hoped, would be provoked into a counterattack that he could not sustain and that could be met on ground of the Allies’ own choosing, conveniently remote from the mainland of Europe, where Hitler had already demonstrated what his armies could do. Hitler for his part was not insensitive to the danger on this northern flank and had ordered contingency planning for such a counterstroke as far back as mid-December. By February the German preparations were at least as far advanced as the Allied ones.
The major weakness in the Allied plan remained what it had always been: the fact that the whole thing hinged on Norway and Sweden giving their permission. Astonishingly, no serious thought seems to have been given to what would happen if they did not. General Pownall, chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France, was quick to jump on that point when the plan was first revealed to him: “I cannot for the life of me see why they should agree, for what do they get out of it except the certainty that Germany will declare war on them and part of their countries at least will be used as a battleground.…”4
In reply to such arguments, the plan’s advocates could only respond that the pressure of public opinion, once Finland had actually made its public cry for help, would force the neutral countries to grant passage, whatever noises they might be making at the moment. Thus beneath all the verbiage and rationalizations the entire Allied scheme was really a gamble on the power of moral persuasion, a political force whose stock at that moment in history had seldom been lower.
Nor could anyone guarantee that Finland would play the game. By now the Finnish government had begun to grow suspicious of the various Allied promises that were being floated toward them. If the offer to help were genuine, then the forces that would arrive in Finland did not seem to be large enough or powerfully enough equipped to be of more than marginal value. If the offer were not genuine, then the Finns were being counted on to defraud their own best interests.
Initial contacts between Finland and the Allies were handled through military channels. Only in February did the Finnish political leadership get brought into the picture. Tanner saw the Allied schemes as an obstacle to his efforts to get negotiations going. Others saw them as a source of international leverage against the Russians, a bargaining chip. It does not seem that anyone in the Finnish government was overly impressed by the offer to help in and of itself. The forces actually earmarked for Finland seemed pathetically inadequate even to the civilians, but the threat of intervention might be useful as a means to pressure the Soviets, or for that matter to coerce the Swedes into giving more aid, as a better alternative than being used as a battlefield.
Intense discussions were conducted in Helsinki between February 8 and 12. There was general agreement about the nation’s diplomatic priorities: first, open direct negotiations with the Soviets; second, get Sweden to join the war; third and definitely last, make an open appeal to the Allies, and let the chips fall where they may. As a basis for negotiations, Finland would offer the Russians a sizable chunk of the Karelian Isthmus and the island of Jussaro, in return for monetary compensation, cash being a much more needed commodity than a big patch of sparsely inhabited Karelian wilderness.
Once the Finnish government’s inner circle had these things nailed down, Tanner and Ryti sought to enlist the Foreign Affairs Committee of the government. At an important session on February 12, the new concessions were agreed to, most reluctantly, by President Kallio, which put him on the side of Tanner, Ryti, and the influential banker-statesman J. R. Paasikivi, who had been part of the original negotiating team in Moscow. Three other ministers balked at offering the Russians any new concessions whatsoever. Their preference was for an appeal to the Allies, the sooner the better. The only immediate course of action everyone agreed on was that Tanner should make one final trip to Stockholm, in a last-ditch effort to obtain Swedish intervention. The pro-peace faction did agree among themselves to pass word to the Russians of the new concessions. On the very day Tanner left for Stockholm, however, the negotiation process was utterly transformed by a single fact that emerged from the battlefield.
The enemy had at long last broken through the Mannerheim Line. For the first time in seventy-odd days the Finnish Army was about to make a general retreat.
1Jakobsen, 209.
2Macleod, Roderick, and Denis Kelly, eds., The Ironside Diaries (New York: David McKay Co., 1963), 188 (hereafter referred to as Ironside).
3Ibid., 215.
4Upton, 58.