Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Read online

  In late February 1940, when the exhausted Finns were finally ready for peace, the British and French still urged the Finns to hold out. The French prime minister, Daladier, urgently wired Finland that he would send 50,000 troops by the end of March, that he had 100 bomber planes that were ready to take off, and that he guaranteed to “arrange” the passage of those troops by land across Norway and Sweden. That offer induced the Finns to keep fighting for another week, during which several thousand more Finns were killed.

  But the British then admitted that Daladier’s offer was a deceitful bluff, that those troops and planes were not ready, that Norway and Sweden were still refusing passage to the offered troops, and that the French offer was being made merely to advance the Allies’ own aims and to save face for Daladier. Hence Finland’s prime minister led a Finnish delegation to Moscow for peace negotiations. At the same time, the Soviet Union maintained its military pressure on Finland by advancing upon Finland’s second-largest city of Viipuri, capital of the Finnish province of Karelia. That fighting accounts for all those gravestones labeled “Viipuri, February or March 1940” that you’ll see in Hietaniemi Cemetery.

  The conditions that the Soviet Union imposed in March 1940 were much harsher than the conditions that the Finns had rejected in October of 1939. The Soviets now demanded the entire province of Karelia, other territory farther north along the Finland/Soviet border, and use of the Finnish port of Hanko near Helsinki as a Soviet naval base. Rather than remain in their homes under Soviet occupation, the entire population of Karelia, amounting to 10% of Finland’s population, chose to evacuate Karelia and withdrew into the rest of Finland. There, they were squeezed into rooms in apartments and houses of other Finns, until almost all of them could be provided with their own homes by 1945. Uniquely among the many European countries with large internally displaced populations, Finland never housed its displaced citizens in refugee camps. Nineteen years later, my Finnish hosts during my visit still remembered the huge strain of finding housing and support for all those Karelians.

  Why, in March 1940, did Stalin not order the Soviet army to keep advancing and to occupy all of Finland? One reason was that the fierce Finnish resistance had made clear that a further advance would continue to be slow and painful and costly to the Soviet Union, which now had much bigger problems to deal with—namely, the problems of reorganizing its army and re-arming to prepare for a German attack. The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. Some authors concluded that the harsh March 1940 peace terms demonstrate that the Finns should indeed have accepted the milder terms demanded by Stalin in October 1939. But Russian archives opened in the 1990’s confirmed Finns’ wartime suspicion: the Soviet Union would have taken advantage of those milder territorial gains and the resulting breaching of the Finnish defense line in October 1939 in order to achieve its intent of taking over all of Finland, just as it did to the three Baltic Republics in 1940. It took the Finns’ fierce resistance and willingness to die, and the slowness and cost of the war against Finland, to convince the Soviet Union not to try to conquer all of Finland in March 1940.

  After the March 1940 armistice, the Soviet Union reorganized its army and annexed the three Baltic Republics. Germany occupied Norway and Denmark in April 1940 and then defeated France in June 1940, so that Finland was now cut off from any possible outside help—except from Germany. Finland rebuilt its own army, especially with German equipment.

  Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union in the following year (1941). At some point, German military planners began discussions with Finnish military planners about “hypothetical” joint operations against the Soviet Union. While Finland had no sympathy with Hitler and Nazism, the Finns understood the cruel reality that it would be impossible for them to avoid choosing sides and to preserve their neutrality in a war between Germany and the Soviet Union: otherwise, one or both of those countries would seek to occupy Finland. Finland’s bitter experience of having to fight the Soviet Union alone in the Winter War made the prospect of repeating that experience worse than the alternative of an alliance of expedience with Nazi Germany—“the least awful of several very bad options,” to quote from Steven Zaloga’s biography of Mannerheim. The poor performance of the Soviet army in the Winter War had convinced all observers—not only in Finland but also in Germany, Britain, and the U.S.—that a war between Germany and the Soviet Union would end with a German victory. Naturally, too, the Finns wanted to regain their lost province of Karelia. On June 21, 1941 Germany did attack the Soviet Union. Finland declared that it would remain neutral, but on June 25 Soviet planes bombed Finnish cities, giving the Finnish government the excuse that night to declare that Finland was once again at war with the Soviet Union.

  This second war against the Soviet Union, following the first Winter War, is called the Continuation War. This time, Finland mobilized one-sixth of its entire population to serve in or work directly for the army: the largest percentage of any country during World War Two. That’s as if the U.S. today were to reinstitute the draft and to build up an army of over 50 million. Serving directly in the armed forces were males from age 16 to their early 50’s, plus some women near the front lines. All Finns of both sexes not actually in the armed forces, ages 15 to 64, had to work in a war industry, agriculture, forestry, or other sector necessary for defense. Teen-age children worked in the fields, sawmills, and anti-aircraft.

  With the Soviet army preoccupied in defending itself against the German attack, the Finns quickly reoccupied Finnish Karelia, and (more controversially) also advanced beyond their former border into Soviet Karelia. But Finland’s war aims remained strictly limited, and the Finns described themselves not as “allies” but just as “co-belligerents” with Nazi Germany. In particular, Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things: to round up Finland’s Jews (although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo); and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south. That latter refusal of the Finns saved Leningrad, enabled it to survive the long German siege, and contributed to Stalin’s later decision that it was unnecessary to invade Finland beyond Karelia (see below).

  Nevertheless, the fact remained that Finland was fighting alongside Nazi Germany. The distinction between “ally” and “co-belligerent” was lost on outsiders who did not understand Finland’s situation. When I was growing up in the U.S. during World War Two, I just thought of Finland as the fourth Axis power, along with Germany and Italy and Japan. Under pressure from Stalin, Britain declared war on Finland. But the only action that Britain took was to send one bombing raid against the Finnish city of Turku, where the British pilots intentionally dropped their bombs offshore into the ocean rather than hit Turku itself.

  After early December 1941, the Finnish army ceased its advance, and nothing further happened in the Continuation War between the Soviet Union and Finland for almost three years. On the one hand, Finland had no other goals after occupying Karelia. On the other hand, the Soviet army was too busy fighting the German army to be able to spare troops against Finland. Finally, after the Soviet Union had made sufficient progress in pushing German troops out of the Soviet Union that it felt able to divert attention to Finland, in June 1944 it launched a big offensive against the Karelian Isthmus. Soviet troops quickly broke through the Mannerheim Line, but (just as in February 1941) the Finns succeeded in stabilizing the front. The Soviet advance then petered out, partly because Stalin set a higher priority on using his army to reach Berlin from the east ahead of American and British armies advancing from the west; and partly because of the dilemmas already faced during the Winter War: the expected high costs of o
vercoming further Finnish resistance, of guerrilla warfare in Finland’s forests, and of figuring out what to do with Finland if and when the Soviet Union did succeed in conquering it. Thus, in 1944 as in 1941, Finnish resistance achieved the realistic goal expressed by my Finnish friend: not of defeating the Soviet Union, but of making further Soviet victories prohibitively costly, slow, and painful. As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation.

  Once the battlefront re-stabilized in July 1944, Finland’s leaders again flew to Moscow to sue for peace and signed a new treaty. This time, Soviet territorial demands were almost the same as they had been in 1941. The Soviet Union took back Finnish Karelia and a naval base on the south coast of Finland. The Soviet Union’s only additional territorial acquisition was to annex Finland’s port and nickel mines on the Arctic Ocean. Finland did have to agree to drive out the 200,000 German troops stationed in northern Finland, in order to avoid having to admit Soviet troops into Finland to do that. It took Finland many months, in the course of which the retreating Germans destroyed virtually everything of value in the whole Finnish province of Lapland. When I visited Finland in 1959, my Finnish hosts were still bitter that their former German allies had turned on Finland and laid waste to Lapland.

  Finland’s total losses against the Soviets and the Germans in the two wars, the Winter War and the Continuation War, were about 100,000 men killed. In proportion to Finland’s population then, that’s as if 9 million Americans were killed in a war today. Another 94,000 Finns were crippled, 30,000 Finnish women were widowed, 55,000 Finnish children were orphaned, and 615,000 Finns lost their homes. That’s as if a war resulted in 8 million Americans being crippled, 2½ million American women being widowed, half-a-million American children being orphaned, and 50 million Americans losing their homes. In addition, in one of the largest child evacuations in history, 80,000 Finnish children were evacuated (mainly to Sweden), with long-lasting traumatic consequences extending to the next generation (Plate 2.7). Today, daughters of those Finnish mothers evacuated as children are twice as likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness as are their female cousins born to non-evacuated mothers. The Soviet Union’s much heavier combat losses against Finland were estimated at about half-a-million dead and a quarter-of-a-million wounded. That Soviet death toll includes the 5,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Finns and repatriated after the armistice to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately shot for having surrendered.

  The armistice treaty required Finland “to collaborate with the Allied powers in the apprehension of persons accused of war crimes.” The Allied interpretation of “Finnish war criminal” was: the leaders of Finland’s government during Finland’s wars against the Soviet Union. If Finland hadn’t prosecuted its own government leaders, the Soviets would have done so and imposed harsh sentences, probably death sentences. Hence Finland felt compelled to do something that in any other circumstance would have been considered disgraceful: it passed a retroactive law, declaring it illegal for its government leaders to have defended Finland by adopting policies that were legal and widely supported under Finnish law at the time that those policies were adopted. Finnish courts sentenced to prison Finland’s wartime President Ryti, its wartime Prime Ministers Rangell and Linkomies, its wartime foreign minister, and four other ministers plus its ambassador to Berlin. After those leaders had served out their sentences in comfortable special Finnish prisons, most of them were voted or appointed back into high public positions.

  The peace treaty required Finland to pay heavy reparations to the Soviet Union: $300,000,000, to be paid within six years. Even after the Soviet Union extended the term to eight years and reduced the amount to $226,000,000, that was still a huge burden for the small and un-industrialized Finnish economy. Paradoxically, though, those reparations proved to be an economic stimulus, by forcing Finland to develop heavy industries such as building ships and factories-for-export. (The reparations thereby exemplify the etymology of the Chinese word “wei-ji,” meaning “crisis,” which consists of the two characters “wei,” meaning “danger,” and “ji,” meaning “opportunity.”) That industrialization contributed to the economic growth of Finland after the war, to the point where Finland became a modern industrial country (and now a high-tech country) rather than (as formerly) a poor agricultural country.

  In addition to paying those reparations, Finland had to agree to carry out much trade with the Soviet Union, amounting to 20% of total Finnish trade. From the Soviet Union, Finland imported especially oil. That proved to be a big advantage for Finland, because it didn’t share the dependence of the rest of the West on Middle Eastern oil supplies. But, as part of its trade agreement, Finland also had to import inferior Soviet manufactured goods, such as locomotives, nuclear power plants, and automobiles, which could otherwise have been obtained more cheaply and with much higher quality from the West. Finns coped with their frustration through black humor, just as they had in dealing with the antiquated Italian artillery that I mentioned earlier. For instance, at the time of my 1959 visit, many Finns had Soviet cars of the Moskvich model, which frequently broke down. Many European and American car models then had sun roofs: sliding panels that one could use to open the roof and let in the sun during beautiful weather. According to a widespread Finnish joke, new models of Moskviches were going to have not just a sun roof, but also a sun floor: another sliding panel, this one in the floor. Question: what’s the advantage of having a sun floor, which can’t let in the sun? Answer: whenever your Moskvich breaks down, which will happen often, you can put your feet through the opening in the sun floor, stand up on the ground inside your Moskvich, and push it forwards!

  Finns refer to the years 1945–1948 as “the years of danger.” In retrospect, we know that Finland survived, but during those years that happy outcome seemed uncertain. The foremost danger was that of a communist take-over, through domestic communist subversion supported by the Soviet Union. Paradoxically for a democratic country that had been fighting for its survival against the communist Soviet Union, Finland’s Communist Party and its allies won a quarter of the seats in the March 1945 free elections for Finland’s parliament, and they tried to take over the police force. The Soviet Union had already occupied East Germany, was in the process of engineering communist take-overs of four Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania), engineered a successful coup in Czechoslovakia, and supported an unsuccessful guerrilla war in Greece. Would Finland be next? The cost of reparations to the Soviet Union represented a heavy burden on the still largely agricultural, not-yet-industrialized Finnish economy. War had destroyed Finland’s infrastructure: farms had been neglected, manufacturing facilities had fallen into disrepair, two-thirds of Finland’s shipping fleet had been destroyed, and trucks were worn out, without spare parts, and reduced to burning wood instead of gasoline. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Karelians, crippled Finns, orphans, and widows required housing, money, and emotional support from those Finnish families that remained intact and healthy. Tens of thousands of Finnish children who had been evacuated to Sweden were returning, having been traumatized, forgotten their Finnish language, and nearly forgotten their parents during their years in exile.

  In those years of danger, Finland devised a new post-war policy for averting a Soviet take-over. That policy became known as the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line, after Finland’s two presidents who formulated, symbolized, and rigorously implemented it for 35 years (Juho Paasikivi, 1946–1956; Urho Kekkonen, 1956–1981). The Paasikivi-Kekkonen line reversed Finland’s disastrous 1930’s policy of ignoring Russia. Paasikivi and Kekkonen learned from those mistakes. To them, the essential painful realities were that Finland was a small and weak country; it could expect no help from Western allies; it had to understand and constantly keep in mind the Soviet Union’s point of view; it had to talk frequently with Russian government officials at every level, from the top down; and it had to win a
nd maintain the Soviet Union’s trust, by proving to the Soviet Union that Finland would keep its word and fulfill its agreements. Maintaining the Soviet Union’s trust would require bending over backwards by sacrificing some of the economic independence, and some of the freedom to speak out, that strong unthreatened democracies consider inalienable national rights.

  Both Paasikivi and Kekkonen knew the Soviet Union and its people very well—Paasikivi, from conducting the October 1939 and March 1940 and September 1944 negotiations with the Soviet Union, and from serving as ambassador to Moscow. Paasikivi concluded that Stalin’s driving motivation in his relationship with Finland was not ideological but strategic and geopolitical: i.e., the Soviet Union’s military problem of defending its second-largest city (Leningrad / St. Petersburg) against further possible attacks via Finland or via the Gulf of Finland, as had already happened in the past. If the Soviet Union felt secure on that front, Finland would be secure. But Finland could never be secure as long as the Soviet Union felt insecure. More generally, conflict anywhere in the world could make the Soviet Union uneasy and prone to place demands on Finland, so Finland had to become active in world peace-keeping. Paasikivi, and then Kekkonen, were so successful in developing a trusting relationship with Stalin, and then with Khrushchev and with Brezhnev, that, when Stalin was once asked why he had not tried to maneuver the Communist Party into power in Finland as he had in every other Eastern European country, he answered, “When I have Paasikivi, why would I need the Finnish Communist Party?”