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CHAPTER 1
The Reasons Why
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-Ã -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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Frozen Hell"
by .
Copyright © 1991 William R. Trotter.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
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