Robert Edwards - The Winter War

Yartsev was not impressed, but at least he had fulfilled his diplomatic function and opened a discussion. He then disappeared, returning (suspiciously quickly) a week later, with a written response. Tanner assumed at the time that the rather cobbled-together document he produced originated with Narkomindel (the Soviet Foreign Ministry) and Maksim Litvinov, but it is quite possible that it did not; certainly it bore no trace of ‘indivisible peace’, the policy by which the Soviet Foreign Commissar was best known. In its tone, it was pure Andrei Zhdanov: If the Finnish Government cannot enter into a secret military alliance, the Soviet Union would be satisfied with a written undertaking that Finland was prepared to resist German aggression and to accept for that purpose Soviet military assistance.’

Interestingly, this time there was no mention of stationing troops on Finnish soil for the purposes of ‘forward defence’; rather, the security needs of Finland would now be met by a combination of arms supplies and the good offices of the Baltic fleet, which would, Yartsev added, need to take over and fortify the island of Suursaari (Hogland) at the Leningrad end of the Gulf of Finland. Further, the fortification of the Åland islands would be acceptable, but should now be a matter for the Soviet Union and Finland together, with no mention of Sweden. Soviet ‘observers’ would remain, to ensure that no German incursions took place.

This was particularly uneasy news; to seek protection in this way would prevent any meaningful exercise of a policy of Scandinavian neutrality on the part of Finland as well as destroy—utterly—any hope of a military alliance, however tangential, with Sweden, which was, of course, exactly the point. Russian policy, unchanged in 130 years, was to separate Finland from its northern neighbours and bind it, in whatever way possible, to the east. To make the Ålands a Soviet casus belli, particularly given the rapidly deteriorating international situation, was simply to play Russian roulette. Clearly though, the USSR wanted Finland back, if not as a vassal state, then certainly as a military dependency. Finland, to Moscow, was Naboth’s Vineyard.

In this, the Soviet Union faced a ticklish doctrinal problem. It was not, in Leninist theory, correct for armies to be used for limited territorial gains, being against the spirit of world socialist revolution—a nicety of which the Poles had probably not been aware in 1920—which had given rise to the tortuous, legalistic diplomacy of the type which Tanner was now experiencing, and which had already come to characterize the Soviet State. In the event, the Russian solution to this ‘moral dilemma’ was less than elegant.

The Finnish Cabinet rejected this latest proposal out of hand on 29 August and, weary of the whispered conversations with Yartsev, instructed Holsti to take the matter up with Litvinov directly in September, when he was due to attend at the League of Nations. This Holsti did, and was somewhat curious to learn that Litvinov appeared to have little or no knowledge of the Yartsev conversation, and certainly not of the recently rejected written proposals; this led the Finns to assume (or at least consider) that the Foreign Commissar, who was generally respected, was no longer the master of his brief, nor even in charge of events.

The Munich crisis at the end of September 1938, the apparent solving of which by Chamberlain served to send a wave of optimism through Western Europe, had rather the opposite effect in the north, as the Soviet Baltic fleet promptly mobilized, surface craft and submarines pouring out of Kronstadt and crowding the Gulf of Finland, with several violations of the territorial waters of both Finland and Estonia. Clearly, nerves were tightly strung in Moscow.

As they were in Helsinki and Stockholm. The news that there would be no immediate war caused a wave of relief to sweep through both capitals and mobilized reservists stood down; it was generally held that a war between Germany and the Western powers would be a catastrophe for Finland, and therefore Scandinavia. Czechoslovakian independence was a small price to pay. Mannerheim used the September crisis to carry out a swift audit of the armed forces, which he would command in the event of war. [32] Mannerheim held Czechoslovakia in no particular regard, for reasons that went back to the Russian civil war—the Czech Legion had handed over the White Admiral Kolchak to the Bolsheviks—for money —with predictable effects upon his life expectancy. The tone of his report was bleak:

The recent crisis has confronted us with a hopeless picture as regards the armament and equipment of the forces which we would have to put into the field in case of war. Finland’s field army would have to be thrown against the enemy completely without protection against armour and aircraft, supported by artillery weak in both quality and quantity, and to a degree lacking in individual equipment. When one realises the equipment and arms of the presumptive enemy, the situation of the Army appears even more hopeless. The same can be said of the Navy and the Air Force. In a word, the armed forces must at present be described as totally unfitted for war.

And, as for the Isthmus:

…the slowness with which the fortifying of the frontier districts is proceeding deserves to be especially emphasised and is due mainly to the almost total lack of technical personnel. To put it shortly our country is at the present time not in a position to be defended. The events of the last few weeks show that our respite may be very short. [33] Mannerheim, Memoirs, p. 296.

Shortly afterward, Mannerheim embarked on a lightning visit to both Paris and London. What he encountered in Paris dismayed him somewhat, in the person of General Gamelin, who was, reported Mannerheim, ‘shocked’ at the state of the French Army. [34] In contrast to General Gamelin’s publicly stated confidence. In London, Lord Halifax gave him a grand lunch and Mannerheim took the opportunity of asking the Foreign Secretary whether he could impart the news in Finland that: ‘England was arming as if she were already in a state of war.’ [35] Mannerheim. op. cit, p. 298. After ‘some moments of reflection’, Halifax assented.

Equipped with this information, Mannerheim busied himself with renewed appeals to President Kallio concerning military estimates, the current 1939 amount having already been spent, and with little, as his report reveals, to show for it. He urged Kallio to authorize an increased budget of 500 million markka for the next year. He got 350 million, to commence in the spring—six vital months away. The news that a second 200-million-markka public bond issue was also under subscription may have pleased him, until he discovered what it was for—the 1940 Olympic Games.

Yartsev, meanwhile, had not given up and nor had Litvinov, despite the fact that his policy had been consigned to history at Munich. Holsti, however, resigned as foreign minister, although not for reasons particularly associated with the USSR. [36] In fact, he merely had to choose between being a League delegate or a minister—he was being paid for both jobs, which raised some auditors’ eyebrows, and he chose the League—the salary was higher! The fact that Holsti was rather anti-German (and, reciprocally, they he) served to start rumours that somehow Berlin had engineered his downfall. [37] His table manners while in Geneva had given some cause for offence; he had been overheard describing Adolf Hitler as a ‘madman’ and Mussolini as a ‘syphilitic demagogue’. He was possibly drunk. His place was taken by Eljas Erkko.

In a curious attempt to appear to be even-handed, the Interior Ministry promptly issued an order banning the Patriotic People’s Party (IKL) as the Communists had been banned, declaring it illegal. The minister in charge, Urho Kekkonen (later, after 1956, president) was to admit later that this was a simple (if crude) gesture, to suggest to Moscow that Finland would have no truck with German fifth columnists. The ban was later—rather awkwardly—reversed by the Finnish courts as being unconstitutional, but it served to rather confuse the issue of Holsti’s resignation, as well as putting the relative fortunes of extreme right and extreme left into some perspective.