Robert Edwards: The Winter War

Within two years of that annexation of Austria, however, Finland’s economy was in smoking ruins; over 25,000 of its people were dead and many more were injured or dispossessed. It lost 11 per cent of its territory and 30 per cent of its economic assets.

HELSINKI, 4 JUNE 1937: As birthday parties went, this one was rather unusual and had clearly been choreographed down to the tiniest detail; it looked like an informal stroll of uniformed notabilities through the packed streets of the Finnish capital, but there was more to it than that. The only potential variable was the weather, which threatened rain, but undeterred by the prospect of damp, the streets and office windows were lined with a largely good-natured crowd of patient well-wishers, Finns are, perforce, used to unpredictable weather. In the event, they need not have worried. At noon, the man whose anniversary this was stepped through his front door. At six feet two, booted and spurred, his height accentuated by a splendid snow-white fur hat and his upper-body breadth by a chestful of decorations from several grateful nations, he was an impressive figure. Cavalry sabre at his hip and marshal’s baton in his white-gloved hand, he was greeted by blushing, reverential maidens in flowing pale blue gowns, who gracefully strewed great bunches of summer blooms in his path. [1] Mannerheim had two Marshal’s batons; one had been presented to him as an unofficial gesture of recognition by his own military circle in 1928, another, formally, by the government in 1933. He carried, on this occasion, the earlier one, claiming that ‘it was lighter’. It was a scene of Ruritanian splendour and perhaps one rather untypical of Finland, but calculated to transmit a simple message to a confused and nervous public: all was well. For Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, 70 today, this occasion marked a return to public life for which this last remaining ‘White’ general had worked hard. Some whispered, perhaps a little too hard.

An event not unlike this, complete with floral tributes, had happened once before, more than nineteen years previously, on 16 May 1918, the day on which modern Finland had been born; that Mannerheim had been the architect of that moment, by his brilliant, authoritative and unorthodox conduct of a savage civil war, was known to all. However, the legacy of that war, a sulphurous resentment on the part of some elements of the working classes, enthusiastically supported by Soviet agitprop, of what they regarded as bourgeois repression of a populist movement, had made for a delicate political tightrope upon which Mannerheim, in the judgement of a traumatized civil administration, had then been considered perhaps unsuitable to step after he had served briefly as regent. In this he had been treated shabbily, but necessarily so, and most of Finland knew it. [2] He had, perhaps unwisely, written an open letter, published in Finland on 2 November 1919, advocating immediate intervention to capture Petrograd (St Petersburg); an impulsive act, to be sure, and one which kept him out of public life until 1931.

Part of this hatred of him by the left was based on experience, for although ‘White’ Finland had fought with both determination and flair, the aftermath of the struggle had been utterly ghastly. No exact records remain of the tally of ‘Reds’ who perished in the internment camps, but it certainly ran into the high thousands; those whom the influenza pandemic did not kill starved to death.

Lenin’s assessment of the country (in which he had been an émigré more than once) had given him high hopes in terms of combining it into the Soviet project. He had written in March 1917: ‘Let us not forget that we have, adjoining Petrograd, one of the most advanced countries, a real republican country, Finland, which from 1905 to 1917, under the shelter of the revolutionary battles in Russia, has developed its democracy in conditions of relative peace and won the majority of its people for socialism.’ [3] V. I. Lenin, Letters from Afar (International Publishers, NY, 1932). Mannerheim and his scratch army had comprehensively wrecked that.

Gustaf Mannerheim was and is a controversial but most absorbing figure. To a large section of his 3.8 million countrymen he was the Father of the Nation, this man who had almost single-handedly forged a resolute yeoman army out of a cowed, hungry and terrorized population, equipped it with the bravely captured weapons of its foul and godless enemy and given Bolshevism a sound thrashing, driving it from the land in 1918. To many others of more ‘progressive’ sentiment, however, he was a monster: Mannerheim the White Butcher, a bemedalled dictator-in-waiting, swaggering and heartless, itching to crush the workers under the heel of his immaculately cobbled riding boot. Perhaps the paradox was best summed up by his decorations—both the Cross of St George, awarded by an appreciative Tsar Nicholas II for fighting the Kaiser, and the Iron Cross from an equally complementary Kaiser for fighting the Russians. [4] He would be made Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire the next year. A unique achievement, perhaps, but only one of many.

To modern eyes, Mannerheim is a man of apparently bizarre contradictions, but it did not necessarily seem so then. A bloodthirsty big-game hunter who worked tirelessly in the cause of child welfare? [5] He had even bagged a python, which seems a little unsporting, or at best opportunistic. They are brave animals, but not swift. Quite normal. A political reactionary who also chaired the Finnish Red Cross? Perfectly natural. Even then, however, he was well-nigh unique in Finland; one who knew him well described him as ‘a stranger from a sunken world.’ [6] General Erik Heinrichs. It seems appropriate, for that world had been Tsarist Russia, a place which Mannerheim had come to love more deeply than almost anything. ‘Socialism,’ he declared, ‘was incapable of defending Democracy.’ And yet democracy itself rather pained him; a tedious process, which seemed too often to thwart the efforts of well-intentioned (and well-bred) men. He had emerged in Finland (in full dress uniform) serene but unsmiling from the wreckage of the Revolution in the middle of December 1917, his worldly goods packed neatly into two valises and carried by a faithful Russian batman on the journey from the Finland Station in Petrograd. He had simply taken the train home. He’d also taken one glance at the Revolution and decided that it was not for him: ‘It disgusted me to see generals carrying their own kit.’ [7] Mannerheim, The Memoirs of Marshal Mannerheim.

This book is not a biography of Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, for there are several already. [8] See in particular the two-volume biography of Mannerheim by I. E. O. Screen. Yet he is an extraordinarily important figure and one often overlooked, partly because the complexities of his motivation are extremely hard to pin down and indubitably because his very existence (and success) sits rather unhappily with certain modern notions. One important aspect of his own world view was an anti-Bolshevism that had bordered on the hydrophobic at the outbreak of revolution, but which later segued into a resigned acceptance as it became clear that, rather like the duodenal ulcers that plagued him, it would simply not go away, and he did not have the resources to fight it (until 1941). He had schemed for the destruction of the Soviet regime, but at the time had been unable to persuade powerful but divided White Russian elements that Finland could deliver a knockout blow to the weak, enfeebled and beatable Bolsheviks, the price for which would be Finnish independence from a reinvented Tsarist state. He had been languidly rebuffed; as a result, by 1937 Mannerheim remained the only ‘White’ from the Court of Tsar Nicholas still active in serious politics anywhere. All the others were dead, senile, drunk or, as the black joke went, driving taxicabs in Paris. [9] Where Mannerheim’s estranged Russian wife Anastasie had lived in resentful exile until her death in 1936. Born Anastasie Arapova, she was the daughter of one of Nicholas II’s closest personal advisers, Generale à la suite Arapov. The marriage had been arranged, partly to ease the penury in which the dispossessed Finn (his father had been declared bankrupt in 1880) found himself, and partly to bind him to the Russian establishment. Arapova was no beauty, but she was rich—Mannerheim had briefly acquired an estate on the Courland peninsula as a result. They had in fact dealt well enough together after a reconciliation following their divorce.