Containing Coexistence

America, Russia, and the "Finnish Solution," 1945-1956

Jussi M. Hanhimaki

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1997
• eBook ISBN: 9781612777641
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the "Finnish Solution, " 1945–1956, is the first full-scale study of Finland's role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war. Cold war Finland was an enigma. Defeated by the Soviet Union in World War II, the country appeared ripe for joining the "people's democracies" in 1945, when the Finnish communists made substantial gains in elections. But it soon became clear that Finland's fate was to be different; by the early 1950s, the Finn claimed to be neutral, and by 1956 the Soviets endorsed this claim. Finland's ability to keep its democratic institutions and Western-oriented trade patterns largely intact was initially accepted in Washington. When the Soviets began propagandizing Finland as an example of "peaceful coexistence" in the aftermath of Stalin's death, however, Finland's symbolic significance as a Western outpost gradually gave way to the perception of Finland as a willing partner in a Soviet effort to spread neutralism to western Europe; later such concerns would be captured under the rubric of Finlandization. Despite such growing concerns, the U. S. generally practiced a cautious policy that allowed the Fins to coexist with the Soviets, as long as such coexistence could be "contained" within strict limits. By comparing the "Finnish Solution" with the general role and development of neutrality, Jussi Hanhimaki adds an important dimension to international studies. Containing Coexistence is an important contribution of political science scholarship to Cold War Studies reading lists.—Midwest Book Review

1

WHERE YALTA WORKED

The “Finnish Solution”

We are very much alone as compared to before 1939 or even in 1940. We must look at things realistically and draw bold conclusions with respect to our relationship with the Soviet Union.

—Juho K. Paasikivi, June 1945

While it is recognized that… Finland represent[s] only a small puncture of the Iron Curtain, it is, nevertheless … a penetration of encouraging significance and … the only penetration yet achieved in any part of the Curtain.

—State-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee, October 1947

Zhdanov: “Everything on time, expertly packed, and of excellent quality … we made a mistake in not occupying Finland. Everything would have been set up if we had.” Molotov: “Akh, Finland—that is a peanut.”

—January 1948

When Juho Kusti Paasikivi sat down to write in his diary on September 2, 1944, he was angry. “Our foreign policy has not been led with brains, but with buttocks,” the seventy-four-year-old conservative banker, politician, and former prime minister complained. “We should never have joined this war,” he added, accusing both the wartime leaders and the newly appointed president, Marshall C. G. E. Mannerheim, of shortsightedness and incompetence in handling Finnish foreign policy. The worst sin, Paasikivi would argue repeatedly in private conversations and public speeches until his retirement from Finnish political life in early 1956, had been to ignore the geopolitical realities of Finland’s position, that is, the country’s proximity to the Soviet Union. Such neglect had, according to Paasikivi, led to such recent disasters as the 1939–40 Winter War and Finland’s cobelligerency with Nazi Germany in 1941–44. This, he added, had led Finland to the brink of collapse by the fall of 1944 when Soviet occupation appeared imminent. This, Paasikivi argued, was something that needed to be changed.¹

Although Paasikivi was probably too harsh in accusing his compatriots, who had been faced with rather limited choices in both 1939 and 1941, his message would resonate widely in postwar Finnish foreign policy. Indeed, with certain modifications the Paasikivi Line remained Finland’s official approach to foreign affairs throughout the entire cold war. In the wake of Finland’s second defeat to the Soviet Union within less than five years, however, few could have expected it. Yet it was this approach to foreign policy that largely explains why Finland, alone among the Soviet Union’s western neighbors, was able to retain its domestic institutions intact. As a consequence, the Paasikivi Line was instrumental in making Finland the only country where the Yalta agreements—understood here to refer to the hope that after World War II the Soviet Union’s western neighbors would be both democratically governed and friendly to the Soviet Union—were realized. This unique development and its consequences—particularly the fact that Finland in the long run emerged as one of the very few countries truly situated between East and West—will be referred to in this book as the Finnish Solution. This chapter contains an outline of the historical background of the Paasikivi Line and its application during the immediate postwar years.²

Juho Kusti Paasikivi was the man most responsible for the implementation of immediate postwar Finnish foreign policy. Although relegated to the sidelines for much of World War II, he was no stranger to high office. Born in 1870, Paasikivi pursued a career in Finnish politics that stretched over half a century. An accomplished student of law and history, fluent in five languages (Finnish, Swedish, French, German, and Russian) and with a passing knowledge of a sixth (English), Paasikivi received his doctorate in law in 1901 after which he worked at the University of Helsinki Law School in 1902–3 before becoming the director of the state (Finland was at the time an autonomous part of the Russian empire) accounting office in 1903. At this time Paasikivi also got involved in Finnish politics, which were bitterly divided over how to respond to the Russian czar’s “Russification” policies. Paasikivi gravitated toward the “old Finns”—led by such figures as Yrjö-Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen and Paasikivi’s mentor, Johan Richard Danielsson-Kalmari—who cautioned their compatriots not to resist Alexander III and Nikolai II overtly in order not to precipitate a complete Russian crackdown and subsequent loss of the remnants of Finnish autonomy. It was in these circles and the debates with the representatives of the other main line of thought, the “young Finns” (constitutionalists) who based their arguments on legal grounds and called for passive resistance, that Paasikivi’s thinking about Russia was shaped. Most significantly, at least from the standpoint of this study, Paasikivi acquired an almost unshaken belief in the realities of power politics and the need for the weaker party to adjust its claims and aims to those of the stronger. To be sure, there were limits to his will to accommodate as well. In 1909 after a brief tenure as the finance minister, Paasikivi resigned in protest, unable to abide the uncompromising orders emanating from St. Petersburg. A few years later, after a six-year stint (1907–13) in the Eduskunta, Paasikivi seemingly left political life and took a post as the director of one of Finland’s largest banks, the Helsinki-based Kansallis-Osake Pankki. He served there for two decades (1914–34) and became a highly respected member of Finnish financial circles.³

Politics, however, was what made Paasikivi tick and where he made his most substantial mark on Finnish history. When the country gained its independence in the turmoil of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, Paasikivi momentarily served at the very top of the new republic. He became the prime minister of Finland in May 1918 after the four-month-old Finnish Civil War ended with the Whites, who were led by another legendary figure, General (and later Marshall and president) Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, defeat of the Reds. Unlike after World War II, however, Paasikivi estimated the realities of power at this time to require that Finland seek German help and even pushed toward acquiring a German monarch to become the king of Finland. This stand was, at least in part, a reflection of the type of realpolitik elitism that was typical of Paasikivi’s thinking about the handling of foreign affairs: he did not think that high politics, particularly foreign policy, should depend on the democratic process. Paasikivi was afraid of a “tyranny of the majority” that might enable a largely uneducated mass to dictate unwise foreign policy decisions. Although he did not keep important policy decisions secret, Paasikivi did feel that it was the duty of the country’s leaders to direct and educate the general public, not to be led by the emotions from below. Indeed, seeking a popular mandate was an almost foreign concept to Paasikivi, who never officially ran for office after his short tenure in the Eduskunta in the early 1900s. He became president in 1946 after a decision by the Eduskunta elected in 1945. In 1950 Paasikivi refused to campaign but was elected because he was supported by most major parties.⁴

The time when Paasikivi would become such an indispensable figure was quite remote in 1918. After Germany’s sudden collapse, Paasikivi’s first cabinet resigned in November of that year, and he seemed to have lost much of his political clout. Yet he was urgently needed for other duties.

It may seem surprising that soon after being among the leaders of the Germanic movement Paasikivi joined the ranks of those politicians who cautioned against hostile policies toward the old mother country, regardless of its political system. Yet, it was to a large degree an example of Paasikivi’s realpolitik that when he served intermittently in the Finnish diplomatic corps in the 1920s and 1930s, the already seasoned old Finn reminded his compatriots increasingly about the perhaps unfortunate but unavoidable demands that Finland’s geographical position placed on the country’s foreign policy. The neighbor to the east—whether it was called the Russian empire or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—was bound to bounce back from its momentary weakness at the end of World War I, and Finland should, therefore, fashion its policies to acknowledge the interests of such a major power. Because the new Soviet state showed (misleading) signs of weakness in the 1920s and 1930s, however, many Finns ignored, even despised, this advice.⁵

The memory of the Finnish Civil War in 1918 between the Reds and the Whites had left behind a popular wave of anti-Russian and anti-Communist feelings in Finland. In its most radical form such nativism produced a demand to annex all of the Karelian peninsula into Finland and to revise the terms of the Dorpat Peace Treaty of 1920, which established the interwar frontiers between Finland and the Soviet Union. As the chief negotiator in Dorpat, Paasikivi had argued to his compatriots that Finland should accommodate the Soviet Union’s security needs and grant their eastern neighbor a security zone west of Leningrad. But in 1920 the Finnish political leadership had instructed him to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s obvious willingness to grant concessions. Therefore, as Roy Allison points out, the Dorpat Treaty “granted few territorial concessions to the defense of Leningrad.” This fact proved to be crucially important two decades later.⁶

After the Dorpat negotiations, Paasikivi spent almost two decades without direct contact with the making of Finnish foreign policy. He did, however, play an influential part in the leadership of the conservative Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition [KOK]) party, the successor to the old Finns. In particular, Paasikivi served as the party’s chairman in 1934–36 when national socialism and fascism made some inroads in Finland, first in the form of the so-called Lapua movement and later under the auspices of a formal party named the Isänmaallinen Kansanliike (Patriotic National Front [IKL]). Under Paasikivi’s leadership KOK distanced itself from these ultranationalist tendencies, which directed much of their energy toward openly criticizing the Soviet Union and demanding a revision of the Dorpat Treaty. These were distressing arguments to Paasikivi, who, although in no way sympathetic to the ideological convictions of the Soviet leaders, began in the 1930s increasingly to call for a more passive policy toward the eastern neighbor.

To suggest that Paasikivi’s entire career before 1944 would have pointed toward the type of policies that he adopted in the aftermath of World War II would be an oversimplification. But a few things can safely be said. First, Paasikivi was a firm realist, who believed that what eventually determined a nation’s future was its size, internal and military strength, and location. Idealism, legalism, or Wilsonian type liberalism had no place in his thinking, which basically led to the conclusion that Finland had been unfortunate to find itself located where it was but that Russia (or the Soviet Union) was a powerful nation that the Finns would have to accommodate in some way if they wished to keep their independence. Later, based on Finland’s World War II experience, Paasikivi’s reading of Finnish history also seemed to indicate that outside help in Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union was, at best, untrustworthy or, at worst, harmful to Finnish independence.

During World War II Paasikivi watched, at times extremely closely as a peace negotiator or diplomat, the painful unfolding of the Finnish drama. It convinced him that Finland had to make its decisions alone without relying on others. His particular reading of events also reminded him of the dangers of nationalism and the need for cool-headed decision makers to take charge of foreign policy. Thus, the experience of World War II strengthened Paasikivi’s elitist convictions about the making of foreign policy. After World War II, Paasikivi also repeatedly made the case—in large part out of a need to justify his postwar policies—that a political realist would have been more willing to make some concessions to the Soviets in the negotiations that preceded the Winter War of 1939–40. Notwithstanding the fates of the Baltic republics, this might have given the Soviets the type of security guarantees that they were, in Paasikivi’s mind, entitled to. Instead, the Finns barely survived and were compelled to make those concessions by force. In addition, combined with the revanche spirit of the Winter War the traditional Finnish Russophobia had, Paasikivi thought, produced a formula for disaster: Finland’s cobelligerency with Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941–44.⁷

It was a disheartening experience. After some initial success in the summer of 1941, the Finno-German offensive was thwarted. In the Finnish case, however, this was a result of a partly voluntary decision. The supreme commander of the Finnish forces, Marshall Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, refused to advance after his troops had reached what he considered to be a militarily ideal position in eastern Karelia in late 1941. Specifically, and what infuriated German commanders the most, Mannerheim refused to commit any Finnish troops to the siege of Leningrad. The Finns also insisted throughout the war that they were fighting a separate struggle against the Soviet Union because they were not linked to the Axis via any alliance treaties. Nevertheless, the Finnish government also turned down some attempts by the Western allies, specifically the United States, to mediate a separate peace. The presence of German troops in northern Finland was a strong enough deterrent for any such moves.⁸

After three years of cobelligerency with Hitler’s troops, however, the invasion of Normandy and the Soviet attack on Karelia that began on June 10, 1944, forced even the most stubborn Finnish leaders to reconsider the wisdom of continuing their struggle. Initially, the Soviet offensive was a complete success as the Red Army quickly conquered Viipuri and appeared to be in a position to advance all the way to Helsinki. A desperate Finnish government asked Sweden to provide its good offices and mediate an armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union. The Soviet answer on June 23, however, was simply to demand unconditional surrender, something the Finnish government was not ready to accept. Instead, given continued German pressure and fear of Soviet occupation, President Risto Ryti⁹ signed the Ryti-Ribbentrop Pact on June 26, 1944. The pact guaranteed Finland German military supplies and food and stated that the Finns would stand on the side of the Germans “to the very end.”¹⁰ A legal twist in the pact, however, allowed Finland to abandon the sinking German ship without a complete loss of face. President Ryti had signed the treaty—on purpose, it should be added—without the authorization of the Eduskunta. When he resigned six weeks later, on August 1, 1944, Ryti’s successor, Marshall C. G. E. Mannerheim, claimed that because the Finnish constitution did not give the president the power to sign treaties with foreign governments on his own, the Ryti-Ribbentrop Pact was not binding. As the Soviets on July 12 began moving some of their troops to the German front and as the Finns succeeded in periodically stalling the Red Army’s advance, the Soviets indicated a desire for a negotiated settlement. Mannerheim took advantage of the change in the Soviet position, quickly distanced himself and Finland from the Ryti-Ribbentrop Pact, broke off relations with Germany on September 2, 1944, and moved his country into peace negotiations with the Soviets that eventually led to the signing of the Moscow Armistice on September 19, 1944.¹¹ The Finnish Army was now obligated to roll against the German troops stationed in northern Finland. Between September 20, 1944, and April 24, 1945, the Finns fought against the Germans in this War of Lapland and finally succeeded in driving them away from Finnish territory and into northern Norway only a few days before V-E Day.¹²

Thus ended a set of wars that had kept Finland on a wartime footing for almost six consecutive years. The country had, naturally, suffered extensively. Because the existing German troops used scorched earth tactics, Lapland was left almost demolished. The costs of World War II for Finland also included the replacement of 420,000 refugees from eastern Karelia and other territories lost to the Soviet Union. This land amounted to approximately 11 percent of Finland’s prewar territory, including Viipuri, the country’s second largest city, and the nickel-rich Pechenga area in the northeast. Finland had also lost 2 percent of its prewar population, agreed to pay $300 million in reparations to the Soviet Union in eight years (based on 1938 dollars), and was forced to rent Porkkala, sixteen miles southwest of Helsinki, as a military base to the Soviets for fifty years.¹³

There was more. The Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue (Finnish Communist party [SKP]), which had been blocked from participating in the nation’s political life for more than two decades, was legalized under the terms of the Moscow Armistice. Paasikivi himself, although with grave doubts, appointed the first communist minister in the history of post-Civil War Finland when he formed his cabinet on November 17, 1944. For four months this man, Yrjö Leino, had a more-or-less symbolic function as a minister without portfolio. In the March 1945 elections, however, the Suomen Kansan Demokraattinen Liitto (Finnish People’s Democratic League [SKDL]), a loose coalition of Communists, many of whom had spent at least some time in the Soviet Union, and le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contetns
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: Two Trips to Moscow
• 1. Where Yalta Worked: The “Finnish Solution”
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Epilogue: “Bridge-building” versus “Finlandization”—The Enduring Dilemma
• Appendix: The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between the Republic of Finland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index