Finland and peace with the USSR

In the spring of 1943, for the first time since entering the Continuation War, Finland was faced with a concrete proposal for peace talks with the Soviet Union. It came from the United States, which on 20 March offered Helsinki its “good offices” in establishing contact with Moscow. By mid-April it was clear that the Finnish government would not take up the offer. Chronologies of the war record this under 15 April as Finland’s official rejection of Soviet peace terms. The diplomatic documents show a somewhat different course of events. A written refusal had been handed to the American chargé d’affaires in Helsinki as early as 10 April, and what it rejected was not Soviet terms but American mediation as such. The terms that Moscow had formulated in March had not at that point been officially communicated to the Finns at all.

After Stalingrad

Finland had been fighting alongside Germany since June 1941, when it entered the war against the USSR to recover the territory lost under the Moscow Peace Treaty of 1940. Finnish leaders stressed that they were not an ally of the Reich but a “co-belligerent” state waging its own, separate war. Britain, bound by its alliance with Moscow, declared war on Finland in December 1941. The United States did not, and kept up diplomatic relations with Helsinki in the hope that this would help bring Finland out of the war at the right moment.

The German defeat at Stalingrad changed the calculations in Helsinki. In early February 1943 President Risto Ryti, Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim and leading ministers concluded at headquarters in Mikkeli that the war had taken a bad turn and that a way out had to be found. On 15 February Ryti was re-elected president, and on 5 March a new government was formed under Edwin Linkomies. Peace was to be its main aim, although neither the prime minister nor the president said so publicly. They feared that most Finns were not ready for concessions and that their German partner was still too strong. The new foreign minister was Henrik Ramsay, a politician of the Swedish People’s Party known for his good contacts with the Americans and the British.

Washington’s offer and Berlin’s pressure

The American proposal of 20 March was a cautious one. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s State Department asked whether the Finnish government would accept the help of the United States in establishing contact with the Soviet government with a view to opening talks on ending hostilities. According to American dispatches, Ramsay understood well the importance of the offer and that a similar opportunity might not recur. At the same time he explained that the Finns feared that even after a peace concluded under American auspices, Moscow would put forward new demands every few months.

News of the American move quickly reached Berlin. Ramsay was urgently summoned to Germany and on 26 March was received by Joachim von Ribbentrop, who made two demands: Finland was to reject the American offer unequivocally, so that Washington could not renew it, and was to give the Reich a written guarantee that it would not conclude a separate peace without Germany’s consent. The refusal that Helsinki soon conveyed to the Americans in practice met the first demand. The Finns did not meet the second – Ryti and Mannerheim refused to sign such an undertaking. The Marshal later told an American diplomat that Finland would go along with Germany only for as long as their interests coincided.

Meanwhile the American ambassador in Moscow, William Standley, asked about the Soviet position. At the end of March Vyacheslav Molotov set out to him, solely for the information of the US government, the “minimum terms” for peace with Finland: an immediate break with Germany and the removal of German troops from the country, restoration of the 1940 treaty “with all the consequences arising from it”, demobilisation of the Finnish army, and compensation for at least half the damage done to the Soviet Union. On 6 April Molotov added in a note that Moscow had no reason to believe Finland could break away from Germany. It would agree to direct talks only once the Finns had accepted these terms. Washington did not want to pass the harsh Soviet demands on to Helsinki. Hull concluded that doing so would only tighten Finland’s ties with the Reich, and on 9 April he ordered an end to efforts to bring the two sides into contact.

The reply of 10 April

On 8 April the American chargé d’affaires, Robert McClintock, warned Ramsay that if Finland accepted further German demands restricting its freedom of action, it must reckon with consequences for its relations with the United States. Two days later, on the afternoon of 10 April, the minister handed him a Finnish memorandum. In it the government stated that it had found no grounds to suppose that talks with the Soviet government could give Finland lasting guarantees for the future. It therefore saw no other course than to continue its “defensive war” until the country’s independence, freedom and democratic institutions were secured, and it could not enter into the proposed talks. The memorandum ended by thanking America for its goodwill and giving assurances that Finland wished to maintain friendly relations with it.

The reply disappointed Washington. On 12 April Hull concluded that relations with Finland had ceased to restrain it from helping Germany, and proposed withdrawing the American mission from Helsinki. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with him on 20 April, writing that for two years the Finns had been “playing both sides” and that their present government had in practice been of great help to the Nazis. On 23 April McClintock was instructed to break off relations, but the very next day Hull ordered him to hold off. The legation stayed in Helsinki, and diplomatic relations survived for more than another year.

Place in the war

The April refusal did not close the road to peace, but it delayed it by more than a year. Finland’s leaders considered the Soviet terms – a return to the 1940 frontiers and reparations – unacceptable while the Finnish army stood deep in Karelia and Germany still had the strength to punish Finland for breaking away. In May Mannerheim told McClintock that he would not accept a peace that restored the Moscow treaty. The Linkomies government therefore cautiously sought other channels. From the autumn of 1943 cautious soundings were conducted through Stockholm, where the Soviet mission was headed by Alexandra Kollontai, and in time the former prime minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi became involved in them. Domestic opposition to the war was also growing: in August 1943 thirty-three prominent politicians and public figures wrote to the president urging him to seek a way to peace.

After the German defeats of the summer of 1943 and the heavy Soviet air raids on Helsinki in February 1944, Paasikivi went to Moscow in March 1944. Finland again rejected the terms he was given there – similar to those of March 1943, with heavy reparations. In June 1944 the Red Army attacked on the Karelian Isthmus and took Viipuri (Vyborg). In return for German military aid, Ryti gave Ribbentrop a personal undertaking not to conclude a separate peace. It was then, on 30 June 1944, that the United States finally broke off relations with Finland. Ryti resigned in August and was succeeded as president by Mannerheim, who held that his predecessor’s personal undertaking did not bind the state, and on 19 September 1944 Finland signed the Moscow Armistice. Its terms were harsher than those Molotov had set out to the Americans in March 1943: in addition to the 1940 frontier, Finland lost Petsamo, had to lease the Porkkala peninsula to the USSR, and had to drive the German troops out of Lapland itself.