Finland rejects the Soviet terms

On 21 March 1944 the governments in Moscow and Helsinki published communiqués summing up a month of confidential correspondence about Finland leaving the war. The Soviet communiqué, printed the next day on the front page of Izvestia, stated that Finland had not accepted the terms and warned that its government “takes upon itself full responsibility for what follows”. The Allied press reported it as the news of the day: Finland had rejected the Soviet peace terms. War chronologies record the event under this date.

The date needs some qualification, however. No new decision to refuse was taken in Helsinki on 21 March. The actual reply, in which the Finns declined to accept the terms in advance, had already been delivered in Stockholm on 17 March. 21 March was the day it was made public, and also the day on which the Finnish government informed Moscow that it agreed in principle to send two representatives there. Instead of a breakdown of the talks, then, there was a continuation – only in strict secrecy. The final rejection of the Soviet terms came only in April.

The starting point: six conditions

The talks began in February, when the former prime minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi went to Stockholm to meet the Soviet ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai – the first of Finland’s peace feelers. On 19 February Paasikivi received six Soviet points. Finland was to break off relations with Germany and intern the German troops on its territory, return to the border of the Moscow Peace Treaty of 1940 and hand over prisoners of war immediately. Demobilisation of the army, reparations and the Petsamo region were to be discussed later, in Moscow.

The pressure also came from the air. In February Soviet long-range aviation bombed the Finnish capital three times. On 1 March the Soviet side made its terms public, and the Finnish foreign minister, Henrik Ramsay, told the American chargé d’affaires, Edmund Gullion, that they were very hard for Finland. For Helsinki two issues were the hardest: interning some 200,000 soldiers of the German Twentieth Mountain Army, which the Finnish army was in no position to do, and the loss of Viipuri (Vyborg) and Karelia.

The exchange of notes: 8–18 March

All the correspondence went through Swedish channels. The intermediary was the cabinet secretary of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, Erik Boheman, who passed the Finnish notes to Kollontai and the Soviet replies to the Finnish government. The first draft of the Finnish reply, which called the Soviet terms unacceptable “as such”, struck the Swedes as so unrealistic that they refused to pass it on. For a week the Swedish foreign minister had been trying to persuade the Finns that they would not get better terms, and King Gustaf V sent a personal message to the Finnish government in the same vein. A revised version reached Kollontai on 8 March. Boheman read it as tacit acceptance of most of the conditions. In it the government of Edwin Linkomies acknowledged that once peace had been concluded, no troops of any belligerent could remain on the territory of a neutral Finland. The matter was, however, “so complicated”, it said, that it required talks. The Finns therefore proposed opening negotiations, during which they could explain their position on this and the other questions.

The Soviet reply, handed to Boheman on 10 March, was curt. Moscow judged the Finnish note “entirely unsatisfactory”. It described the six points of 19 February as “minimal and elementary”: negotiations on ending hostilities were possible only once they had been accepted. If Finland accepted them and agreed in principle to the internment of the German troops, the manner of carrying out the internment could be discussed in Moscow. The closing sentence was the most important. The Soviet government expected a positive answer within a week, by 18 March. After that date it would conclude that the Finns were deliberately dragging the matter out and rejecting the terms. Moscow also agreed that the correspondence and the talks should remain secret.

The ultimatum coincided with American pressure. On 14 March Washington instructed Gullion to hand the Finnish government a memorandum expressing the hope that the talks would lead to Finland leaving the war; because of communication delays it reached Helsinki only on 16 March. On the same day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued a public statement. In it he wrote that it had always seemed strange to Americans that Finland should be a partner of Nazi Germany, fighting side by side with the “sworn enemies of our civilisation”. The Finns now had the chance to get out of “this hateful partnership”, and the longer they stayed at Germany’s side, the more suffering awaited them. Ramsay asked for the exact text and received it on 17 March.

In Helsinki it was parliament that decided on the reply. The government laid the Soviet terms before the Eduskunta at a secret session, recommending that they should not be accepted until Moscow agreed to further talks. On 15 March the Eduskunta backed this position unanimously, without a recorded vote. Ramsay assured Gullion that Finland was “not closing the door”. If anyone was closing it, he said, it was rather the state that had set a deadline and refused discussion. He also assured him that Germany had not put pressure on Helsinki in those days.

At 4 p.m. on 17 March Boheman delivered the Finnish reply in Stockholm. The Finnish government regretted that Moscow had not given it the opportunity to set out its position and had made negotiations conditional on accepting the terms. It wrote that it wanted peace and talks, but could not accept in advance terms that “concern the existence of the whole nation” without even being sure how they were to be understood and what their real scope was. It asked for clarifications, without which parliament could not take a position. This was the actual Finnish refusal, though worded so as not to break off contact.

18 March: agreement to give clarifications

Moscow answered on 18 March, the day its deadline expired. Kollontai handed Boheman a short note with two points. The Soviet government had no objection to Finland sending one or more representatives who would receive its interpretation of the terms. Moscow would be the most suitable place for giving the “fullest” clarifications. There was not a word in the note about concessions, but there was no breach either. Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov had left the door open to the Finns – if only the door to their own office.

The Finnish government accepted the proposal. On the morning of 21 March Ramsay informed Gullion that Moscow had already been notified that Finland agreed, in principle, to send two representatives. He stipulated that they would not be given full powers and would take no decisions in Moscow. Their sole task was to hear how Moscow understood its points.

21 March: two communiqués

That same day both governments issued press communiqués summarising the exchange of notes since February and presenting each side’s position. The Finnish communiqué stressed the will to continue talking. The Soviet one described the successive stages and said of the Finnish note of 17 March only that by it the Finnish government had taken upon itself full responsibility for the further course of events. Neither mentioned the planned journey to Moscow, since both sides had pledged secrecy.

To a world that knew only the communiqués, Finland had rejected the peace terms and Moscow was warning it of the consequences. In Washington the reading was subtler. Hugh Cumming, chief of the State Department’s Division of Northern European Affairs, pointed out in a memorandum of 23 March that, contrary to custom, the Soviet communiqué did not attack the Finnish leaders. German propaganda, too, was cautious and did not proclaim a diplomatic defeat for the Allies. Cumming concluded that the two governments had quietly agreed on further talks in Moscow and that the harsh tone of the communiqués was meant as a “smokescreen”. The State Department decided to respect the Finnish request for discretion and refrain from comment, without softening its hard line towards Helsinki.

Behind the Finns’ caution there were domestic fears as well. According to American diplomats, President Risto Ryti and other leaders believed that when the time came to make peace, it would be better to present public opinion with a fait accompli. Very few people, Ramsay said, knew of the decision to send a delegation to Moscow. The country was divided: parliament’s earlier authorisation for the government to explore the possibility of peace on Soviet terms had passed by 105 votes to 80, with the Conservatives, the Agrarians and the far-right Patriotic People’s Movement (IKL) voting against. Washington did not even rule out civil war if the Germans resisted by force the removal of their troops from Finland. The Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, considered the internment of the German troops by Finnish forces militarily impossible.

Background: Ukraine and Hungary

The Finnish hesitation was playing out as Germany’s position was rapidly deteriorating. The Red Army was conducting a great offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine and approaching the borders of Romania. Two days before the Finnish communiqué, on 19 March, the Wehrmacht occupied Hungary after Hitler had lost trust in the government in Budapest, which was seeking contact with the Allies. For Helsinki this was a clear signal of what might befall an ally of Germany that sought a way out of the war too openly, especially with a German army stationed in the country. Finland, however, was in a different position from Hungary: it had its own intact army and a front in the Continuation War that had stood still since 1941.

Place in the war

On 25 March Boheman informed the American minister in Stockholm that preparations for the journey were complete. On 26 March Paasikivi and the former foreign minister Carl Enckell arrived in Moscow. At the first meeting on 27 March they declared that they had no full powers and had come only for an interpretation of the terms. Molotov confirmed that the six points were unalterable. Over the following days the Finns heard terms harsher than in February: reparations of 600 million dollars payable over five years, the internment or expulsion of the German troops by the end of April and the demobilisation of half the army by the end of May. The delegates returned to Helsinki at the beginning of April.

Only then did the real rejection of the terms come. The government judged them impossible to fulfil; on 12 April Prime Minister Linkomies presented this position to parliament, which endorsed it, and in the middle of the month the refusal was conveyed to Moscow. On 22 April the Soviet side announced publicly that Finland had rejected its proposals. Hitler, who had learned of the talks, responded by halting some deliveries of arms and grain.

21 March thus marks an intermediate stage: a public refusal to accept the terms in advance, behind which lay agreement to further secret talks. Those talks produced nothing, and Finland paid the price. On 10 June 1944 the Red Army struck on the Karelian Isthmus and took Viipuri within ten days. After heavy fighting in the summer the front stabilised, Ryti stepped down and Mannerheim became president. On 19 September 1944 Finland signed the Moscow Armistice. Its terms were broadly similar to those of the spring, but heavier: besides the 1940 border, Finland lost the whole Petsamo region, leased the Porkkala peninsula to the USSR and undertook to pay reparations in goods worth 300 million dollars over six years. It also had to remove the German troops from its territory itself, which led to the Lapland War.