Finnish peace feelers

On 16 February 1944 a meeting took place in Stockholm that Finland had been waiting for for more than a year. The former prime minister and one-time envoy in Moscow, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, was received by the Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Alexandra Kollontai. Chronologies of events record this day as a meeting of the two countries’ diplomats who were to sign an armistice. That was not the case. Paasikivi had no authority to conclude anything. The government in Helsinki had sent him to Stockholm solely to learn the Soviet terms and to see whether talks could be based on them. The February meetings were the first direct Finnish–Soviet contact on peace since the outbreak of the Continuation War in June 1941. The armistice was signed only seven months later, on 19 September 1944.

A year of cautious soundings

Finland began looking for a way out of the war after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The government of Edwin Linkomies, formed in March 1943, regarded peace as its main goal. The first attempt, however, came to nothing. In the spring of 1943 Helsinki turned down an American offer of mediation under heavy pressure from Berlin, which demanded that the talks with Washington be broken off.

In the autumn the matter returned by way of Sweden. On 20 November 1943, after the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, Kollontai read out to the Secretary-General of the Swedish Foreign Ministry, Erik Boheman, a message for the Finnish government: Moscow was prepared to receive Finnish representatives. Helsinki replied on 29 November that it regarded the 1939 border – that is, the border before the Winter War – as the basis for talks. On 20 December Kollontai answered that this was not enough and that the starting point must be the border of the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940. At the turn of the year the Finnish government concluded that it could not make peace on that basis, but that contact should be maintained. Moscow met this reply with silence.

January and February 1944: pressure from three sides

At the beginning of 1944 Finland’s position deteriorated sharply. In January the Leningrad Front drove the Germans back from the city, and on 27 January the end of the siege of Leningrad was announced. Army Group North was falling back towards Estonia, and the Finnish army, which since 1941 had stood on the Karelian Isthmus and on the Svir, was losing its support on the southern flank.

On 31 January the American chargé d’affaires in Helsinki, Edmund Gullion, handed the Foreign Minister, Henrik Ramsay, a note from Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Washington urged Finland to take the first step itself and approach Moscow. It also warned that if Finland did not detach itself from the Axis without delay, it would bear the consequences. On 8 February the State Department made the content of this warning public, which in Helsinki was perceived as additional pressure.

It was the bombs, however, that spoke loudest. During the night of 6–7 February Soviet long-range aviation carried out the first of three great raids on Helsinki. Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was in the capital on the day of the raid. According to Finnish accounts, more than a hundred people were killed. The political aim was obvious: to force the Finns into a quick decision.

Paasikivi’s mission

After lengthy deliberations the government decided to send Paasikivi to Stockholm. He was the natural choice. The seventy-three-year-old politician had negotiated the Treaty of Tartu with Moscow in 1920, had travelled to the Kremlin talks that preceded the Winter War in the autumn of 1939, and had been envoy to the USSR in 1940–1941. He knew Stalin and Molotov personally and had long believed that Finland must come to terms with its neighbour. Formally he travelled as a private individual, with no power to conclude agreements. President Risto Ryti and the prime minister wanted in this way to keep their freedom of manoeuvre, including vis-à-vis Germany.

Paasikivi left Helsinki on 12 February. According to American diplomatic documents and Finnish accounts, Kollontai received him on 16 and 19 February. The Swedish government, and Boheman in particular, facilitated the contacts but was not a party to the talks. Kollontai, a former Bolshevik activist and the USSR’s representative in Sweden since 1930, had already acted as intermediary in 1940 in the negotiations that ended the Winter War. Now she was once again the main channel between Helsinki and Moscow.

The meetings were not negotiations. Paasikivi asked questions, and Kollontai conveyed Moscow’s position. He received the Soviet terms in writing towards the end of his stay – on 19 February according to American sources, at a further meeting on 21 February according to some Finnish accounts. They were divided into two parts.

Moscow’s terms

Finland was to accept the first part at once, even before sending a delegation to Moscow:

• breaking off relations with Germany and interning the German troops in Finland (the USSR did not demand that Finland declare war on Germany, but offered the “necessary assistance” of ground and air forces should the internment prove beyond Finland’s strength);
• restoring the Moscow treaty of 1940 in full and withdrawing Finnish troops to the border of that time; the question of the lease of Hanko could be discussed in Moscow, in exchange for compensation;
• the immediate release of prisoners of war and of Soviet and Allied civilians.

Only in Moscow were the partial or full demobilisation of the Finnish army, reparations for damage caused during the hostilities and the occupation of Soviet territory, and the Petsamo region (Pechenga) to be discussed.

For Helsinki the first point was the hardest. In the north of the country stood the German 20th Mountain Army, numbering by various estimates some two hundred thousand men. Interning it with the Finnish army was in practice impossible. Accepting Soviet “assistance” would mean letting the Red Army onto Finnish territory. Equally painful was the return to the 1940 border, which meant the loss of Viipuri (Vyborg) and Karelia. On top of this came unspecified reparations.

Paasikivi returned to Helsinki convinced that the terms must not be rejected out of hand and that they had to be discussed. The government was more divided, and the military command cautious. Berlin learned of the journey, but according to Finnish accounts the Germans did not react sharply at the time.

Helsinki’s answer

In the last days of February the government and the foreign affairs committee of the Eduskunta, the Finnish parliament, deliberated over the Soviet points. Most ministers believed that the terms could not be accepted as preconditions, before any negotiations had taken place, but they did not want to break off contact either. Moscow kept up the pressure. During the night of 16–17 February, while the Stockholm talks were under way, and again on the night of 26–27 February, Soviet bombers returned over Helsinki.

On 1 March the Soviet side made its terms public. On 8 March the Finnish government replied that it was ready to state its position, but first wished to know how the individual points were to be understood, since without that the parliament could not respond to them. An exchange of notes in March led to agreement on confidential talks in Moscow.

Place in the war

On 26 March Paasikivi and the former foreign minister Carl Enckell went to Moscow. Over the following days they talked with Molotov and his deputy Vladimir Dekanozov. What they heard was harsher than in Stockholm: the earlier terms were now joined by reparations of 600 million dollars payable over five years, the German troops were to be interned or expelled by the end of April, and half the Finnish army demobilised by the end of May. Paasikivi advised accepting the terms, but the government judged them impossible to fulfil. On 12 April Prime Minister Linkomies presented the government’s position to the Eduskunta, which endorsed it, and on 22 April Moscow announced that Finland had rejected its proposals. Hitler responded to the Finnish talks by partially halting deliveries of arms and grain.

The refusal cost Finland dearly. On 10 June 1944 the Red Army attacked on the Karelian Isthmus and ten days later took Viipuri. In exchange for German military aid, at the end of June Ryti gave Ribbentrop a personal undertaking that Finland would not conclude a separate peace. The front was halted in July at Tali-Ihantala and on the Vuoksi, and Stalin, who needed troops for the main axis of advance, agreed to talks. Ryti resigned on 1 August and was succeeded as president by Mannerheim, who regarded his predecessor’s undertaking as non-binding. At the beginning of September the fighting ceased, and on 19 September 1944 Finland signed the Moscow Armistice.

The final terms were in many respects similar to those Paasikivi had heard in February: the 1940 border, a break with Germany, the expulsion of the German troops. Added to them, however, were the loss of Petsamo, the lease of the Porkkala peninsula instead of Hanko, and reparations of 300 million dollars. Driving the Germans out of the north of the country meant yet another war for the Finns, the Lapland War. Unlike Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, however, Finland escaped occupation and preserved its political system. Paasikivi, who in February 1944 had travelled to Stockholm as a private emissary, became prime minister in November 1944 and president in 1946. The policy of coming to terms with the USSR that he had tried to pursue during the war became the foundation of Finnish foreign policy after 1945.