The ceasefire between Finland and the USSR

On the morning of 4 September 1944, after three years and two months of the Continuation War, Finnish troops ceased fire along the whole front, from the Gulf of Finland to the Barents Sea. The order was given by the Commander-in-Chief, who had also been President of Finland for a month, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. It fulfilled the condition that the Finnish parliament had accepted two days earlier: a break with the Third Reich in return for a halt to the fighting and peace talks in Moscow.

Chronicles of events usually state that a ceasefire between Finland and the USSR came into effect that day. That is a simplification. Only the Finnish side stopped firing. The Red Army went on shooting for another twenty-four hours and halted operations only on the morning of 5 September. Both dates were later written into the first article of the Moscow Armistice. Finnish sources say that the Finns stopped fighting at 7 a.m. Finnish time. The Soviet proposal named 8 a.m., which in Moscow time meant the same moment – hence both times appear in the literature.

The road to the ceasefire

By the summer of 1944 Finland found itself in a hopeless position. On 9 June the Leningrad Front launched its offensive on the Karelian Isthmus and within two weeks had taken Viipuri (Vyborg). The Finnish army, however, was not destroyed. At the Battle of Tali-Ihantala at the turn of June and July it halted the Soviet advance, and in mid-July the Stavka began transferring forces from Karelia to the Baltic axis and East Prussia. The front stabilised, but it was clear that the country would not survive another blow.

Earlier attempts to leave the war had failed. At the beginning of 1944 Juho Kusti Paasikivi held talks in Stockholm with the Soviet envoy Alexandra Kollontai, and at the end of March he flew to Moscow together with the former foreign minister Carl Enckell. The terms they brought back, with reparations of 600 million dollars, were rejected in April by the government and parliament as impossible to fulfil. In June, in the most difficult days of the offensive, Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Helsinki. The Germans promised weapons and divisions but demanded a guarantee that Finland would not conclude a separate peace. On 26 June President Risto Ryti signed a letter in which he personally gave such an undertaking. It was not a treaty ratified by parliament but a declaration by the head of state – and that is precisely why it was possible to get out of it.

President Mannerheim

On 1 August Ryti resigned. On 4 August parliament, by a special act and without a popular election, conferred the office of president on Mannerheim, who retained command of the army. The 77-year-old marshal was the only man trusted in that situation by both the soldiers and most of the politicians, and, for Moscow, despite his past, a partner who could commit the whole state. On 8 August Antti Hackzell, a former envoy in Moscow and former foreign minister, became the new prime minister and was entrusted with the peace negotiations.

On 17 August Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel came to headquarters at Mikkeli to decorate Mannerheim and to make sure of the Finns’ loyalty. He was told that Ryti’s undertaking had been personal and did not bind his successor. A few days later, on 25 August, the Finnish envoy in Stockholm passed Kollontai the question of whether Moscow would receive a delegation to discuss an armistice or peace. The answer came on 29 August. The USSR, in agreement with Great Britain, set two preliminary conditions: Finland was to break off relations with Germany publicly and demand the withdrawal of German troops from the country by 15 September at the latest, and if they did not leave, to disarm them and hand them over to the Allies as prisoners of war. Only once these conditions had been accepted could a delegation come to Moscow.

The condition was a hard one. In Lapland and northern Finland stood the German 20th Mountain Army under Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, more than 200,000 men. The Finnish General Staff estimated that, even with German goodwill, evacuating such a mass of men and equipment would take at least three months. Nevertheless the government and the president concluded that there was no other way.

2–4 September

On 2 September parliament met in secret session. After a heated debate, in which the break with Germany was opposed by members of the far-right Patriotic People’s Movement and some deputies of the conservative and agrarian parties, it accepted the Soviet conditions by 108 votes to 43. In the evening Prime Minister Hackzell announced on the radio that Finland was breaking off relations with the Reich and entering into peace negotiations. The German envoy in Helsinki was handed a note demanding the withdrawal of German troops by 15 September.

The same day Mannerheim wrote to Adolf Hitler. The letter, one of the most frequently quoted documents of this war, assured him of respect for the German “brothers-in-arms” and explained that the Finnish people, unlike the Germans with their many millions, would not survive defeat. The marshal wrote that he considered it his duty to lead his people out of the war, and expressed the hope that the parting would take place without aggravating the situation. He did not promise that the Finns would turn their weapons on the Germans. Within a few weeks it turned out that they would have no choice.

On the morning of 4 September the Finnish artillery fell silent and the infantry stopped returning fire. In many places, however, Soviet batteries kept firing. Finnish commanders were ordered to defend themselves only in the event of a direct attack. The Red Army ceased fire only at about 8 a.m. on 5 September. The reason for the discrepancy has never been conclusively explained; Finnish studies usually point to a delay in the publication of the Soviet announcement. On that same 4 September the government in Helsinki formally broke off diplomatic relations with Germany.

The Soviet side

For Joseph Stalin, Finland was a secondary front in the summer of 1944. The main forces of the Red Army were advancing through Poland and the Baltic states towards East Prussia, while in the south Soviet troops were moving into the Balkans after the coup in Romania of 23 August. Finland’s withdrawal from the war freed considerable forces of the Leningrad and Karelian Fronts, opened the way out of the Gulf of Finland for the Baltic Fleet, and cut the Germans in Lapland off from the south. Moscow, moreover, dropped its demand for unconditional surrender, and the Finns were not required to let the Red Army into the rest of their territory. Finland was spared the kind of occupation that other states allied with the Reich experienced in the months that followed.

The preliminary conditions were framed, however, so that from the first day of the armistice Finland would have to turn against its former ally. The 15 September deadline was unrealistic, and both sides knew it. Who was to enforce that condition, and at what price, was left unsaid in Moscow.

The delegation on its way

On the morning of 7 September a Finnish delegation – Prime Minister Hackzell, Defence Minister General Rudolf Walden, Chief of the General Staff General Erik Heinrichs and General Oscar Enckell (PL) – crossed the front line on the Karelian Isthmus and travelled to Moscow. There it waited a week to be summoned, because the USSR and Great Britain were still agreeing on the terms. Talks with the Soviet delegation, led by Vyacheslav Molotov, began only on 14 September.

Meanwhile, at home, what had been feared most began to happen. The Germans gave assurances that they would leave southern Finland by 15 September, but said nothing about the north. The 20th Mountain Army began the retreat to Norway that it had been preparing since the spring, and from 7 September the Finnish authorities evacuated the population of Lapland and part of Northern Ostrobothnia. According to Finnish figures, this affected some 100,000 people, a large proportion of whom were taken in by Sweden. Along with the people, cattle were driven south and across the border.

Place in the war

The ceasefire of 4 and 5 September effectively ended the Continuation War, although it was formally concluded only by the armistice signed in Moscow on 19 September. During the talks Prime Minister Hackzell suffered a stroke, and Carl Enckell took over the delegation. The armistice restored the 1940 border, took Petsamo from Finland, forced it to lease the Porkkala peninsula, imposed reparations of 300 million dollars and placed the country under the supervision of an Allied Control Commission chaired by Andrei Zhdanov. The condition requiring the removal of the Germans led to the Lapland War, which lasted until April 1945 and destroyed much of northern Finland.

Of the states that had fought alongside Germany on the Eastern Front, Finland alone emerged from the war without being occupied by foreign troops. It kept its independence, its parliamentary system and its own army, although for decades to come its foreign policy had to take account of Moscow’s wishes. The day on which the Finnish guns fell silent while the Soviet ones went on firing for another twenty-four hours captures that balance of power well.