Finnish–Soviet talks break down

On the evening of 13 November 1939 a train left Moscow carrying the Finnish delegation home to Helsinki: the minister in Stockholm, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, and the finance minister, Väinö Tanner. That same day they had sent a short letter to the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov. They wrote that in the talks held with him and with Joseph Stalin it had not proved possible to find a basis for the intended agreement, thanked him for the courtesy shown to them and expressed the hope that the negotiations would one day lead to a result satisfactory to both sides. So ended the series of meetings in the Kremlin, begun on 12 October, in which the Soviet Union had demanded from Finland a military base at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, a number of islands and a shift of the border on the Karelian Isthmus. The Finns left convinced that the talks had merely been interrupted. In reality it was the last conversation before the war.

Two rounds and Molotov’s speech

The negotiations began on 12 October, when Stalin and Molotov presented Paasikivi with the Soviet demands, set down two days later in a memorandum: a thirty-year lease of the port of Hanko as a naval base with a garrison of up to 5,000 men; the right to an anchorage in Lappohja Bay; the cession of islands in the Gulf of Finland, including the largest of them, Suursaari (today Gogland); a shift of the border on the Karelian Isthmus so that it would run some 30 kilometres from Viipuri (Vyborg); and the western part of the Rybachy Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean. In return Finland was to receive an area twice as large, but economically worthless, in Soviet Eastern Karelia. In the second round, on 23 and 24 October, Paasikivi was joined by Tanner, the leader of the Social Democrats, because the government wanted one of its own members to sit at the table in Moscow. The Finns then agreed to give up several smaller islands and to straighten the border at the “knee” near Kuokkala, the point closest to Leningrad, but they rejected the base at Hanko. Stalin softened his demands somewhat regarding the border line and the size of the garrison, but did not give up the principle.

The delegation returned to Helsinki for fresh instructions. On 31 October the government of Prime Minister Aimo Cajander approved a reply that was to be Finland’s last word. On the same day Molotov did what the Finns had feared most: in a speech to a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR he made the Soviet demands public. Until then both sides had conducted the talks in secret. As recently as 19 October, at a meeting of the Nordic heads of state in Stockholm, President Kyösti Kallio had said that Helsinki was deliberately keeping the Soviet proposals secret so that an agreement would not become a matter of prestige for Moscow. After Molotov’s speech any concession by the Kremlin would look like a great power’s defeat at the hands of a small neighbour. On 1 November the foreign minister, Eljas Erkko, replied in a speech that the government had a united nation behind it and that Finland would hold to its neutrality, its right to defend itself and the treaties in force, for if the old ones were not observed, there was no guarantee that anyone would keep new ones.

The third round: “now it is the turn of the military”

Paasikivi and Tanner, accompanied this time also by Counsellor of State Rafael Hakkarainen, arrived in Moscow for the third time at the beginning of November. On 3 November they handed Molotov their government’s memorandum. In it Finland maintained its refusal to lease Hanko or to make Lappohja Bay available: it could not accept foreign troops or a foreign naval base on its territory “in any form”, as that would destroy its sovereignty and neutrality. It agreed to cede, in return for compensation, the islands of Seiskari, Peninsaari, Lavansaari and both Tytärsaari islands, was prepared to discuss a solution regarding Suursaari, and on the Karelian Isthmus proposed a border moved somewhat further than in October, along the rivers Vammeljoki and Lintula, but still far from the Soviet line. It also agreed to negotiate the cession of the western part of the Rybachy Peninsula. It did not agree, however, to dismantle the fortifications on the Isthmus, which it saw as the only guarantee of its security. The memorandum pointed out that any such agreement would have to be approved by the Finnish parliament.

Molotov considered these concessions insufficient. According to Tanner’s memoirs and accounts cited by historians, he then told the Finns: “We civilians can see no further in the matter; now it is the turn of the military to have their say.” That same day the Moscow Pravda wrote that the Soviet Union would “throw to the devil all the games of political gamblers” and secure its safety, “breaking down all obstacles on the way to its goal”.

The next day, 4 November (in Finnish correspondence the meeting was described as having taken place “on the 3rd, or more precisely the 4th of November”, because it went on late into the night), Stalin joined the talks and again proved more flexible than his commissar. He agreed to move the proposed border on the Isthmus somewhat to the south, although in the west it was still to reach Koivisto and include the island of Koivisto. He also withdrew the demand for the demilitarisation of a fortified belt on both sides of the border and the removal of regular troops from it. On Hanko he proposed two alternatives. Since Finland could not lease a base on its own territory, it could sell the area to the Soviet Union or exchange it for Soviet land. The base would then lie on Soviet territory and, as the Soviet side argued, would not infringe Finnish neutrality. The second possibility was to cede, instead of the peninsula itself, the islands lying east of it – Hermansö, Koö and Hästö-Busö – again with the right to an anchorage at Lappohja.

The delegates passed these proposals on to Helsinki. Paasikivi and the chairman of the Defence Council, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, had believed from the outset that more must be conceded, because the army could not withstand a long war with the Soviet Union. Mannerheim warned that the country was not prepared for one and advised seeking a compromise. But the view of Erkko, the defence minister Juho Niukkanen and President Kallio prevailed: that Moscow was bluffing and firmness would pay. On 8 November the delegates received their answer: the government would not agree to cede, in any form, territory at Hanko or anywhere else on the Finnish coast for military bases.

The last meeting

On 9 November Paasikivi and Tanner met Stalin and Molotov for the last time. They handed over a short note: the reasons why Finland could not give up a base at Hanko applied equally to the islands near it, since Finland could not grant a foreign power military bases on its territory and within its borders. The Soviet side agreed to consider a Finnish compromise on the Rybachy Peninsula, and in the final phase of the talks the Finns offered to cede the southern part of Suursaari. Moscow, however, demanded the whole island. The key issues – the base at the entrance to the gulf and the border on the Isthmus – remained unresolved.

That same evening Molotov returned the Finnish note with a letter in which he accused the delegates of misrepresenting the Soviet position. If the area near Hanko or the islands east of it were sold or exchanged, they would no longer be Finnish territory, and so the Finnish argument was “groundless”. To Hermansö, Koö and Hästö-Busö he added Långskär, Furuskär, Ekön and “certain other” nearby islands. On 10 November Paasikivi and Tanner replied that they had faithfully reported the Soviet proposal to their government; that the three islands, surrounded by Finnish land and territorial waters, would lie within Finland’s borders even after being ceded; and that the others had not been mentioned at the meeting at all. Finland, which wished to keep out of the wars of the great powers, could not hand over to a foreign power a base at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. That would mean abandoning the vital interests of the state.

On 11 November the Soviet news agency TASS issued a communiqué stating that Finland had rejected the USSR’s “minimum” demands and had shown growing intransigence, increasing the number of its divisions near Leningrad from two or three to seven. On 13 November the delegation concluded that nothing more could be achieved in Moscow and left. In Helsinki the delegates’ return was received calmly. The government officially expressed the hope that talks would be resumed, and Erkko and his supporters still believed that the Soviet Union would not risk war with a nation ready to defend itself.

Finnish suspicions

Helsinki’s firm stance stemmed largely from distrust. The Finns were watching what was happening south of the Gulf of Finland. Estonia, which at the end of September had accepted a mutual assistance pact granting the Soviets the right to bases, had had Soviet garrisons on its territory since 18 October. Latvia and Lithuania had been forced to conclude identical agreements. In Helsinki it was believed that a base at Hanko and the disarmament of the Isthmus would be the first step down the same road. Soviet aircraft were already violating Finnish airspace during the negotiations; between 10 October and 14 November the Finns counted some thirty such overflights.

The Finns also suspected that Germany and the Soviet Union had come to an understanding about their fate. They did not know how right they were. The secret additional protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 assigned Finland, together with Estonia and Latvia, to the Soviet “sphere of interest”, and the Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September added Lithuania. The contents of the protocol were unknown. Only the non-aggression pact was public, but Berlin’s conduct spoke for itself. Adolf Hitler’s government, which as recently as the spring of 1939 had offered the Nordic states non-aggression pacts, advised Helsinki in the autumn to give way and promised no help whatsoever. The evacuation of the Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia, which began in October, looked like the Reich abandoning the whole region. The full text of the secret protocol became known only after the war, when in 1946 the defence at the Nuremberg trial tried to submit a copy found in the German archives, and in 1948 it was published by the US State Department. The Soviet Union denied its existence until 1989.

The dispute over the meaning of the talks

Historians still assess the talks of October and November 1939 in different ways. Paasikivi and Mannerheim later believed that Finland could have avoided war had it agreed earlier to some of the demands, and that Stalin, who conducted the negotiations in person and softened the terms several times, genuinely wanted an agreement. According to some recent Russian historians, a compromise was possible until the end of October, when the plan for war with Finland was finally approved. Others point out that Moscow treated the talks with the Finns in the same way as those with the Baltic states, and that the bases and the disarmament of the Isthmus would have deprived Finland of any means of defence. The fate of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, occupied and annexed to the USSR in June 1940, suggests that concessions would not necessarily have saved the country. What is certain is that Helsinki rejected not the Soviet demands as a whole, but the demand for a foreign base on its own coast. On territorial questions it agreed to more than Finnish public opinion wanted.

Place in the war

After the Finns left, the Soviet Union was already preparing for war. Radio and press launched a campaign against Finland, aimed in particular at Cajander, Erkko and Tanner. The troops of the Leningrad Military District (PL), commanded by Komandarm 2nd Rank Kirill Meretskov, stood in full readiness, and in Moscow a puppet “people’s government” was being prepared, headed by the Finnish communist Otto Kuusinen. On 26 November Moscow accused the Finns of shelling Soviet soldiers near the village of Mainila, although the shots had been fired from the Soviet side of the border. On 28 November the USSR denounced the non-aggression pact of 1932, which in 1934 had been extended to the end of 1945; on 29 November it broke off diplomatic relations; and on 30 November the Red Army attacked Finland without a declaration of war, while Soviet aircraft bombed Helsinki. The next day, in the occupied border town of Terijoki, the establishment of Kuusinen’s Finnish Democratic Republic was proclaimed, and Moscow quickly signed a “treaty” with it granting everything that Finland had refused Stalin. On 14 December the League of Nations expelled the USSR.

The Winter War lasted until March 1940. On the Mannerheim Line and in the forests of Karelia the Finns inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army, but faced with the enemy’s superiority they had to make peace. On 12 March 1940 in Moscow Finland gave up the whole of the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri, the shores of Lake Ladoga, territory in the north and part of the Rybachy Peninsula, and had to lease Hanko to the Soviet Union for thirty years. It lost far more than had been demanded of it in October and November 1939, but it kept its independence. A sense of injustice pushed Helsinki towards Germany, at whose side Finland entered the Continuation War in June 1941. Paasikivi, who in November 1939 had advised giving way, after 1944, as prime minister and then president, based Finland’s policy on the principle that the country must take account of the security interests of its great neighbour.