The Moscow Armistice

On 19 September 1944 in Moscow, representatives of Finland signed an armistice agreement with the Soviet Union and Britain, acting on behalf of all the United Nations at war with Finland. Colonel General Andrei Zhdanov, Party secretary in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo, signed on behalf of both powers. For Finland the signatories were the Foreign Minister, Carl Enckell, the Minister of Defence, General Rudolf Walden, the Chief of the General Staff, General Erik Heinrichs, and Lieutenant General Oscar Enckell (PL). The agreement came into force on signature and formally ended the Continuation War, which Finland had waged alongside Germany since June 1941.

The Finnish name of the agreement, Moskovan välirauha, means literally “interim peace”. It was not a peace treaty but an armistice, to remain in force until peace was concluded. The peace treaty was signed only in Paris in February 1947, and in its main points it repeated the Moscow provisions. Nor should the 1944 armistice be confused with the Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940, which ended the Winter War, although the new agreement referred to it explicitly.

A week of waiting

The talks took place after Finland had accepted the Soviet preliminary conditions: on 2 September it broke off relations with Germany and demanded the withdrawal of its troops, and on 4 September it ceased fire. The Red Army ceased fire a day later, a fact recorded in the first article of the agreement itself. On 7 September the Finnish delegation, headed by Prime Minister Antti Hackzell, crossed the front line on the Karelian Isthmus and travelled to Moscow. There it was not received for a week. During that time the Soviet Union was agreeing the final text of the terms with Britain, while the United States, which was not at war with Finland, took no part in the negotiations.

Britain was involved because in December 1941, under pressure from Stalin, it had declared war on Finland. London had no troops on the Finnish front and in practice left the setting of the terms to Moscow. The agreement did, however, provide that compensation for losses suffered in Finland by the other Allied states and their nationals would be settled separately. Supervision of the implementation of the whole agreement was entrusted to the Soviet High Command, acting on behalf of all the Allies.

The delegation was summoned late in the evening of 14 September. Just before the first meeting with the Soviet delegation, led by Vyacheslav Molotov, the 62-year-old Hackzell suffered a stroke in his hotel that left him unable to speak. He never returned to the talks. The delegation chose General Walden as its acting chairman, and two days later the Foreign Minister, Carl Enckell, who had already been in Moscow with Juho Kusti Paasikivi in March 1944, flew in from Helsinki.

Historians explain why Moscow settled for an armistice instead of occupying the country by several factors: the Red Army was needed on the Berlin axis; the Finnish army had not been shattered in the summer battles and defeating it would have been costly; and the United States, which had never declared war on Finland, was sympathetic towards it. Joseph Stalin nevertheless obtained everything the Soviet Union needed strategically: the 1940 border, a base at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, and Petsamo with a common border with Norway.

There were no negotiations in the strict sense of the word. The Finns were handed a ready-made text and could at most ask for clarifications or minor changes. What surprised them most was the demand for a lease of the Porkkala peninsula, a few dozen kilometres from Helsinki, and the short deadline for demobilisation combined with the obligation to disarm the Germans. According to a telegram that Enckell sent to Helsinki, Molotov and his deputy, Vladimir Dekanozov, declared that if Finland did not accept the terms, the country would be occupied by Soviet troops.

The terms

The agreement had 23 articles and an extensive annex with maps. Its most important provisions concerned the borders, the army, the Germans, reparations and the country’s future political order.

Borders. The treaty of 12 March 1940 was restored to force. Finland once again had to cede the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri (Vyborg), Ladoga Karelia, the Salla and Kuusamo area and the islands in the Gulf of Finland that it had recovered in 1941, and its troops were to withdraw behind the 1940 border within a set time. In addition it ceded to the USSR the Petsamo area, with its nickel mines and Finland’s only access to the Arctic Ocean, which it had received from Soviet Russia under the treaty of 1920. The Soviet Union gave up its lease of Hanko, and in return Finland leased to it for 50 years the Porkkala peninsula with the adjacent waters as a naval base. The 1940 agreement on the demilitarisation of the Åland Islands was also restored. In all, Finland lost about a tenth of its 1939 territory.

The army and the Germans. Finland undertook to disarm the German land, sea and air forces remaining on its territory after 15 September and to hand their personnel over to the Soviet command as prisoners of war, and to intern German and Hungarian nationals. At the same time it was to return its army to a peacetime footing within two and a half months. It also had to make airfields on its southern and south-western coast available to the Soviet air force for operations against the Germans in Estonia and the Baltic, place its merchant fleet under Allied control and break off relations with all the Reich’s satellite states.

Reparations. For the damage done to the USSR Finland was to pay 300 million dollars over six years, not in money but in goods: timber, paper, cellulose, ships and machinery. Prices were calculated at 1938 levels, which in practice considerably increased the real burden. Finland also had to return property removed from the Soviet territories occupied in 1941–1944 and immediately repatriate all Soviet and Allied prisoners of war.

Politics. Finland undertook to release political prisoners held for activity on behalf of the United Nations, to repeal discriminatory legislation, to dissolve all pro-Hitler organisations and those “of a fascist type”, as well as those conducting propaganda hostile to the USSR, and to cooperate in the apprehension and trial of persons accused of war crimes. Until the conclusion of peace, implementation of the agreement was to be supervised by the Allied Control Commission, operating under the direction of the Soviet High Command.

Compared with the terms of March 1944, which Helsinki had rejected, the reparations were halved, from 600 to 300 million dollars, and the repayment period was extended from five to six years. On the other hand, the loss of the whole of Petsamo and the lease of Porkkala were added, and the removal of the Germans, already one of the conditions in the spring, now had to be carried out by force, at the same time as demobilisation.

Acceptance and signature

The government in Helsinki, led after Hackzell’s illness by Ernst von Born as acting Prime Minister, saw no way out. On 19 September parliament met in closed session. Von Born read out Enckell’s telegram from Moscow with the Soviet threat of occupation and stressed that the terms had to be accepted. Parliament approved them without a vote, with 141 members present. That same day the signatures were put to the agreement in Moscow. On 23 September President Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim approved the act bringing the armistice into effect, which empowered the government to issue implementing regulations. The delegation returned home two days after the signing. The sick Hackzell was replaced as Prime Minister by Urho Castrén, and the composition of the government remained almost unchanged.

Finnish society received the armistice with relief that the war was over and with bitterness at its price. Some 260,000 inhabitants of Karelia, who in 1941–1944 had returned to the homes they had abandoned in 1940 and in the summer of 1944 had again had to flee before the front, lost hope of returning. Many Finns feared that the armistice was merely a prelude to the subjugation of the country, as had happened to the Baltic states in 1940.

The Zhdanov Commission

The most tangible effect of the armistice in the following years was the Allied Control Commission. Its first Soviet members arrived in Helsinki on 22 September, its chairman Zhdanov on 5 October, and the British members only in mid-October. Over its three years of activity it numbered some 150 Soviet members and twenty-odd Britons, and in practice it was run by the Soviet side. The Commission enforced the dissolution of the paramilitary Civil Guard (Suojeluskunta) and of the women’s organisation Lotta Svärd, and the legalisation of the Communist Party of Finland. It also made sure that the Finns really did fight the Germans in Lapland. Finnish historians consider that its powers, formulated in very general terms in Article 22, gave Moscow wide latitude for interpretation.

Significance

The armistice was the direct cause of the Lapland War. From 28 September the Finnish army, while demobilising and under the Commission’s supervision, fought the German Twentieth Mountain Army, which retreated to Norway, burning Lapland as it went. The last German soldiers left Finland in April 1945.

In November 1944 Paasikivi became Prime Minister, and in March 1946 he succeeded Mannerheim as President. In accordance with Article 13 of the agreement, a war-responsibility trial was held in 1945–1946. It sentenced the former President, Risto Ryti, to ten years’ imprisonment, as well as former prime ministers and ministers. The reparations, whose term was extended to eight years in 1945 and which were reduced in 1948, were paid off by Finland in September 1952. Delivering them forced the expansion of the metal and shipbuilding industries. The Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947 confirmed the provisions of the armistice. Porkkala was returned to Finland in January 1956, almost forty years ahead of schedule.

Of the states that had fought on Germany’s side against the USSR, only Finland was not occupied by the Red Army and retained a democratic system. For Finland the Moscow Armistice was at once a defeat and a deliverance. It closed the road begun in 1941 in the hope of recovering the lands lost in the Winter War, and opened a period in which an independence preserved on the battlefield would henceforth require constant regard for the neighbour to the east.