The shelling of Mainila

On the afternoon of 26 November 1939 several shells exploded near Mainila, a small village on the Soviet bank of the border river Sestra (Rajajoki in Finnish) on the Karelian Isthmus, a few dozen kilometres from Leningrad. Finnish border guards at posts on the other side of the river heard the shots and saw the explosions in an open field by the village. That same evening the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, handed the Finnish minister in Moscow, Aarno Yrjö-Koskinen, a note claiming that Soviet troops near Mainila had been shelled by Finnish artillery and that Soviet soldiers had been killed. Over the next three days Moscow denounced its non-aggression pact with Finland and broke off diplomatic relations. On 30 November the Red Army crossed the border. Finnish historians and most scholars around the world regard the “shots of Mainila” (Finnish: Mainilan laukaukset) as a provocation staged on the Soviet side to present Finland as the aggressor and give the Soviet Union a pretext for war.

After the breakdown of the talks

When the Finnish delegation, Juho Kusti Paasikivi and Väinö Tanner, left Moscow on 13 November, Helsinki hoped that the talks would one day be resumed. Moscow, however, was preparing a solution by force. Radio and press launched a campaign against Finland: they wrote of supposed desertions in the Finnish army, of soldiers mutinying against their officers and of clashes between reservists and members of the Suojeluskunta, the volunteer Civil Guard. Soviet aircraft, which had already violated Finnish airspace dozens of times during the negotiations, appeared ever more often. The troops of the Leningrad Military District (PL), commanded by Komandarm 2nd Rank Kirill Meretskov, were ready to attack in the second half of November. According to reports circulating in Moscow at the time, more than a dozen divisions had been brought up to the border. In the capital a puppet “people’s government” of Finnish communists under Otto Kuusinen was being prepared.

What the Soviet Union still lacked was a reason. It was bound to Finland by the Treaty of Tartu of 1920, in which Soviet Russia had recognised the Finnish border, by the non-aggression pact of 21 January 1932, extended in 1934 until the end of 1945, and by the Covenant of the League of Nations. Moscow, attached to the appearance of legality, needed proof that it was Finland that threatened the Soviet Union. According to Finnish historians the scenario had long been ready: in Soviet war games of 1938 and March 1939, war with Finland began precisely with border incidents in the Mainila area.

Seven shots

According to the Soviet note of 26 November, at 3.45 p.m. Moscow time seven artillery shells fired from Finnish territory had fallen on Soviet troops near Mainila. Three privates and a non-commissioned officer were said to have been killed, and seven privates and two members of the command staff wounded. The Soviet troops, who had been strictly forbidden to allow themselves to be provoked, had supposedly not returned fire. Molotov wrote that his government did not intend to “exaggerate this outrageous act of aggression”, committed perhaps by badly commanded Finnish units, but that it regarded the concentration of Finnish troops near Leningrad as a hostile act towards the USSR. He demanded that Finland immediately withdraw its troops on the Karelian Isthmus 20–25 kilometres from the border, “so as to preclude the possibility of a repetition of the provocation”.

The Finnish government at once opened an investigation. The shots had been recorded in the log of a Finnish border post at the moment they were fired. According to the Finnish reply, the firing lasted from 3.45 to 4.05 p.m. Soviet time, the shells fell right by the village, which lay some 800 metres from the border beyond an open field, and, judging by the sound of the discharges, the gun or guns stood about one and a half to two kilometres south-east of the explosions, that is, deep inside Soviet territory. Finnish batteries could not reach Mainila. Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, chairman of the Defence Council, had earlier ordered the artillery to be pulled back from the border precisely for fear of a provocation, and the war diaries of the nearby batteries show that Mainila lay beyond the range of their guns. On the Finnish side of the border there were above all border guard units.

The exchange of notes

On 27 November Yrjö-Koskinen delivered his government’s reply to Molotov. Finland rejected the protest and stated that it had committed no hostile act. It suggested that the incident might have been an accident during Soviet artillery exercises. It proposed that the border commissioners of the two states on the Karelian Isthmus carry out a joint investigation in accordance with the convention on border commissioners of 24 September 1928, and declared its readiness to discuss a mutual withdrawal of troops to a certain distance from the border. It refused to withdraw only its own units, since that would have meant surrendering its line of defence on the Isthmus without a fight.

On 28 November Molotov replied with a note stating that the Finnish position bore witness to “deep hostility” towards the USSR. He called the denial of the shelling an attempt to mislead public opinion and to mock the victims, and dismissed the suggestion of Soviet artillery exercises right on the border, in full view of the Finns, as a sign of irresponsibility. A mutual withdrawal of troops was out of the question: Finnish units stood 32 kilometres from Leningrad, a city of 3.5 million inhabitants, whereas Soviet troops were hundreds of kilometres from any Finnish centres, and pulling them back 20–25 kilometres would mean placing them in the suburbs of Leningrad. Since Finland was “systematically violating” the non-aggression pact, the Soviet government considered itself released from that day from the obligations arising from it. Yrjö-Koskinen pointed out that under the protocol of 1934 the pact could not be denounced before the end of 1945. Molotov made no reply.

In the Soviet Union propaganda exploited the incident at once. That very night meetings were held at factories working the night shift, and the next day demonstrations took place all over the country. The newspapers wrote of the “insolent provocation of the Finnish soldiery”, and speakers called for “a triple blow in reply”. According to Finnish tallies, the meetings demanded among other things that Prime Minister Aimo Cajander and the other “ringleaders of capitalism” be sent the way of Józef Beck and Ignacy Mościcki, that is, share the fate of the Polish leaders who a few weeks earlier had been forced to leave their country. Moscow had run a similar campaign in September before its invasion of Poland, when Pravda suddenly began writing about the oppression of Ukrainians and Belarusians in the Polish state.

The breaking off of relations

On the evening of 29 November Yrjö-Koskinen was again summoned to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Before he could deliver his government’s reply to the note of 28 November, the Deputy People’s Commissar, Vladimir Potemkin, handed him another note signed by Molotov. It stated that attacks by Finnish units on Soviet troops were continuing not only on the Karelian Isthmus but on other sections of the border as well, and that the USSR could no longer maintain normal relations with Finland and was recalling its political and economic representatives. This meant the breaking off of diplomatic relations. As evidence of the “attacks” Moscow cited that day, among other things, the crossing of the border by a Finnish patrol near Pummanki on the Rybachy Peninsula in the Petsamo area. According to the Finnish version it was the other way round: the day before, a Soviet detachment had crossed the border there and abducted three Finnish border guards.

The Finnish reply was delivered after midnight. In it Helsinki proposed, in accordance with Article 5 of the non-aggression pact, the convening of a conciliation commission or the submission of the dispute to neutral arbitration. It also declared its readiness to reach agreement on withdrawing troops on the Isthmus, with the exception of border guards and customs officers, to such a distance from Leningrad that it could not be claimed they threatened the city. No one answered. That same evening Molotov made a radio broadcast. He said that nothing but fresh provocations could now be expected from the Finnish government and its “crazed military clique”, but gave an assurance that the Soviet Union had no intention of seizing Finnish territory or infringing Finland’s independence, “whatever the regime there”, and that the sole aim of its actions was the security of the USSR, and of Leningrad in particular. This problem was to be solved “by the efforts of the USSR itself, in friendly cooperation with the Finnish people”. That day the troops of the Leningrad Military District received an order signed by Meretskov and by a member of the district’s military council, the secretary of the Leningrad party organisation Andrei Zhdanov, assuring them that the Red Army was entering Finland “not as conquerors, but as friends and liberators of the Finnish people from the oppression of the landlords and capitalists”.

What is known about the shots

The Soviet government never published the findings of any investigation. According to Meretskov’s report, four soldiers had been killed and nine wounded by the shelling, and the head of the district staff’s operations department, Colonel P. G. Tikhomirov, had gone to the scene. The names of the dead were never disclosed, nor is it known where they were buried. The Russian historian Pavel Aptekar, who examined declassified military documents, found no casualties for that day in the daily reports of the units stationed in the area and concluded that the shelling had been staged. Material from Zhdanov’s archive also points to the involvement of the Soviet services in preparing the incident, although some Russian historians question its authenticity or its import. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that the affair was like the start of any war: each side claims that the other fired first. There is no shortage of Russian authors who defend the Soviet version or, like the St Petersburg historian Vladimir Baryshnikov, claim that no shots were fired at all and that the whole affair was nothing more than an announcement on Moscow radio. None of these versions, however, undermines what matters most: Finland did not fire, it proposed a joint investigation and arbitration, and Moscow rejected all these proposals because the incident was meant only as a pretext. In Finnish and most international historiography the incident is a classic example of a false flag operation. In May 1994 the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, called the Winter War a war of aggression.

Gleiwitz, Mukden, Mainila

Mainila belongs to the same family of provocations as the Gleiwitz incident of 31 August 1939, when SS men disguised as Polish insurgents attacked a German radio station to give Hitler a pretext for attacking Poland, and the Mukden Incident of 1931, when Japanese officers blew up a railway line in Manchuria. As early as December 1939 the American journalist John Gunther wrote that the Mainila incident was “as clumsy and obviously fabricated as all such ‘incidents’ since Mukden”. The pattern was similar every time: an alleged attack by a weaker neighbour, outrage in the press, unacceptable demands, and a war presented as self-defence. The Soviet Union had already used it earlier that autumn, when it exploited the escape of ORP Orzeł from Tallinn to put pressure on Estonia, accusing it of being unable to safeguard its neutrality.

Its place in the war

On the morning of 30 November 1939, without a declaration of war, the Red Army attacked Finland along the whole length of the border, from the Karelian Isthmus to Petsamo, and Soviet aircraft bombed Helsinki and other towns. On 1 December Kuusinen’s Finnish Democratic Republic was proclaimed in the captured border town of Terijoki; Moscow concluded a “treaty” with it and from then on would negotiate only with it. On 14 December the League of Nations declared the Soviet Union an aggressor and expelled it. The Winter War, in which the Finns held out for three and a half months against an enemy many times stronger, ended on 13 March 1940 with the Peace of Moscow and the loss of the Karelian Isthmus together with Viipuri (Vyborg).

Mainila returned to the pages of history once more. At the end of August 1941, during the Continuation War, the Finnish 18th Division reached the border river. Its commander, Colonel Aaro Pajari, appreciated the propaganda value of the place and had the village shelled in front of the cameras of Finnish war correspondents. In his report to headquarters he wrote that on 31 August 1941 the 18th Division had “carried out the shelling of Mainila”. The village was taken a few days later. This time the shots really did come from the Finnish side.