The Soviet Union invades Finland

At dawn on 30 November 1939 the Red Army crossed the Finnish border along its entire length, from the Karelian Isthmus to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union did not declare war. A few hours later Soviet bombers appeared over Helsinki and dropped bombs on the city centre. The same day President Kyösti Kallio handed supreme command to the 72-year-old Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, and on the following day Moscow announced the creation of a puppet “people’s government” of Finland headed by Otto Kuusinen. So began the war that the Finns would later call the Winter War, and which was to last 105 days.

From talks to shots

The attack was the end of a road that had begun in the autumn. Under the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, Finland had been assigned to the Soviet sphere of interest. Once Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been forced in September and October to accept mutual assistance pacts and Soviet garrisons, it was Helsinki’s turn. On 12 and 14 October Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov presented the Finnish negotiator, Juho Kusti Paasikivi, with their demands: a lease of the port of Hanko as a military base, islands in the Gulf of Finland, and a shift of the border on the Karelian Isthmus further away from Leningrad, in exchange for a larger but worthless area of Soviet Karelia. Finland agreed to minor concessions but rejected the base at Hanko and the surrender of its defensive line on the Isthmus. On 13 November the Finnish delegation left Moscow empty-handed.

Events then followed a script familiar from August. On 26 November the Soviet side announced that Finnish artillery had shelled the village of Mainila on the Soviet side of the border and killed several soldiers. The Finnish guns were out of range, and later research indicates that the shelling was a Soviet provocation, similar to the Gleiwitz incident with which Germany had justified its attack on Poland. Helsinki proposed a joint investigation and a mutual withdrawal of troops from the border. Moscow would not hear of it: on 28 November it renounced the non-aggression pact of 1932, and on 29 November it broke off diplomatic relations with Finland (the Mainila incident).

Military preparations had been under way for weeks. According to Finnish research, on 17 November the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, ordered the Leningrad Military District to be brought to full combat readiness by 20 November, and the operational plan was ready the same day. The district was commanded by Komandarm 2nd Rank Kirill Meretskov. Moscow was counting on a swift campaign: the troops were to reach the Swedish border within a few weeks, and according to accounts cited by historians, the soldiers were warned not to cross it by mistake.

The blow of 30 November

On the Karelian Isthmus the Soviet artillery opened fire at 6.50 a.m. Finnish time. In the north, in Ladoga Karelia and in Lapland, Soviet units crossed the border at roughly the same time, and in a few places minor skirmishes had begun even earlier. According to the most commonly cited estimates, some 450,000 soldiers in 21 divisions went into the attack, supported by more than 2,500 tanks and a powerful air force, although only part of these forces was in action in the first days. The offensive was spread across four axes:

• the 7th Army on the Karelian Isthmus was to break through the Finnish fortifications and advance on Viipuri (Vyborg) and Helsinki;
• the 8th Army, north of Lake Ladoga, was to outflank those fortifications from the rear;
• the 9th Army in central Finland, in the Suomussalmi and Salla area, was to cut the country in two at its narrowest point and reach the Gulf of Bothnia near Oulu;
• the 14th Army, advancing from Murmansk, was to seize the Arctic port of Petsamo and cut Finland off from the Arctic Ocean.

At the same time the Soviet Baltic Fleet began occupying Finnish islands in the Gulf of Finland, and its ships shelled the coast. In the Petsamo area soldiers of the 104th Mountain Rifle Division came partly from the sea and partly overland, and the few Finnish covering detachments began to fall back.

Finland was not taken by surprise. Since October, under the guise of “extraordinary reserve exercises”, it had mobilised its army and deployed it on the border. On the Karelian Isthmus the main forces were waiting in a belt of fortifications that the whole world would soon know as the Mannerheim Line. In front of it covering detachments operated, tasked with delaying the enemy’s advance and, as they fell back, burning villages and destroying bridges. The population of the border communes was evacuated. The enemy’s superiority was nonetheless overwhelming: the Finnish army, some 300,000 men strong after mobilisation, had a few dozen obsolete tanks, more than a hundred aircraft, of which only some were fit for combat, and very little artillery ammunition or anti-tank weaponry. Along the whole front Finland fielded nine divisions and several independent groups.

By 1 December the Red Army had taken the border town of Terijoki, a summer resort on the Karelian Isthmus, which the Finns had abandoned according to plan.

Bombs on Helsinki

At 9.15 a.m. the sirens wailed in Helsinki. The first wave of Soviet bombers was probably aiming at Malmi airfield, but the bombs fell on residential districts. The heaviest raid came in the afternoon, between 3 and 4 p.m. DB-3 bombers of the Baltic Fleet’s air arm, returning from an unsuccessful attack on naval targets, dropped their loads on the city centre, around the Kamppi bus station, the Hietalahti district and the Polytechnic, not far from the parliament building. Apartment blocks caught fire. Many residents had not gone down to the shelters, believing after the morning alarm that the danger had passed.

According to the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, the raids of 30 November and the following day killed 91 people in Helsinki and seriously injured 36. Other tallies give slightly different figures, in the region of a hundred dead. It was the bloodiest day for the capital in the entire Winter War. According to Finnish records, bombs fell that day on more than a dozen towns, including Viipuri, Lahti, Kotka and Turku. Along with the bombs the aircraft dropped leaflets assuring the Finns that the Soviet Union meant them no harm and that the blame for the war lay with Mannerheim and the Prime Minister, Aimo Cajander.

Photographs of Helsinki in flames went round the world and settled how Western public opinion judged the Soviet attack. On 1 December President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to both sides not to bomb civilians. Finland agreed at once. Molotov replied that Soviet aircraft were bombing only airfields. An anecdote took hold in Finland according to which Molotov claimed that the aircraft were dropping bread to the starving Finns; the Finns nicknamed the Soviet cluster bombs “Molotov’s bread baskets”, and the incendiary bottles with which they were soon fighting Soviet tanks “Molotov cocktails”.

Mannerheim as Commander-in-Chief

The government had been in session in Helsinki since the morning. President Kallio declared a state of war and addressed the nation on the radio. Under the Finnish constitution the President was commander-in-chief in peacetime, but as early as 1931 President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, when appointing Mannerheim chairman of the Defence Council, had promised him in writing that in the event of war he would take command of the army. Kallio renewed this promise in 1937. For months Mannerheim had been in sharp conflict with the Cajander government: he demanded more money for armaments, and in the autumn he advised accepting some of the Soviet demands, believing that the army could not withstand a long war. He had tendered his resignation several times. According to his biographers, he made it a condition that he would return only as commander-in-chief.

On 30 November Kallio appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. The same day Mannerheim issued his first order of the day. In it he wrote that he was taking command at a moment when the “hereditary enemy” was once again attacking the country, that confidence in the commander was the first condition of victory, and that this war was the continuation and final act of the Finnish War of Independence of 1918. The soldiers were fighting, he wrote, “for home, faith and fatherland”. He set up his headquarters in Mikkeli. He later wrote to his daughter that he had not wanted this responsibility, which his age and health did not permit, but had had to yield to the entreaties of the President and the government, and was now “at war for the fourth time”.

The war also changed the government. Cajander and his Foreign Minister, Eljas Erkko, were blamed for believing to the last that the Soviets were bluffing. Mannerheim and the Finance Minister, Väinö Tanner, demanded changes. On 1 December the Cajander cabinet resigned, and a new government was formed by the Governor of the Bank of Finland, Risto Ryti. Tanner became Foreign Minister. His first aim was to open talks and restore peace as quickly as possible.

The Terijoki government

Moscow was ready for this. On 1 December the TASS agency announced that in Terijoki, the “first liberated” Finnish town, a “people’s government” of the Finnish Democratic Republic had been formed. It was headed by Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish communist who had fled to Soviet Russia after the Reds lost the Civil War of 1918 and had for years been one of the secretaries of the Comintern. The other ministers were Finnish émigrés living in the USSR. The government described itself as provisional and announced that once it entered Helsinki it would be broadened and its authority confirmed by an elected parliament. The Soviet Union recognised it at once. On 2 December Molotov and Kuusinen signed a treaty of mutual assistance and friendship in Moscow. In it the “people’s government” agreed to everything Stalin had demanded of the government in Helsinki in October, including the lease of Hanko. In return the USSR promised to give Finland a large part of Soviet East Karelia.

The construct was meant to justify a war that Moscow did not want to call a war. Molotov explained that the Soviet Union was not at war with Finland but, at the request of its lawful government, was helping it against the “White Finnish” authorities in Helsinki, and for that reason he refused any talks with the Ryti government. As early as 30 November he had told the German ambassador that the new government would not be Soviet but “democratic”, and that Moscow expected to reach an understanding with it on the security of Leningrad. Leaflets dropped over Finland assured the population that the Red Army was coming “not as a conqueror but as a liberator”. Poles had heard the same language less than ten weeks earlier, when on 17 September the Red Army entered Poland, likewise without a declaration of war, in order to “take under its protection” the population of the eastern borderlands.

The Terijoki government won no support whatsoever in Finland. The workers, the sons and grandsons of the Reds of 1918, stood by the lawful authorities, and the unity of the nation in the face of invasion passed into Finnish history as the “spirit of the Winter War”. Outside the USSR the new government was recognised only by its satellites, Mongolia and Tuva.

The world and the attack

Finland immediately appealed for help to the League of Nations, which the Soviet Union had joined in 1934 as a champion of collective security. On 3 December the Finnish representative in Geneva demanded that the League’s Council and Assembly be convened. Moscow refused to take part in the proceedings, repeating that it was not at war with Finland and maintained peaceful relations with its “people’s government”. On 14 December 1939 the Assembly condemned the Soviet aggression and called on member states to help Finland, while the League Council found that the Soviet Union had placed itself outside the organisation and expelled it. It was the first and only such expulsion in the League’s history. Finland itself abstained in the vote on the resolution, so as not to become an instrument of great-power politics and not to provoke Germany.

The world’s sympathy was immense. Finland, the only country that regularly repaid the loans it had taken from the United States after the First World War, enjoyed a good press in America, and in Sweden, Britain, France and Italy money was collected and volunteers came forward. Governments, however, were cautious. Sweden declared that it was not a party to the conflict but was not observing strict neutrality, which allowed it to send arms and volunteers. Britain and France, absorbed in the war with Germany, were only beginning to consider aid. The Third Reich, bound by its pact with Stalin, maintained a neutrality benevolent to the USSR. Joachim von Ribbentrop instructed German diplomats to present the Soviet position sympathetically, and the German press blamed the war on the British, who were supposedly egging the Finns on.

Place in the war

The attack of 30 November was meant to be a short march. It became one of the Red Army’s greatest humiliations. On the Karelian Isthmus its offensive stalled on the Mannerheim Line in December, and in the forests of central Finland Finnish units moving on skis encircled and destroyed Soviet columns tied to the roads; at Suomussalmi and on the Raate road, at the turn of December and January, two Soviet divisions were destroyed. Only in February 1940, after a change of command, the arrival of fresh forces and a massive artillery preparation, did the Red Army break through the Finnish defences on the Isthmus. With Viipuri threatened and its army exhausted, Finland accepted the Soviet terms. Peace was signed in Moscow on 12 March 1940, and the fighting ended the following day. Finland lost the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri, the shores of Lake Ladoga and territory in the north – about a tenth of its land in all – and more than 400,000 of its inhabitants had to leave their homes. It leased Hanko to the USSR. It nevertheless kept its independence, and the Terijoki government was dissolved without a word. According to various estimates, some 25,000–26,000 Finnish soldiers were killed or went missing, and at least 125,000 Soviet soldiers, and according to some researchers considerably more.

The consequences of the war reached far beyond Finland. Britain and France prepared an expedition to help the Finns through northern Norway and Sweden, which would incidentally have cut Germany off from Swedish iron ore; this plan drew Hitler’s attention to Scandinavia and hastened the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. The defeats of the Red Army, weakened by the Great Purge, convinced Hitler and many Western staff officers that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay, which weighed on the decision to attack in 1941. Stalin, for his part, drew lessons from the war and reformed the army under Semyon Timoshenko, who replaced Voroshilov. For Finland the most important consequence was bitterness over the Moscow peace and a sense of isolation. Looking for support against the USSR, Helsinki drew closer to Germany, and in June 1941, alongside the Wehrmacht, it entered the Continuation War to recover what it had lost after 30 November 1939.