The USSR expelled from the League of Nations

On 14 December 1939 in Geneva the League of Nations, for the first and only time in its history, removed a member state from its ranks. First the League Assembly solemnly condemned the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland and called on its members to give the Finns every possible assistance. Then the League Council, invoking Article 16, paragraph 4 of the Covenant of the League, declared that the Soviet Union had “by its act placed itself outside the League of Nations” and was no longer a member. Five years earlier the same Assembly had admitted the USSR with honours and a permanent seat on the Council as an ally in the defence of peace. Now it was throwing it out for waging a war of aggression against a small neighbour. It was the last significant act of an organisation that had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to function in the autumn of 1939.

An appeal from Helsinki

The Red Army crossed the Finnish border on 30 November 1939 without a declaration of war, after the staged Mainila incident. The next day Moscow announced in the occupied border town of Terijoki the creation of the puppet Finnish Democratic Republic, headed by the communist Otto Kuusinen, and on 2 December concluded a “treaty of mutual assistance and friendship” with it. The legitimate Finnish government, led from 1 December by Risto Ryti, sought help wherever it could. On 3 December Finland’s representative at the League of Nations, the former foreign minister Rudolf Holsti, asked the Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, to convene the Council and the Assembly. Finland invoked Articles 11 and 15 of the Covenant, which allowed a state threatened with war to appeal to the League.

The appeal was an act of desperation rather than of faith in the effectiveness of Geneva. The League had failed to stop Japan in Manchuria in 1931, Italy in Ethiopia in 1935–1936, or Germany. Japan and Germany had left the League in 1933, Italy in 1937 and Spain in May 1939. The Scandinavian states, Finland’s closest neighbours, had declared in the 1930s that they no longer considered themselves bound by the obligation to apply sanctions. When Germany on 1 September 1939 and the Soviet Union on 17 September attacked Poland, the League had remained silent. The Finns, however, wanted something more than military help, which no one in Geneva could give them: the public branding of the aggressor, a political basis for assistance from abroad, and an assurance that the world would not recognise the “government” in Terijoki.

Molotov’s reply

On 4 December the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, replied to Avenol in a telegram that captured the logic of Soviet propaganda well. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was not at war with Finland and did not threaten her. It maintained peaceful relations with the Finnish Democratic Republic, with whose government it had concluded a treaty of mutual assistance and friendship on 2 December, and that government had itself asked the Red Army for help in eliminating the “hotbed of war” created by Finland’s former rulers. The people on whose behalf Holsti spoke were not, in Moscow’s view, the true representatives of the Finnish people. The USSR therefore considered Finland’s request groundless and refused to take part in the sessions of the Council and the Assembly.

This reply determined the further course of events. The Soviet explanations convinced no one in Geneva, all the more so as bombs were falling on Helsinki and other towns and photographs of civilian casualties were appearing in newspapers all over the world. A member state that had attacked another member and refused to appear before the League was exposing itself to the severest sanction the Covenant provided for.

The debates in Geneva

The League Council met for its 106th session on 9 December, and on 11 December the twentieth Assembly opened under the presidency of the Norwegian politician Carl Joachim Hambro, President of the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. The Assembly set up a special committee of thirteen states to examine the Finnish request. That same day the committee sent Moscow and Helsinki an appeal for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the opening of negotiations with the League’s mediation, giving them 24 hours to reply. Finland agreed. On 12 December Molotov replied that, for the reasons set out in his telegram of 4 December, the Soviet Union could not accept the invitation.

The debates took place in an atmosphere of evident sympathy for the Finns. Their army, contrary to expectations, was holding out on the Mannerheim Line, and on 12 December at Tolvajärvi it won its first major victory. The delegates of the Latin American states spoke with particular firmness; they remembered Soviet support for Republican Spain and distrusted communism. According to accounts of the debates, the Argentine delegation even announced that its country would leave the League if it failed to draw the consequences against the aggressor. States lying close to the USSR or Germany were more reticent. The Scandinavian countries, which a few days earlier had declared their neutrality in the Winter War, and the Baltic states, bound to Moscow since the autumn by mutual assistance pacts and Soviet garrisons, did not want to take part in decisions that might bring Stalin’s wrath down upon them.

On 14 December the Assembly adopted the resolution drafted by the committee. It found that the USSR had violated not only its agreements with Finland – the Treaty of Tartu of 1920 and the non-aggression pact of 1932 – but also Article 12 of the Covenant of the League and the Kellogg–Briand Pact, and that it had moreover refused to take part in the League’s proceedings. The Assembly “solemnly condemned” the Soviet action against the State of Finland and urgently appealed to every member state to provide Finland with such material and humanitarian assistance as might be in its power and to refrain from any action that might weaken Finland’s power of resistance. It also authorised the Secretary-General to coordinate this assistance, and referred the question of expulsion to the Council. No one voted against; a number of states, among them the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, abstained.

The Council’s decision

That same day the Council met for its 107th session, which proved to be its last. Article 16, paragraph 4 of the Covenant provided that a member which had violated any of its obligations could be declared to be no longer a member of the League by a vote of the Council. The Council “associated itself with the condemnation” expressed by the Assembly and, for the reasons given in the Assembly’s resolution, found that the Soviet Union had by its act placed itself outside the League of Nations and was no longer a member.

Seven members of the Council voted for this formula: Britain, France, Belgium, Bolivia, Egypt, South Africa and the Dominican Republic. China, which depended on Soviet arms deliveries in its war with Japan, abstained, as did Greece, Yugoslavia and Finland herself. The Finns did not want expulsion to close the door to possible League mediation and to peace talks with Moscow. The remaining members, including of course the USSR, did not attend the meeting. Three of the states that voted in favour – Bolivia, Egypt and South Africa – had been elected to the Council by the Assembly only during that same session, which Soviet propaganda later presented as manipulation. Lawyers argued for years over whether a decision taken by a minority of the Council’s members met the requirements of the Covenant. Politically, however, the verdict was clear.

Moscow’s “ironic smile”

The Soviet Union responded with contempt. On 16 December the TASS agency published a statement calling the League’s decision “absurd”. According to TASS it provoked an “ironic smile” and could only make its authors look ridiculous. Moscow repeated that it was not at war with Finland, and that the League had ceased to be an instrument of peace and had become an instrument of the Anglo-French military bloc. The statement stressed that only seven of the fifteen members of the Council had voted for the expulsion.

Behind the contemptuous tone, however, lay humiliation. A state that for five years, with Maxim Litvinov in Geneva, had presented itself as the most faithful champion of collective security had been publicly branded an aggressor – and at a moment when its army was suffering defeat after defeat in Finland. In the eyes of Western opinion the USSR now stood in the same rank as Germany, Japan and Italy, which had earlier left the League of their own accord. Of the great powers, only Britain and France remained in the organisation.

Aid for Finland

The Assembly’s resolution obliged no one to do anything, but it provided a moral and legal basis for assistance. Between 19 December 1939 and 2 March 1940 the League secretariat received replies from 26 states declaring support for Finland in one form or another. Money, weapons, equipment and volunteers arrived from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, Italy, Hungary and the United States, where the former president Herbert Hoover set up a relief fund for Finnish civilians. When Britain and France drew up a plan for an expedition to Finland in January and February 1940, they intended to invoke precisely the League resolution in demanding that Norway and Sweden allow their troops to pass through. Both countries refused.

Place in the war

The expulsion of the USSR was the last political act of the League of Nations. The Council never met again, and the Assembly not until April 1946, and then only to dissolve the organisation and transfer its assets to the United Nations. Avenol, accused of sympathising with the Axis powers, resigned in 1940, and the remnants of the secretariat in Geneva were run until the end of the war by the Irishman Seán Lester.

For Finland, condemnation in Geneva did not change the situation at the front. Help from abroad was limited and came late, and in March 1940, after the Mannerheim Line had been broken, the Finns had to accept Soviet peace terms and give up the Karelian Isthmus with Viipuri (Vyborg). They did, however, keep their independence. The League’s verdict strengthened the conviction in London and Paris that Stalin was in effect Hitler’s accomplice, and Allied staffs even considered bombing the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus.

All this changed in June 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR and the Soviet Union became an ally of Britain and, from December 1941, of the United States. Stalin, however, did not forget the humiliation of December 1939. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 he reminded Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of how, during the Winter War, Britain and France had turned the League against the Soviet Union. Historians also link this experience with the Soviet Union’s stubborn insistence on a veto in the Security Council of the new organisation, which ruled out the possibility that the USSR might ever again be outvoted and expelled as it had been in Geneva on 14 December 1939.