How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War, Kimmo Rentola, Yale, £25.00
This is a timely book. Finland, sharing a long border with an aggressive Russia, has cast an anxious look at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and, after decades of studied neutrality, finally joined NATO in 2023; it sees the Russian bear on the rampage once more and hopes to avoid a repeat of its past wars with the superpower. These wars, and the immediate diplomatic tensions with Russia that followed them, form the basis of Kimmo Rentola’s How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War, which covers the period 1939-1950.
By 1917, Finland had been in the Russian Empire for over a century. It achieved independence when Russia departed World War One having signed the harsh Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany. Stalin wanted it back, and long machinated to reabsorb the country into the Russkiy mir. Ever the opportunist, he used the new understanding with Nazi Germany in 1939, through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as a green light to invade Finland in November and recover it for Mother Russia. The Finns put on an unexpectedly brave and dogged resistance, resulting in the four-month Winter War. Despite having a population of only four million people, this small Arctic state fought the Russians to a temporary standstill until Stalin deployed nearly half of his army against it. Defeat against such a goliath was inevitable, but Stalin, fearing Anglo-French intervention, agreed to a less than punitive peace. The Russian leader, heeding as ever his own counsel, blundered in thinking that Britain was his greatest foe. Furthermore, Britain and France, prepping during the Phoney War, were not in a position to offer any significant assistance. The Great Leader might have been sly and scheming; he was also his own worst enemy.
While the Finns had to concede substantial border areas, they avoided occupation and the imposition of a puppet regime. This is a notable achievement. Throughout this period and beyond, there was the usual plethora of useful idiots in the SKD (the Finnish Communist Party) and other fellow travellers, but the government was able to hold firm. The country was ruled by an elected Centre Left coalition at this time; Stalin was surprised that the people, especially its agricultural and working classes, did not welcome revolutionary Soviet emancipation with open arms. Instead, their arms were cocked and loaded. Even the Finnish Communist leader and interior minister dismissed Stalin as ‘a physically stunted tiddler with sloped shoulders’.
Unsurprisingly, when Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941, and with Britain and France now with Russia, the Finns allied with the Germans against the Russians to regain their lost territory. The poor performance of the Red Army in Finland had only encouraged Hitler further in believing that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was a sure-fire thing. For the Finns, this became the Continuation War until 1944. At first, their incursions into Russian territory met with considerable successes, making their way to the siege of Leningrad. When the war turned in favour of the Allies, the Finns had to fight a rearguard action as they retreated, once more losing home ground in the separate armistice they arranged with Russia. Again, the defeat could have been much worse; as Rentola notes, ‘It is an extraordinary fact that, among the capitals of the European nations participating in the Second World War, only three avoided foreign occupation: London, Moscow, and Helsinki’. Elsewhere, the matter of casualties, ‘relatively modest losses’, is also highlighted: ‘When a foreign historian is informed of the total number of Finnish soldiers killed in the war (a little under 100,000) and asked to guess the civilian death toll, the estimates are invariably in six figures. The correct answer – 2,000 – is difficult to believe, as it is exceptionally low.’ While the Russian losses were much higher, they were proportionately lower, and so easier to absorb. (We are seeing this factor at play in the Russo-Ukrainian grinding slog today.)
Despite the book’s title, there is very little on the actual Russo-Finnish wars themselves: how they were fought, numbers of soldiers involved in different engagements, tactics, weaponry, logistics etc are not afforded any analysis. Instead, the focus is very much on diplomatic and political manoeuvrings combined with hefty doses of espionage and intelligence operations. While these offer extremely important insights, especially for Anglophone readers, the lack of a military angle removes not only the bloody drama of the battlefield context – the most urgent context of all and which guided the diplomacy and politics of the conflicts – it also means there is a missed opportunity for a comprehensively authoritative account of the wars being made available to a non-Finnish readership. When the reader tantalizingly learns of the Finns’ fierce resistance near Vyborg constituting ‘the biggest battle ever in northern Europe’, he is left yearning for more. Rentola’s attention and interests are elsewhere, which is the author’s prerogative; it is not for a reviewer to determine the contents of a book. However, his expert coverage would have a greater impact with more space given to the military setting.
Rentola relays with authority the political and diplomatic thinking of both sides of these conflicts as they unfolded and were settled. This becomes especially involved, and even more complex, in the Cold War phase, when Stalin was eager to gather in Germany’s erstwhile allies – Hungary, Romania and Finland – into his orbit. Again, the Finns were defiant. Here, as previously, they were lucky to have as their prime minister and then president, J. K. Paasikivi, who, even in old age, played a weak hand masterfully and thereby greatly mitigated Finland’s losses. Rentola identifies him as one of the main reasons why Finland was ‘such a hard nut for Stalin to crack’. There is sagely no opprobrium from Rentola for Paasiviki’s ‘policy of appeasement’: this was necessary because of the outcome of the wars.’ Indeed, Paasikivi’s pragmatic realism is something we could all do with more of today.
Are there lessons for Ukraine today? The truly heroic Finnish resistance against Russia could only get the Finns so far. The difference today is the nuclear context. One miscalculation could lead to Armageddon in a matter of an hour. As this excellent book repeatedly demonstrates, political and strategic miscalculations always abound in conflict. And they always will.
