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Twenty-five: Snow and Silent Shadows

On Monday, October 9th 1939, the civil defence organization in Helsinki staged the first general exercise for a black-out and an air raid alarm in the Finnish capital. On that very same day, President Kyösti Kallio drew his last breath in the Surgical Hospital, with his wife Kaisa sitting next to him, holding his hand. The final stroke that led to his death was entirely expected. In fact all through late September and early October there had been talk among the president and the members of the cabinet about Kallio resigning from the office of president due to his several medical issues.

For the Finnish government, Kallio's death could not have taken place at a more inopportune time. Prime Minister Paasikivi's coalition cabinet had only been in office since late August, and had started its work in conditions of national tragedy as it was. Now, less than two months later, the new cabinet was facing the death of the well-liked and respected President of the Republic, in the conditions of a general war having taken hold of Europe.

Prime Minister Paasikivi now became the acting president of Finland. This was not an official position, according to the constitution he still was merely acting as the president's deputy for the time being. It was now instrumental to elect a new president for Finland as soon as possible.

Also on the 9th, the official discussions between the Finnish and Soviet governments were started in Moscow. In the Kremlin, the Finnish delegation was met by Foreign Minister Molotov, who after offering his condolences for the death of President Kallio and apologizing for the absence of General Secretary Stalin himself, invited the Finnish delegation to the table. On the right side, sat the Finns: Foreign Minister Voionmaa as the head of the delegation, then the Finnish ambassador to the USSR, Yrjö-Koskinen; next to him Nykopp, an experienced Foreign Ministry official, and finally Colonel Paasonen, the Finnish military expert. On the left side was Molotov, his deputy Potyomkin, and Derevyansky, the Soviet ambassador to Finland.

After proposing to the Finns a mutual assistance pact, like on a whim and quickly shelving it, after hearing the negative answer of his opposing numbers, Molotov then outlined the general conditions of the Soviet government to the Finns. These included a Soviet base on the Finnish coast, preferably on the Hanko Peninsula, several islands on the Gulf of Finland to be given to the USSR, and ”border corrections” made both up north in Petsamo and in the south on the Karelian isthmus. In return, Finland would be given additional areas in Eastern Karelia, namely the parishes of Repola and Porajärvi. Some additions to the Finno-Soviet non-aggression pact would be made, and border fortifications would have to be destroyed on both sides on the Karelian isthmus. After Voionmaa communicated the Finnish position that the territorial integrity of the Republic of Finland was inviolable, the meeting adjourned for the day.

Voionmaa contacted Helsinki by telegraph to relay the Soviet position and to ask for further instructions. Inside the hour, he received an answer: discussions could not be continued based on the Soviet demands. The delegation had no chance but to return home as soon as possible.

On Tuesday, October 10th 1939, the statue of Aleksis Kivi was unveiled in Helsinki. The statue created by the sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen honored the writer of Seitsemän veljestä (”The Seven Brothers”), generally recognized as the most important Finnish novel. The event was attended by thousands. Heavy snowfall on the Railway Square covered the people, the statue of the thoughtful author with his downturned gaze, and the Finnish Navy Band, whose rendition of the national anthem sounded somehow muted this time. When the band stopped playing, it was as if all sound had gone out and all colours had been washed away. That day entire Finnish capital was hidden by a blanket of snow, early for the season. According to Doctor Risto Jurva, the ice expert at the Helsinki University Department of Meteorology, all the signs pointed towards a cold winter and heavy ice cover on the Baltic Sea to be expected in the months to come.

That week, several additional age cohorts for reservists were called to ”extraordinary exercises”. In other words, this meant a limited mobilization of the Finnish military, a process that had in fact begun already before the president's death. The mobilization was begun based on a suggestion by General Öhquist, the chairman of the National Defence Council, who many say was in this mainly channeling old Field Marshal Mannerheim.

In the Eduskuntatalo, the Finnish parliament passed amendments in the Criminal Code in the interest of increasing the severity of sentences for espionage. The new Civil Defence Act was given its second reading. That week, the state authorities already acted in the interest of national security, and the State Police, directed by Urho Kekkonen, the Second Minister of the Interior, started bringing ”dangerous elements” in for ”protective custody”. This measure was directed mainly against the far left, and that week already over three hundred individuals were arrested, mainly in Helsinki and the other major cities.

Kekkonen was also otherwise busy, as organizing and overseeing the volunteer evacuations of civilians in the border parishes on the Karelian isthmus were made the responsibility of the minister. To this effect, Kekkonen was to travel to Karelia himself. In the event, the death of President Kallio and the ensuing uncertainty about the governance of the nation kept Kekkonen in Helsinki where, instead, he would during the week receive parish delegations from the Karelian areas, all there to demand the government to stand firm against any Soviet demands.

In these meetings, Kekkonen consistently promised the Karelians that ”not one inch of Finnish land will be handed over to the Bolshevik government”. The answer seemed to elevate the visiting Karelians, who would leave the minister's offices with newfound optimism about their future.

Meanwhile, the Eduskunta and the parties were preoccupied with the most pressing domestic issue of the day: the lack of a President of Republic. The nation was in a state of mourning, perhaps still even in a state of shock after Kallio's death, and because the process of electing a new president had not been started while the old man was still alive, it was imperative that it would be started now.

On the evening of the 10th, while the Finnish delegation was returning to Finland by train, it was argued in the Eduskunta that the next president would have to be elected not in a nationwide election but through a simplified procedure by the parliament itself. This decision, based on the initiative of the Agrarian League, was generally agreed upon as prudent under the circumstances, due to the ongoing de facto military mobilization and the voluntary evacuations of civilians from several parts of the country. It was already seen in terms of showing national unity in the face of the USSR. In practice, this would mean voting on an expedited special act of parliament through which the electors of the 1937 presidential elections would be allowed to vote on the new president as well, for the remainder of Kallio's term of office.[1]

The first discussion about the Soviet demands were had in Helsinki between the members of the Finnish delegation and the Finnish cabinet on the evening of October 11th. In addition to the members of the delegation, in attendance were Paasikivi, the Minister of Defence Oksala, the Commander of the Army and the Chairman of the National Defence Council, Lieutenant General Öhquist, and the Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant General Oesch. Field Marshal Mannerheim was asked to attend, but he was unavailable due to unspecified health issues.

To start out, Paasikivi first noted that Finland had three options; either agree to the Soviet demands, or reject them in toto, or draft an alternative proposal for the Soviets. In the discussions that followed, only Oksala at first openly opposed concessions to the Soviets. He would have only discussed about the islands on the Gulf of Finland. Yrjö-Koskinen and Voionmaa, though, agreed that an effort would have to be made to ”satisfy the legitimate defensive needs of the Soviet Union”. The question was put to the soldiers present about how this could be achieved.

In the event, Öhquist in essence communicated Mannerheim's view that the fortress of Ino on the coast of the Gulf of Finland could be offered to the Soviets instead of Hanko. Oesch, in turn, commented upon the border changes, to point out that the changes as proposed would make the border many times more suitable for an Eastern attacker, and would make the position of the Finnish defenders difficult on both sides of the Ladoga, especially on the Isthmus where a new defensive line would have to be built further west of the current main defensive line – as a big part of it would have to be given over to the Red Army.

All three, Voionmaa, Oksala and Yrjö-Koskinen agreed that perhaps some minor changes on the Karelian Isthmus could be proposed, but Hanko was out of the question. The meeting was ended on the note that before proceeding to answer the USSR, Finland would need to find out whether Sweden would help Finland in the event of an escalation. As everyone present knew that Voionmaa was due to visit Stockholm in just a few days, the decision was made to postpone the next meeting until the matter could be discussed with members of the Swedish cabinet.

Naturally, the matter of the presidential elections in the parliament also had a bearing on the issue. In practice, the Finnish top leadership agreed that the new president would need to be elected before a binding deal with the Soviets could be agreed upon, anyway, never mind what the terms of that deal would be.

Voionmaa's trip to Sweden took place from October 14th to 16th. The Finnish Foreign minister met Foreign Minister Sandler (together with Erkko, the Finnish ambassador to Stockholm), Defence Minister Strindlund and, finally, Prime Minister Hansson. The results of the visit would have been lean even if, in the event, the situation did not turn from poor to worse due to external events. Sandler was still predictably supporting strong Swedish support to Finland, and publicly he argued for Swedish participation in the defence of Åland. In this, he was in agreement with the attitudes of the Swedish military leadership. All the other key members of the Swedish cabinet were hesitant, not to say negative towards aiding Finland. Voionmaa could see that Strindlund had an almost hostile attitude to the Finnish wishes, and that generally the death of Sköld in the Hannila incident was still weighing down the Swedish attitude towards the Finnish military on the negative side.

In the evening of the 15th, there was yet another maritime incident in the Baltic Sea. Just a few sea miles outside the lighthouse island of Märket, west of Åland, the Finnish minelayer Louhi and a Swedish freighter, S/S Ulla, collided almost head-on in heavy snow storm. The Swedish ship was damaged, but the crew of the Louhi acted fast and towed the ship to Eckerö on Åland. No lives were lost in the incident, which the captain of the Louhi claimed was due to the minelayer needing to avoid an unidentified largish ship moving towards from south to north across the area with no lights at all.[2] In the Swedish press, the incident was immediately compared to the Hannila accident, and in the left-wing press especially to the Finnish Navy's late summer incident with the Soviet freighter Metallist.

The argument most prevalent in the Swedish press was then that the Finnish military was hopelessly incompetent and the Finns generally could not be trusted in military matters. Another issue was the fact that in the Mariehamn-based newspaper Ålandstidningen, the local provincial leadership protested the Louhi's ”unnecessary breach” of Åland's demilitarization in no uncertain terms. This commentary was also echoed in Swedish leftist papers.

While Prime Minister Hansson was moved to comment the incident in tones that emphasized the importance of Swedish cooperation with its Nordic neighbours, the general results of the incident were negative towards the likelibility of Finno-Swedish defence cooperation in the near future, and Voionmaa reported as much to the Finnish cabinet on the 17th after he returned home.

No Swedish support for Finland was forthcoming in this juncture, then, and in fact voices were growing in the Swedish capital for a cabinet reshuffle to remove Rickard Sandler to replace him with someone else more committed to the traditional Swedish stance on neutrality.

The state funeral of President Kyösti Kallio would be held in the Helsinki Cathedral on Sunday, October 21st. The emergency act on electing a new president having passed the parliament with two thirds majority on the 22nd, the Finnish parliament moved on with electing a new president on Monday, the 30th.

On the 22nd, the Finnish delegation returned to Moscow to resume its talks with the Soviet leadership. Voionmaa would again lead the delegation, it being deemed prudent for Paasikivi to stay at home due to the uncertain constitutional situation. This time the Finnish Foreign Minister would face Stalin himself. Prior to the meeting, the Finns had entertained the notion that Stalin was acting like a carpet merchant in an Oriental bazaar, putting up a ludicrously high first offer to have room to haggle. Now, though, the Soviet dictator dispelled this notion by saying that what the USSR was was asking were ”the minimum terms”. No more, no less.

Stalin spoke at lenght about the defence needs of Leningrad, and the need to have the ability to close the Gulf of Finland from the enemy in the event of an attack against the USSR. While Stalin referred in his arguments to the Allied intervention in Russia during the Civil War, Voionmaa would later comment that in his view, what Stalin was actually talking about was the future threat of Germany, not that of the British or the French. To hear him argue his case, Finland would be under no threat due to the Soviet demands, and would be amply compensated by land for the comparatively small pieces of territory they would be handing over to the USSR. By the same token, said Stalin, the USSR would be ready to accept Finland remilitarizing the Åland islands even in peace time, through a bilateral treaty, in the interest of the defence of both nations in the northern Baltic Sea area.

During these negotiations, the Finns offered the Soviets the concessions that had been agreed upon among Paasikivi and the Finnish cabinet: Finland would hand over the islands of Peninsaari, Seiskari, Lavansaari, and Greater and Lesser Tytärsaari, and agree to the division of Suursaari. Additionally, Finland would hand over a small parcel of land on the Karelian Isthmus, known as the Kuokkala bend, to move the border closest to Leningrad 16 kilometers west from its 1920 line. The new border would run across the town of Terijoki.

As for Hanko, Finland could not agree to any concessions about the peninsula.

All this would of course be dependent on the Eduskunta agreeing to these concessions, Voionmaa added, and the new president confirming the deal with his signature after he has been sworn in.

As the two sides again could not reach an agreement, the negotiations were again stopped. As the Finnish delegation stood up to leave, Stalin's parting remark to them was to exhort the Finns to get their decision for a new president ”done and over with”, and also otherwise start being ”prudent and reasonable”. As Aladar Paasonen later commented, Stalin's words contained a measure of threat and in his view put all the Finns present ”ill at ease” about the country's position in the negotiations.


In one way at least, the Finns would be heeding Stalin's words in the next few days. Back in Helsinki, the presidential electors gathered at the Eduskunta on October 26th to vote in the first round of the extraordinary presidential elections. The candidates had been chosen and the battle lines had been drawn.

Starting with the biggest party in parliament, the SDP had nominated Väinö Tanner, as everyone had predicted. The party chairman had a week previously been made the Minister of Supply in a minor government reshuffle, to correct what the Social Democrats saw as a flaw in the cabinet and to give Tanner a seat at the adults' table. The unaffiliated professional Rainer von Fieandt had bowed out give Tanner the room Siltasaari [3] felt he needed.

The Agrarians, for their part, nominated Viljami Kalliokoski, the Minister of Agriculture and a loyal long-time soldier of the party. He was, however, a placeholder candidate: behind the scenes the party leadership, spearheaded by the party chairman Pekka Heikkinen, and supported, among others, by Urho Kekkonen, tried to organize for a compromise among the bourgeois parties ”in the interest of national unity”. Kalliokoski's position was then hamstrung from the beginning due to lack of real support.

The candidate of the National Coalition Party was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Paasikivi. The party's argument was ”don't change horses at midstream” and of course Paasikivi was practically working as the president as it was.

For the Progress Party, the obvious choice was Risto Ryti, the Minister of Finance. Ryti had been considered as an outside candidate already in 1937, and his generally competent handling of Finland's state finances in the last months, even in the conditions of an international crisis in Europe, had earned him even more support as a pragmatic, statesmanlike figure.

The Patriotic People's Movement had no candidate of their own, having finally come to terms with the fact that Mannerheim would not accept the party's nomination. The party did not declare their support for any other party before the first vote, either.

The Swedish People's Party did declare their support, and it was for Paasikivi. The party's argument was for continuity, and the SPP also seemed to believe that the experienced former ambassador to Stockholm would stand the best chance of convincing Sweden into supporting Finland as strongly as possible.

The first vote took place in the evening of the 26th. The results were as follows:

Tanner 93
Paasikivi 92
Ryti 71
Kalliokoski 40
Empty votes 4

In the event, then, the Agrarian vote was quite expectedly split between Paasikivi and Ryti. It was obvious, though, that on balance Paasikivi had an edge among the bourgeois parties candidates.

As the electors mulled the results of the first vote, in Moscow the Pravda reported a speech given by Vyacheslav Molotov in a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The speech was, in general, a look at the recent geopolitical changes in Eastern Europe following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. What is noteworthy, though, that after commenting on the wider ideological struggle taking place in the world between Socialism and imperialism, Molotov moved on to spell out in detail the USSR's demands on Finland in the recent negotiations. Like Stalin, he expounded on the importance of defending Leningrad, and the importance of the Finnish government ”to come to its senses” in trying to uphold cordial relations with the USSR and ”decline the siren calls of anti-Soviet forces and foreign warmongers”. The USSR's demands were quite modest, being the minimum conditions to secure the defence of the Soviet Union, Molotov reminded his listeners, and as such they were eminently reasonable and did not include any real threats against Finnish sovereignty and independence.

The text of the speech quickly reached Finnish and Nordic papers. Among the Finnish political class, the results were electrifying. Many of the people in the cabinet and the parliament who had still entertained ideas about the situation not being serious for Finland suddenly sat up and took notice. If the Soviet leadership was ready to air its demands in public, and so forcefully through the words of the Foreign Minister itself, then Stalin was being very serious. Molotov was acting as his messenger.

In a meeting between the leaders of the major parties in parliament on the 29th, a tacit understanding of the precariousness of the Finnish position was reached. Finland was being forced into a corner, the parliamentary leaders agreed, and now more than ever Finland needed to speak with one voice. Some rather tense private conversations were had, and as the evening wore on until midnight, a clear choice emerged. At the stroke of midnight, almost to the minute, the different parties called their electors to hear the decisions of the their respective party leaders.

On the 30th, after a generally sleepless night, the electors again convened at the Eduskunta. The second vote for the president of Finland would take place at noon. When the votes were counted, the results were clear. While there was a small smattering of electors who didn't apparently want to heed the general consensus, overwhelmingly what had been decided the night before held.

By 268 electoral votes out of 300, Juho Kusti Paasikivi was elected President of Finland.

Paasikivi was sworn in on Wednesday, November 1st, at the Eduskunta. The event was quite modest and matter of fact. But then nobody really expected any festivities or big gestures, not under the circumstances. In the evening, Paasikivi gave his first public radio speech as president. In it he recounted the seriousness of Finland's position, and exhorted the Finnish people to trust each other and be ready to support their family, friends and fellow citizens steadfastly and in every way possible during what ever events the next weeks and months would bring.

Three days later, Paasikivi called together the cabinet's foreign affairs committee to hammer out Finland's final offer to the USSR. There was a general agreement now that Finland could not offer much more than it already had in the previous session in Moscow. Väinö Tanner, now first time a part of these discussions, outright said that there should be no more concessions offered. He was in the minority, however. Most of the others present were ready to further small changes to what would be put on the table. A small slice of the Karelian Isthmus more was added to the list, and an agreement was reached on handing over the Ino fortress should worst come to worst. Any areas under discussion still ran short of reaching the main fortified defence line on the Isthmus.

As the discussion moved towards the question of Hanko, the people present were surprised to hear a knock on the door. The door opened, and a flustered young secretary made way for an old man leaning on a cane. It was Field Marshal Mannerheim himself, in civilian clothes. To those in the room that had not seen the old soldier since the Hannila incident, his appearance was probably shocking. In a 1987 article about Tanner it is said that Mannerheim looked five if not ten years older than just months previously.[4] He had lost weight and his hair suddenly appeared to have a lot more grey in it than before. Despite all this, though, the Field Marshal was as meticulously well-groomed and neat about his person as always.

Mannerheim said that he had just one message for the men present. And that message was: Finland could not afford a war. In the recent weeks, Mannerheim had become quite disillusioned with the state of the Finnish military. While the draft information Captain Halsti was delivering to the old officer about this and that aspect of the military were not entirely negative, in his depressed mind Mannerheim was reading a lot into the deficiencies reported and even alluded to. The positives he overlooked or did not acknowledge. As a matter of fact, Mannerheim's extant diaries from the days preceding this meeting show that, in the event of a Soviet attack on Finland, the Field Marshal did not believe that the Finnish military could stand firm for longer than a week or ten days at the very best. The conclusion was clear: Finland could not afford a war with Stalin's USSR.

And this is what he told the political leaders of Finland at this crucial moment.

”Mr President”, Mannerheim said in his slightly accented but precise Finnish, looking intently at Paasikivi, ”we can't have war”.

In his diaries, Paasikivi confesses that he was somewhat shaken by Mannerheim's sudden appearance at the Presidential Palace. What we now know about Mannerheim's role in securing Paasikivi's presidency[5], it is no wonder that he wanted to come personally to meet the members of the Finnish delegation due to leave for Moscow in a few days to give them his view about the situation.

In the rest of the Nordic area, the papers abounded with speculation about Finland's fate when the Finnish delegation arrived to Moscow on the 4th. The Soviet press was no better: what waited for the Finns in the morning's Pravda was a direct attack on Finland and its recalcitrance towards the USSR's ”justified minimum demands”. The hyperbolic story made Paasikivi feel quite conflicted, especially with its ending.

Regardless of any opposition, the Soviet Union will ensure its security by crushing all obstacles in its path!

At the Kremlin, the Finns met a surprisingly affable Stalin. The Soviet dictator appeared even jocular as the Finnish and Soviet delegations again faced each other. Stalin congratulated Paasikivi for his electoral victory, making him an unexpected gift of a box of cigars that astonished the old diplomat. Stalin told Paasikivi that it was his first time of negotiating personally with a Finnish president and that he felt honored for it.

If Stalin's goal was to confuse the Finns, he appeared to have succeeded in it.

The Soviets laid out their terms and the Finns offered their amended counter-proposal. Again, no headway could be made – the difference was just too big. In Paasikivi's eyes, Stalin looked outright disappointed with the Finns. He stood up and threw up his hands.

”You Finns are impossible”, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union said, ”and here I was thinking that I could finally reason with you. But as it now appears that we civilians are unable to come to an agreement, maybe it is time to give the soldiers their turn to solve this Gordian knot?”

It sounded truly ominous. As the Finns were escorted out of the Kremlin and driven to their lodgings, the majority feeling among the delegation was that the talks had again reached an impasse. The next day was Sunday, however, and on Tuesday the 7th the USSR celebrated the memory of the Russian Revolution. The Finnish delegation had no chance but to wait, though Stalin had arranged so that they would not need to be idle: they had been invited to the Red Square to watch an impressive military parade, standing among a number of other foreign dignitaries. The sight of so many troops and massed armored vehicles had an impression on Paasikivi, at least. In his diaries he writes that the next night he was besieged by nightmares about battles. A particularly harrowing scene, Finnish infantry hopelessly charging a number of machine gun nests and dying in their hundreds in a hail of bullets, kept repeating until he woke up tangled in his sheets, his heart pounding.

In the morning of the 8th, a new invitation to come to the Kremlin arrived. Hesitantly, Paasikivi, Voionmaa, Tanner and Paasonen returned to the presence of the Soviet dictator.

Stalin still appeared cautiously optimistic, which again surprised a tired Paasikivi. And now he was ready to make concessions. He explained to the Finns that the Soviet demands on the Karelian Isthmus could well be reduced, as long as there was agreement on the Hanko question. As Voionmaa explained him that the Finns would not give Hanko, Stalin kept insisting on it. When the Finns again refused, Stalin suddenly changed his tack. He pulled up a map with a number of islands near Hanko highlighted[6].

”How about these islands?”

It appeared Stallin was ready to give up Hanko for lesser gains in the western Gulf of Finland. The haggling continued about Ino and the island of Suursaari, and after a couple of hours, it seemed that a gridlock would again be reached. Paasikivi, remembering his dreams from a night before, asked Stalin for a brief recess for the negotions, to be continued the first thing the next morning. Grudgingly, Stalin agreed.

Back in the Finnish embassy, the president reminded his fellow negotiators about Stalin's words regarding the military on the first day of these negotiations, and drew their attention to the display they had seen on the Red Square the day before. And then he finally exhorted them to remember what Mannerheim had said to them back in Helsinki.

We can't have war.

The discussion continued well into the night, and finally the negotiators retired to their beds feeling already exhausted for the morning.

Now was the last opportunity to make a deal, Paasikivi had convinced himself. He believed that he had convinced Voionmaa and Tanner about it as well. In his mind's eye, he saw a steady procession of men dying in a hail of bullets, and others blown to pieces by artillery granades. Like Prime Minister Cajander.

And then the same dance with Stalin and Molotov was resumed. Five hours in, his frustration and fear growing, Paasikivi finally went for it.

”If we agree on giving you these three islands”, he said, making a rough circle with his finger east of the Hanko Peninsula, ”will you agree on our terms about the Isthmus?”

This was the final offer about the Isthmus agreed back in Helsinki that would leave the whole of Terijoki and roughly third of both Kivennapa and Uusikirkko on the Soviet side, including the Ino fortress. But it would keep the main Finnish defensive line on the Isthmus intact, which was the main point. And it would avoid having to give over Hanko itself, Suursaari, or any part of Petsamo.

Stalin's eyes flashed. He took his pipe thoughtfully in his hand.

”It is still a bit lean...”, he mused.

”It is our final offer. The Finnish people will not stand to give up any more”, Paasikivi told the Soviet leader, feeling like a gambler with a poor hand, throwing his last crumbled small notes on the table.

Slowly, a smile spread on Stalin's face.

”Well, then we must take it, don't we?”

The most feared man in the USSR turned to face Molotov.

”I told you we could reason with these people, Vyacheslav Mihailovich.”

After the meeting ended, says Paasikivi in his diary, his right hand would not stop shaking until he had taken two glasses of brandy to steady his wracked nerves.

When the Finnish delegation returned to Helsinki on November 12th, again a crowd of people waited for the train on the Main Railway Station.

When President Paasikivi climbed off the train, the silence around him was deafening.





Notes:

[1] The Finnish president's term of office was six years during the First Republic. Accordingly, the new president would then hold the office until March 1943 before the next scheduled elections.

[2] It has been suggested in some studies (most recently by Michael Gustavsson in his Vad är frekvensen? from 2012) that the mystery ship the Louhi tried to avoid could be one of the German merchant raiders that were known to operate in the Åland waters in the fall of 1939, most likely the armed auxiliary Tannenberg. Ironically, then, the presence of the Louhi may have saved the Ulla from being stopped and boarded by the Germans.

[3] The Siltasaari area of the Hakaniemi district used to be known as the centre of Social Democratic power in Finland. This is where the imposing Helsinki Workers' House (Paasitorni) is located, and this is the area where the headquarters of the Finnish Social Democratic Party stood until 1941.

[4] See Per Nyström's article ”Väinö Tanner: The Last Man Standing” in the Foreign History Quarterly, 2/1987.

[5] What had turned out to be the decider of the electoral vote was the fact that Field Marshal Mannerheim himself had sent the word late in the evening that he supported Paasikivi, just like President Kallio had before him. Mannerheim might have been a ghost of himself after the Hannila incident, but his word still carried a lot of weight even among the political parties' leaderships – for better or for worse.

[6] Specifically, Hermansö, Koö and Hästö-Busö.


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To Be Continued