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Twenty-seven: The Squirrel and the Bear
...
That year, the Squirrel's Christmas was rather lean and small-scale.
Veikko Huovinen: Oravan tarina (”The Story of the Squirrel”, 1951)
Twenty-seven: The Squirrel and the Bear
In modern Finnish historiography, The Story of the Squirrel by the radical young novelist Veikko Huovinen is today understood as an allegory of the Finnish political situation in a transformed Europe during the heavy postwar years. Certain parts of the book, like Huovinen's depiction of the protagonist's rather depressing Christmas can also be understood as describing Finland's international position and the domestic political situation during the last weeks of 1939.
When the Sun rose above the treetops on Christmas morning, the Squirrel was alone and it was feeling very cold.
Apart from its veiled political content, Huovinen's story is of course a reference to the Song of the Squirrel, a poem included in Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers. The text that became a popular children's song is a celebration of the safety and freedom of a squirrel's comfortable little home at the top of a tall tree. By comparison to the frankly enviable position of the Kivian, national-romantic little animal, protected as it is from ”the dog's teeth and the hunter's trap”, Huovinen's omnivorous arboreal rodent is definitely experiencing the crunch of being endangered by the surrounding reality.
The ratification of the Moscow Agreement, the final version of which was put in writing, took place on November 30th, 1939. Putting all the small details of the deal in order had been a harrowing process, and it had included several surprises by the Soviet side, who liked to bring issues to the table that the Finns thought had already been resolved in a mutually satisfying way. Along with Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the men who shouldered most responsibilities in these negotiations were Väinö Voionmaa and Risto Ryti, who had ascended to the Prime Minister's office after Paasikivi's inauguration as president. The major parties in parliament agreed that Ryti, who was generally well-liked and, crucially, not politically compromised in any obvious way, would be the best choice for the job, especially after his strong showing in the presidential election.
The changes in the cabinet were otherwise minimal. To the vacant spot of the Minister of Finance the parties slotted Väinö Tanner, who thus had spent no longer than eighteen days at his previous position at the helm of the Ministry of Supply. Rainer von Fieandt was recalled to his old job in haste, which led to the publication of the well-known cartoon in the Tampere-based Aamulehti depicting the aristocrat in a bowtie never having made his way out of the ministry's revolving door before he was called back in.
The border changes between Finland and the USSR would take place during the first two weeks of December. In the Karelian Isthmus, Finland would hand over the parish of Terijoki in its entirety, the south-eastern part of the parish of Kivennapa, and the south-eastern part of the parish of Uusikirkko, and a small bit of the southern corner of the parish of Kanneljärvi in the interest of straightening the border. The area given over to the USSR here amounted to 452 square kilometers. 12 542 people were evacuated from the area. In the eastern Gulf of Finland, the USSR gained the islands of Peninsaari, Seiskari, Lavansaari, and Greater and Lesser Tytärsaari. The area of these islands was c. 20 square kilometers and evacuated population numbered in 2723. Finally, in the western Gulf of Finland, east of the Hanko Peninsula, Finland relinquished a number of islands, the biggest of which were Hermansö, Koö and Hästö-Busö, to the USSR not outright but under a 50 year lease agreement. This area, soon to be called the ”Raasepori Archipelago Lease Area”[1], was c. 8 square kilometers in size and the evacuated population was 438.
Altogether, then, the area given over to the Soviets in late 1939 amounted to 480 square kilometers, and the Finns had to evacuate and resettle 15 703 people.
In return, like Stalin had promised, Finland gained new areas from Soviet Karelia, to be added to the Kuopio province. This meant the entirety of the parish of Porajärvi, which had previously been a part of the Petrovsky District (of the Karelian ASSR), and the southern half of the parish of Repola, a part of the Rebolsky District. Together, these areas amounted to c. 8700 square kilometers of additional land. Theoretically, the local population here was given the choice to either stay put or leave to elsewhere in the USSR. Practically, the Soviets forcibly moved out some of the people who would have wanted to become Finnish citizens. All in all, Finland gained 1790 new citizens in this sparsely inhabited area.
The huge difference in the size of the areas Finland lost and gained was used to great effect in Soviet official statements and propaganda, which painted the Agreement as hugely beneficial for Finland, to the extent of it being a Soviet gift to the Finnish nation. This Soviet view was propagated by the far left across Europe, and treated as gospel by the Finnish far left as well. Among the Finnish political mainstream, though, those who opposed the Agreement's land swap were a lot more numerous than those who rejoiced for it. While the East Karelian area Finland had received was comparatively huge, the fact of the matter is that it was predominately made up of undeveloped wilderness, lot of which was hard to reach through what poor local roads there was. The infrastructure in the new parishes was nonexistent, and the local population was low. In comparison, the area given up on the Karelian Isthmus was much more valuable in economic terms: it was some of the best farmland in the Republic, and it had good roads and railway connections. Furthermore, the border parishes on the Isthmus were also otherwise rich and included even some limited industry arrayed along the Leningrad-Viipuri railway.
For the majority of the Finns, then, it all was a net loss, and the Soviet propaganda celebrating Repola and Porajärvi as a great gift was understood as an insult added to an injury. Already in December, the ”stab in the back” the Moscow Agreement represented to many was used as a reason for a Patriotic People's Movement protest march in Helsinki [2], one that led to clashes with far left provocators. The actual response of the far left were the so-called Christmas Riots in the Hakaniemi and Sörnainen districts of the capital, a sudden mass event that led to some fighting and injuries on both sides when the Helsinki police intervened to restore order.
According to classified reports by the State Police, submitted to the office of the Second Minister of the Interior by Director Säippä, the Kremlin's hand was undoubtably behing organizing this chain of protests. At this time, Helsinki was a hotbed of intelligence activities. The State Police tried to keep tabs on known Soviet agents, and also follow the activities of the operatives of other nations as much as it was possible. As the former British intelligence officer J.H. Magill writes in an autobiographical account [3], the staff of the SIS office in Helsinki had grown to unprecedented numbers in the fall of 1939. But then, on the other hand, when he personally arrived in the Finnish capital in December 1939 to make an estimate about the reach of Soviet influence among the Finnish military, many of the British intelligence officers in Finland, including Rex Bosley, were about to be reassigned due to the war generally heating up in Europe.
At this time, rumours went around in Helsinki that none other than Otto Wille Kuusinen was present in Helsinki in December, under an assumed identity, to advance Soviet interests among the Finnish underground left. While it is hard to find direct evidence to support this particular claim, it is obvious that Finland was subjected to increasing Soviet intelligence efforts in the weeks after the signing of the Moscow Agreement. Even a brief look at the surviving papers of the Finnish State Police held by the Finnish National Archival System [4] confirms this, as do a number of recent studies. The Soviets were preparing ground for something in the near future. This is, almost word for word what Director Säippä told Urho Kekkonen when the two men met to discuss the implications of the Christmas Riots on December 29th at the State Police offices at Helsinki's Ratakatu. In the event, Kekkonen ordered Säippä to to step up arrests and interrogations among known far left supporters and suspected Finnish Communist Party operators. A special case that came up in the discussion was the need to screen the new Finnish citizens in the Repola and Porajärvi area for political reliability: both Säippä and Kekkonen were convinced that the Soviets had sneaked in spies and saboteurs among the local residents. Kekkonen gave Säippä orders to the effect that the new citizens in the area should not be allowed to move west of the old border before they had been thoroughly vetted, and even then they should be kept under surveillance if at all possible.
Not only were the civilian authorities alarmed about the situation. The Finnish military was also receiving a lot of information about suspicious and irregular Soviet activities. As before and during the Moscow negotiations, Soviet breaches of the Finnish airspace and territorial waters continued to be a weekly if not daily occurrence. In the first week of December, the first Soviet transport ships had arrived in the Raasepori Archipelago Lease Area and unloaded men and equipment to the island of Hästö-Busö. Of the islands in the lease area, Hästö-Busö had the best infrastructure, having been used as a coastal fortress for the last two decades by the Finnish military.[5] It was logical, then, that the Soviet military would use the island as its forward base first and start developing the rest of the islands later.
At this time, a Finno-Soviet joint border commission was working feverishly to delineate the new borders between the two states. While this work was more straightforward on the Isthmus where the Agreement included a rather simple attached map about where the border would run, around the RLA the maps attached to the Agreement by the Russians were quite vague, perhaps deliberately so like some of the Finnish officers would comment in private. The effort of drawing the sea border of the lease area then created all sort of friction between the Finns and the Soviets, on both local and national levels. Disagreements on particular small islands were had, and on December 21st, the Soviets arrested four local fishermen for breaching the border of the USSR and confiscated their vessels. This incident would end in the release of the fishermen so they could return home for Christmas (the Soviets kept their boats, though). Later similar incidents would lead to inhabitants of the coastal area being arrested and sent to Leningrad for interrogations concerning ”acts of espionage and sabotage against the Soviet People's State”. These kinds of incident would often also lead to the Soviet embassy in Helsinki issuing scathing diplomatic protests to the Finnish government for acting against the "letter and spirit of the Moscow Agreement" and "deliberately sabotaging good relations and trust between our two nations".
For the Finnish military, the situation presented many challenges. The Soviet military threat did not seem to diminish, rather to the contrary. Finnish military intelligence received many kinds of information about the Soviet armed forces being in high readiness just across the border, and new military installation were being constructed in the area of the Karelian ASSR. What was felt rather acutely among the military leadership was the Finnish forces' need for various weapons and materiel. Efforts to buy such things as artillery pieces, fighter aircraft and even motor torpedo boats were underway in different countries. The artillery expert, Lieutenant General Nenonen, had in November travelled to the United States to find suitable field artillery pieces the Finns could buy soon. At the same time, the boat designer Jarl Lindblom of the Turku Boat Yard was in America as well to locate a yard that could construct a new class of MTBs for the Finnish fleet. Preliminary discussions were had with the Higgins company.
The efforts to buy military aircraft were perhaps seen as most pressing. In Britain, the Finnish ambassador Gripenberg was pulling all strings to get the British government agree to selling Finland as modern fighters as possible, and in sufficient quantities. In conditions where the British military rather needed such aircraft itself, or could see such need in the near future, this proved an uphill struggle. The first deal for ten Gloster Gladiators could only be agreed upon on December 10th. With the Italians, the Finns already had a deal for twenty Fiat G.50 fighters signed in late October. In practice, the transport of these planes to Finland proved difficult due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as Germany did not allow its railways to be used. The Fiat fighters would be brought over to Norway by ship, and then transported to an aircraft factory in Trollhättan, Sweden where they were assembled and tested by a joint Finno-Swedish crew. The first Fiat fighter would be flown to Finland on January 1st, 1940.
The Red Banner Baltic Fleet had stepped up its sorties in the Gulf of Finland since late October. After the Soviet military had entrenched itself on Hästö-Busö, the Soviet fleet would make it a point sending a convoy of ships to the RLA every few days. The ships of this convoy were most made up of transports, tugs and barges, but might include even bigger units, like G-class destroyers, vessels which obviously had no reason to be in the RLA area due to the work of the base construction alone.
The fact that these convoys did not always stick to the agreed-upon sealane from the central Gulf of Finland to the RLA, as described in the Agreement annex about the lease area, but might stray into strictly Finnish territorial waters (whether accidentally or on purpose) worried the military leadership. The Commander of the Navy, Major General[6] Valve, wanted to send the armored coastal ships Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen to sortie past the RLA as a show of preparedness, but his plan was overruled by the political leadership. Apparently Paasikivi was afraid of a repeat of the incident with the Metallist. Instead, then, Valve quietly organized for boosting the presence of coastal artillery forces on the Hanko Peninsula and generally in the surroundings of the RLA. For example more men were stationed and several more heavy coastal guns added to the coastal fortress on the island of Russarö.[7]
The implications of the Soviet presence in the RLA, and the increased Soviet naval activity in the Gulf of Finland had an effect also on Finnish maritime trade. In joint talks between the military and the Maritime Administration, it was agreed that the Finnish ports on the southern coast were now in a more threatened position than before. The decision was therefore made to reroute a lot of merchant traffic to the ports on the western coast instead, primarily Turku, Pori and Rauma. The expansion of the port facilities in these towns was slated to start in the beginning of January 1940. By the same token, plans about increasing the capacity of the port of Petsamo in the far north were expedited.
On the civilian front, one of the most pressing issues for the cabinet and government was also the resettlement of the evacuees. While the majority of the people evacuated from the Isthmus and the islands on the coast were being temporarily housed in a number of parishes in the Ostrobothnian area, the parliament discussed about the compensations they could be given for losing their land and farms to the Soviet state. Eventually, a resettlement plan was created which would include giving the evacuees farmland in different parts of the country on the taxpayer's expence, acquired through purchases or even forced confiscation from private owners if need be. A new, temporary tax was instituted in the quickly-agreed upon Resettlement Act. As the number of evacuees was, on the national scale, still rather modest, it was expected that the extra tax would only be a burden for the Finnish taxpayers for the next two or three years.
The situation Finland found itself at the end of 1939 was commented upon in many foreign papers as well, in Europe and further afield. For example in Britain the general attitude was filled with sympathy for the Finns during the Moscow negotiations, like the Finnish ambassador to London, Alexis Gripenberg, has later written in his posthumously published memoirs. After the terms of the Moscow Agreement became known, however, an increasingly pessimistic attitude about the Finnish chances to survive in the face of Soviet pressure started to gain prominence. Gripenberg particularly recounts how in early December The Times chose to caption its analysis about the Finnish position as ”Lights Out for Little Finland?”, which Gripenberg tells us he was moved to protest in a letter to the editor and try to assure the paper that Finland was still committed to holding on to independence and national sovereignty.
One of the most interesting Western articles about Finland published in December was one titled ”Finland's Predicament”, written by the famous journalist Martha Gellhorn for the Christmas issue of Collier's Magazine. In this story, Gellhorn writes about the divisions within Finland after the signing of the Moscow Agreement, the distrust between the parties, the apparent growth of both the far right and the far left, and the general breakdown of national morale as the author understands it.
While the well-to-do and young university students dance and drink the night away in Helsinki's modern music establishments, amusing themselves with the latest schlagers and witty conversation, on the Karelian isthmus bitter evacuees burn their own houses to avoid their hard-earned belongings ending in Soviet hands. While young Finnish reservists are called up to don the simple grey uniform of the Finnish Republic's armed forces, in the workers' quarters the far left vehemently protests the nation's 'bourgeois' government for its 'anti-Soviet' actions and attitudes. Finland, today, is a land of contradictions, and a society on the brink of something. A war, a revolution, or some other transformation? Nobody really seems to know. But as the saying goes, 'something's got to give'.
The truth of the matter is that Finland is in a predicament, and that predicament is of the geographical kind. As President Paasikivi told me, there is nothing the Finns can do about geography. That the small Nordic republic borders the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a fact of life. One way or the other, the Finns will have to live with that fact.[8]
...
…
Notes:
[1] Raaseporin saaristovuokra-alue. (Editor's Note: The lease area will be later on abbreviated as ”RLA” in the current volume.)
[2] Dubbed ”Kannaksen marssi” by the party leadership (A March for the Isthmus).
[3] J.H. Magill: A Mission in the North, 1975.
[4] Available to the public at the Archival System's Leppävaara Unit.
[5] The construction of the artillery positions here was started by the Imperial Russian military already in 1913 when the island was to become a part of the Russian defensive system at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland.
[6] In 1939, the Finnish coastal artillery was a part of the Navy but was using army ranks. This explains a Major General commanding a Navy.
[7] Some of these guns had some weeks previously been evacuated out of Hästö-Busö.
[8] Quoted from Gellhorn's article in Collier's Magazine, December 30th, 1939.
…
To Be Continued
...
That year, the Squirrel's Christmas was rather lean and small-scale.
Veikko Huovinen: Oravan tarina (”The Story of the Squirrel”, 1951)
Twenty-seven: The Squirrel and the Bear
In modern Finnish historiography, The Story of the Squirrel by the radical young novelist Veikko Huovinen is today understood as an allegory of the Finnish political situation in a transformed Europe during the heavy postwar years. Certain parts of the book, like Huovinen's depiction of the protagonist's rather depressing Christmas can also be understood as describing Finland's international position and the domestic political situation during the last weeks of 1939.
When the Sun rose above the treetops on Christmas morning, the Squirrel was alone and it was feeling very cold.
Apart from its veiled political content, Huovinen's story is of course a reference to the Song of the Squirrel, a poem included in Aleksis Kivi's The Seven Brothers. The text that became a popular children's song is a celebration of the safety and freedom of a squirrel's comfortable little home at the top of a tall tree. By comparison to the frankly enviable position of the Kivian, national-romantic little animal, protected as it is from ”the dog's teeth and the hunter's trap”, Huovinen's omnivorous arboreal rodent is definitely experiencing the crunch of being endangered by the surrounding reality.
The ratification of the Moscow Agreement, the final version of which was put in writing, took place on November 30th, 1939. Putting all the small details of the deal in order had been a harrowing process, and it had included several surprises by the Soviet side, who liked to bring issues to the table that the Finns thought had already been resolved in a mutually satisfying way. Along with Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the men who shouldered most responsibilities in these negotiations were Väinö Voionmaa and Risto Ryti, who had ascended to the Prime Minister's office after Paasikivi's inauguration as president. The major parties in parliament agreed that Ryti, who was generally well-liked and, crucially, not politically compromised in any obvious way, would be the best choice for the job, especially after his strong showing in the presidential election.
The changes in the cabinet were otherwise minimal. To the vacant spot of the Minister of Finance the parties slotted Väinö Tanner, who thus had spent no longer than eighteen days at his previous position at the helm of the Ministry of Supply. Rainer von Fieandt was recalled to his old job in haste, which led to the publication of the well-known cartoon in the Tampere-based Aamulehti depicting the aristocrat in a bowtie never having made his way out of the ministry's revolving door before he was called back in.
The border changes between Finland and the USSR would take place during the first two weeks of December. In the Karelian Isthmus, Finland would hand over the parish of Terijoki in its entirety, the south-eastern part of the parish of Kivennapa, and the south-eastern part of the parish of Uusikirkko, and a small bit of the southern corner of the parish of Kanneljärvi in the interest of straightening the border. The area given over to the USSR here amounted to 452 square kilometers. 12 542 people were evacuated from the area. In the eastern Gulf of Finland, the USSR gained the islands of Peninsaari, Seiskari, Lavansaari, and Greater and Lesser Tytärsaari. The area of these islands was c. 20 square kilometers and evacuated population numbered in 2723. Finally, in the western Gulf of Finland, east of the Hanko Peninsula, Finland relinquished a number of islands, the biggest of which were Hermansö, Koö and Hästö-Busö, to the USSR not outright but under a 50 year lease agreement. This area, soon to be called the ”Raasepori Archipelago Lease Area”[1], was c. 8 square kilometers in size and the evacuated population was 438.
Altogether, then, the area given over to the Soviets in late 1939 amounted to 480 square kilometers, and the Finns had to evacuate and resettle 15 703 people.
In return, like Stalin had promised, Finland gained new areas from Soviet Karelia, to be added to the Kuopio province. This meant the entirety of the parish of Porajärvi, which had previously been a part of the Petrovsky District (of the Karelian ASSR), and the southern half of the parish of Repola, a part of the Rebolsky District. Together, these areas amounted to c. 8700 square kilometers of additional land. Theoretically, the local population here was given the choice to either stay put or leave to elsewhere in the USSR. Practically, the Soviets forcibly moved out some of the people who would have wanted to become Finnish citizens. All in all, Finland gained 1790 new citizens in this sparsely inhabited area.
The huge difference in the size of the areas Finland lost and gained was used to great effect in Soviet official statements and propaganda, which painted the Agreement as hugely beneficial for Finland, to the extent of it being a Soviet gift to the Finnish nation. This Soviet view was propagated by the far left across Europe, and treated as gospel by the Finnish far left as well. Among the Finnish political mainstream, though, those who opposed the Agreement's land swap were a lot more numerous than those who rejoiced for it. While the East Karelian area Finland had received was comparatively huge, the fact of the matter is that it was predominately made up of undeveloped wilderness, lot of which was hard to reach through what poor local roads there was. The infrastructure in the new parishes was nonexistent, and the local population was low. In comparison, the area given up on the Karelian Isthmus was much more valuable in economic terms: it was some of the best farmland in the Republic, and it had good roads and railway connections. Furthermore, the border parishes on the Isthmus were also otherwise rich and included even some limited industry arrayed along the Leningrad-Viipuri railway.
For the majority of the Finns, then, it all was a net loss, and the Soviet propaganda celebrating Repola and Porajärvi as a great gift was understood as an insult added to an injury. Already in December, the ”stab in the back” the Moscow Agreement represented to many was used as a reason for a Patriotic People's Movement protest march in Helsinki [2], one that led to clashes with far left provocators. The actual response of the far left were the so-called Christmas Riots in the Hakaniemi and Sörnainen districts of the capital, a sudden mass event that led to some fighting and injuries on both sides when the Helsinki police intervened to restore order.
According to classified reports by the State Police, submitted to the office of the Second Minister of the Interior by Director Säippä, the Kremlin's hand was undoubtably behing organizing this chain of protests. At this time, Helsinki was a hotbed of intelligence activities. The State Police tried to keep tabs on known Soviet agents, and also follow the activities of the operatives of other nations as much as it was possible. As the former British intelligence officer J.H. Magill writes in an autobiographical account [3], the staff of the SIS office in Helsinki had grown to unprecedented numbers in the fall of 1939. But then, on the other hand, when he personally arrived in the Finnish capital in December 1939 to make an estimate about the reach of Soviet influence among the Finnish military, many of the British intelligence officers in Finland, including Rex Bosley, were about to be reassigned due to the war generally heating up in Europe.
At this time, rumours went around in Helsinki that none other than Otto Wille Kuusinen was present in Helsinki in December, under an assumed identity, to advance Soviet interests among the Finnish underground left. While it is hard to find direct evidence to support this particular claim, it is obvious that Finland was subjected to increasing Soviet intelligence efforts in the weeks after the signing of the Moscow Agreement. Even a brief look at the surviving papers of the Finnish State Police held by the Finnish National Archival System [4] confirms this, as do a number of recent studies. The Soviets were preparing ground for something in the near future. This is, almost word for word what Director Säippä told Urho Kekkonen when the two men met to discuss the implications of the Christmas Riots on December 29th at the State Police offices at Helsinki's Ratakatu. In the event, Kekkonen ordered Säippä to to step up arrests and interrogations among known far left supporters and suspected Finnish Communist Party operators. A special case that came up in the discussion was the need to screen the new Finnish citizens in the Repola and Porajärvi area for political reliability: both Säippä and Kekkonen were convinced that the Soviets had sneaked in spies and saboteurs among the local residents. Kekkonen gave Säippä orders to the effect that the new citizens in the area should not be allowed to move west of the old border before they had been thoroughly vetted, and even then they should be kept under surveillance if at all possible.
Not only were the civilian authorities alarmed about the situation. The Finnish military was also receiving a lot of information about suspicious and irregular Soviet activities. As before and during the Moscow negotiations, Soviet breaches of the Finnish airspace and territorial waters continued to be a weekly if not daily occurrence. In the first week of December, the first Soviet transport ships had arrived in the Raasepori Archipelago Lease Area and unloaded men and equipment to the island of Hästö-Busö. Of the islands in the lease area, Hästö-Busö had the best infrastructure, having been used as a coastal fortress for the last two decades by the Finnish military.[5] It was logical, then, that the Soviet military would use the island as its forward base first and start developing the rest of the islands later.
At this time, a Finno-Soviet joint border commission was working feverishly to delineate the new borders between the two states. While this work was more straightforward on the Isthmus where the Agreement included a rather simple attached map about where the border would run, around the RLA the maps attached to the Agreement by the Russians were quite vague, perhaps deliberately so like some of the Finnish officers would comment in private. The effort of drawing the sea border of the lease area then created all sort of friction between the Finns and the Soviets, on both local and national levels. Disagreements on particular small islands were had, and on December 21st, the Soviets arrested four local fishermen for breaching the border of the USSR and confiscated their vessels. This incident would end in the release of the fishermen so they could return home for Christmas (the Soviets kept their boats, though). Later similar incidents would lead to inhabitants of the coastal area being arrested and sent to Leningrad for interrogations concerning ”acts of espionage and sabotage against the Soviet People's State”. These kinds of incident would often also lead to the Soviet embassy in Helsinki issuing scathing diplomatic protests to the Finnish government for acting against the "letter and spirit of the Moscow Agreement" and "deliberately sabotaging good relations and trust between our two nations".
For the Finnish military, the situation presented many challenges. The Soviet military threat did not seem to diminish, rather to the contrary. Finnish military intelligence received many kinds of information about the Soviet armed forces being in high readiness just across the border, and new military installation were being constructed in the area of the Karelian ASSR. What was felt rather acutely among the military leadership was the Finnish forces' need for various weapons and materiel. Efforts to buy such things as artillery pieces, fighter aircraft and even motor torpedo boats were underway in different countries. The artillery expert, Lieutenant General Nenonen, had in November travelled to the United States to find suitable field artillery pieces the Finns could buy soon. At the same time, the boat designer Jarl Lindblom of the Turku Boat Yard was in America as well to locate a yard that could construct a new class of MTBs for the Finnish fleet. Preliminary discussions were had with the Higgins company.
The efforts to buy military aircraft were perhaps seen as most pressing. In Britain, the Finnish ambassador Gripenberg was pulling all strings to get the British government agree to selling Finland as modern fighters as possible, and in sufficient quantities. In conditions where the British military rather needed such aircraft itself, or could see such need in the near future, this proved an uphill struggle. The first deal for ten Gloster Gladiators could only be agreed upon on December 10th. With the Italians, the Finns already had a deal for twenty Fiat G.50 fighters signed in late October. In practice, the transport of these planes to Finland proved difficult due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as Germany did not allow its railways to be used. The Fiat fighters would be brought over to Norway by ship, and then transported to an aircraft factory in Trollhättan, Sweden where they were assembled and tested by a joint Finno-Swedish crew. The first Fiat fighter would be flown to Finland on January 1st, 1940.
The Red Banner Baltic Fleet had stepped up its sorties in the Gulf of Finland since late October. After the Soviet military had entrenched itself on Hästö-Busö, the Soviet fleet would make it a point sending a convoy of ships to the RLA every few days. The ships of this convoy were most made up of transports, tugs and barges, but might include even bigger units, like G-class destroyers, vessels which obviously had no reason to be in the RLA area due to the work of the base construction alone.
The fact that these convoys did not always stick to the agreed-upon sealane from the central Gulf of Finland to the RLA, as described in the Agreement annex about the lease area, but might stray into strictly Finnish territorial waters (whether accidentally or on purpose) worried the military leadership. The Commander of the Navy, Major General[6] Valve, wanted to send the armored coastal ships Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen to sortie past the RLA as a show of preparedness, but his plan was overruled by the political leadership. Apparently Paasikivi was afraid of a repeat of the incident with the Metallist. Instead, then, Valve quietly organized for boosting the presence of coastal artillery forces on the Hanko Peninsula and generally in the surroundings of the RLA. For example more men were stationed and several more heavy coastal guns added to the coastal fortress on the island of Russarö.[7]
The implications of the Soviet presence in the RLA, and the increased Soviet naval activity in the Gulf of Finland had an effect also on Finnish maritime trade. In joint talks between the military and the Maritime Administration, it was agreed that the Finnish ports on the southern coast were now in a more threatened position than before. The decision was therefore made to reroute a lot of merchant traffic to the ports on the western coast instead, primarily Turku, Pori and Rauma. The expansion of the port facilities in these towns was slated to start in the beginning of January 1940. By the same token, plans about increasing the capacity of the port of Petsamo in the far north were expedited.
On the civilian front, one of the most pressing issues for the cabinet and government was also the resettlement of the evacuees. While the majority of the people evacuated from the Isthmus and the islands on the coast were being temporarily housed in a number of parishes in the Ostrobothnian area, the parliament discussed about the compensations they could be given for losing their land and farms to the Soviet state. Eventually, a resettlement plan was created which would include giving the evacuees farmland in different parts of the country on the taxpayer's expence, acquired through purchases or even forced confiscation from private owners if need be. A new, temporary tax was instituted in the quickly-agreed upon Resettlement Act. As the number of evacuees was, on the national scale, still rather modest, it was expected that the extra tax would only be a burden for the Finnish taxpayers for the next two or three years.
The situation Finland found itself at the end of 1939 was commented upon in many foreign papers as well, in Europe and further afield. For example in Britain the general attitude was filled with sympathy for the Finns during the Moscow negotiations, like the Finnish ambassador to London, Alexis Gripenberg, has later written in his posthumously published memoirs. After the terms of the Moscow Agreement became known, however, an increasingly pessimistic attitude about the Finnish chances to survive in the face of Soviet pressure started to gain prominence. Gripenberg particularly recounts how in early December The Times chose to caption its analysis about the Finnish position as ”Lights Out for Little Finland?”, which Gripenberg tells us he was moved to protest in a letter to the editor and try to assure the paper that Finland was still committed to holding on to independence and national sovereignty.
One of the most interesting Western articles about Finland published in December was one titled ”Finland's Predicament”, written by the famous journalist Martha Gellhorn for the Christmas issue of Collier's Magazine. In this story, Gellhorn writes about the divisions within Finland after the signing of the Moscow Agreement, the distrust between the parties, the apparent growth of both the far right and the far left, and the general breakdown of national morale as the author understands it.
While the well-to-do and young university students dance and drink the night away in Helsinki's modern music establishments, amusing themselves with the latest schlagers and witty conversation, on the Karelian isthmus bitter evacuees burn their own houses to avoid their hard-earned belongings ending in Soviet hands. While young Finnish reservists are called up to don the simple grey uniform of the Finnish Republic's armed forces, in the workers' quarters the far left vehemently protests the nation's 'bourgeois' government for its 'anti-Soviet' actions and attitudes. Finland, today, is a land of contradictions, and a society on the brink of something. A war, a revolution, or some other transformation? Nobody really seems to know. But as the saying goes, 'something's got to give'.
The truth of the matter is that Finland is in a predicament, and that predicament is of the geographical kind. As President Paasikivi told me, there is nothing the Finns can do about geography. That the small Nordic republic borders the great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a fact of life. One way or the other, the Finns will have to live with that fact.[8]
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Notes:
[1] Raaseporin saaristovuokra-alue. (Editor's Note: The lease area will be later on abbreviated as ”RLA” in the current volume.)
[2] Dubbed ”Kannaksen marssi” by the party leadership (A March for the Isthmus).
[3] J.H. Magill: A Mission in the North, 1975.
[4] Available to the public at the Archival System's Leppävaara Unit.
[5] The construction of the artillery positions here was started by the Imperial Russian military already in 1913 when the island was to become a part of the Russian defensive system at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland.
[6] In 1939, the Finnish coastal artillery was a part of the Navy but was using army ranks. This explains a Major General commanding a Navy.
[7] Some of these guns had some weeks previously been evacuated out of Hästö-Busö.
[8] Quoted from Gellhorn's article in Collier's Magazine, December 30th, 1939.
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To Be Continued
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