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Thirty: The Stolypin Affair

In January 1940, the most popular movies in the Finnish theatres were Punahousut (”The Red Trousers”), Ilmari Unho's military farce about the romantic dalliances of the officers of a dragoon regiment in a small town, and Seitsemän veljestä (”The Seven Brothers”), the first major film version of Aleksis Kivi's classic novel by the director Wilho Ilmari. In the uncertain conditions of the early weeks of the new year, the movie theatres in the country were continually packed. Apart from distraction from the real world, the Finnish men and women were also seeking a measure of warmth in the shared darkness of the cinema: the winter had proven itself an exceptionally cold one, and even in the most southern parts of the country, the temperatures would those days often dip to as low as -30 degrees Celsius.

In the Finnish eastern border areas where mobilized Finnish reservists huddled in often drafty barracks and light tents warmed with wood-burning stoves, many military commanders now sent their superiors reports detailing mounting problems with their units' morale and defensive spirit. Many kinds of activities were being put together to find the bored reservists in the Karelian Isthmus and north of the Ladoga something to do. Skiing competitions were the chosen, wholesome remedy in many units, as were handicrafts competitions. In the absense of an official system of providing the soldiers at the border regular entertainments, the commanders, educational officers and even chaplains of different units were creating ad hoc theatrical troupes and bands.

Also professional entertainers started to be seen in the work of improving the flagging morale of the ”Sitting War” [1]. Tours of military entertainment were being put together by the Maan Turva (”Defence of the Land”) society. Since January 5th, in the Karelian Isthmus the so-called Military Entertainment Tour Number One brought the men in the bunkers and barracks the presence of such luminaries as the actor and comedian Aku Korhonen, known for his comedy roles as the relaxed, down-to-earth worker/drifter Lapatossu, master accordionist Vili Vesterinen of Dallapé fame, and of course the three Valtonen sisters Veera, Maire and Raija, together making up the popular singing trio Harmony Sisters.

On the sea side, the Navy had put together its own little tour of the bases and icy fortress islands. This smaller group starred names just as big: Onni Laihanen, another famous accordionist, Georg Malmstén, the nationally renowned singer, and Tuire Orri, the ”most fetching starlet of the Finnish theatre scene” as advertisements for the Viipuri City Theatre put it in the fall of 1939. During these tours, audiences would for the first time hear Malmstén's upcoming hit, Liisa-Mai, a German song released in August 1939 [2] that the singer, songwriter and composer had stumbled on by accident through his contacts in the Parlophon record company and to which he created the Finnish lyrics himself.

In February, then, new rounds of demobilizations were announced. While readiness would be kept high, the nation just could not manage keeping so many of its young men in uniform in what might be tense times but what still practically amounted to peace time conditions.

Despite all the attempts to keep up the national morale, a certain wintery gloom had fallen on the nation. The seemingly daily increasing measures of rationing did not help to raise the people's spirits, either, even if the Ministry of Supply started publishing a series of colourful posters proclaiming that ”Sharing Equally Will Kill the Hunger” and ”The Black Marketeer is the Enemy Within”. As the winter proved more severe than anticipated, the Finnish and foreign cargo ships still plying the dangerous waters of the Baltic Sea could not bring to Finland nearly the amount of trade goods the people and financial interests had been accustomed to. To avoid interference by German merchant raiders, Finnish shipping was routed to run along the Swedish coast. Up in Lapland, a major effort was put into trying to maintain and develop the road from Rovaniemi to Petsamo to be able to carry increasing amounts of goods from the port of Liinahamari, Finland's only ice-free port in the dead of winter. The state-run truck company Pohjolan Liikenne Oy [3] was set up under the control of the Ministry of Supply to handle this route, and scores of trucks of various makes and models were taken over by the state to add to the company's motor pool post-haste.

The Finnish government was fighting a diplomatic struggle on several fronts. Among other issues, the matter of Petsamo nickel was kept in the spotlight by the Soviets, the British and the Germans, and the discussions about potentially sharing the production of the mine entered a sort of grid-lock in January. President Paasikivi was quite tired of the nickel discussions himself, huffing and puffing about the issue to the ministers of his cabinet, making sarcastic comments about the sanity of the foreign governments making ”one single mine” into such a major issue that it interfered with ”running actual matters of state”.

Abroad, the high publicity about the Finnish-Soviet negotiations in the fall, and the mobilization of the Finnish military had created interest to support Finland. Even after Finland had agreed to relinquish land to the USSR, several people and organizations around Europe and the US were actively creating public campaigns ”to help democratic little Finland defend itself from the pressure of Soviet totalitarianism”. In the United States, the exiled former Finnish Red leader and former top Social Democrat politician Oskari Tokoi was working among the Finnish American community to create and run the Help Finland Society. In Sweden, the Swedish Red Cross and the newly-created Finland Committee organized material assistance to the Finnish evacuees, particularly. This work was partly prompted by the booklet by the journalists Olof Lagercrantz and Karl-Gustaf Hillebrand, Finland's Cause is Ours, published just under Christmas.[4]

Also foreign volunteers were arriving to Finland, to join the Finnish military to fight in a war many thought was certain to come – either for democracy, or then against Communism. Some of these foreign volunteers had not even heard that Finland had finally caved in to some Soviet demands in the late fall, and thus for some of the arrivees, learning this state of affairs caused, in the event, some palpable disillusionment and loss of fighting spirit. Some turned tail immediately, to find their own battles elsewhere. Others stayed, after registering with the Finnish State Police, the interior authorities, and their local embassies as legal aliens. One of the most interesting group of arriving volunteers was a ragtag group of Polish soldiers, who had after many implausible turns of events made it out of Poland and through the Baltic states into Helsinki in early January. These 42 men created a real dilemma for officialdom when they made their presence in the Finnish capital known to the authorities. It was thought politically too risky to enlist them in the service of the Finnish state, under the circumstances, and after some tense discussions, the men were hurried out of the capital and interned in a small camp built for this purpose in the Kuopio rural municipality, to put the men well out of harm's way along with the traditional credo of ”out of sight, out of mind”.

Among the foreign groups offering their support to the Finnish government were the Russian white emigrants. Offers of assistance from White Russians had been received all the way from October, and by the winter they were many and varied. In early February, Gustaf Mannerheim was approached by General Nikolai Golovin, the former Tsarist officer and military historian. Golovin had recently organized military staff training for the Russian All-Military Union, a central emigré organization create in Paris in 1924. Golovin's idea for Finland was that, in the case of actual military battles being realized between Finland and the USSR, enthusiastic young members of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), a newer emigré organization of young White firebrands, would be sent to the USSR as spies and saboteurs. In this rather ephemeral project, Golovin was joined by Arkady Stolypin, the son of the former Russian Prime Minister Petr Stolypin.

Stolypin had already drawn up plans of air-dropping ”strike teams” made of NTS members into northwestern and northern Russia, with a mission of freeing GULAG prisoners from different camps to then create anti-Communist partisan forces out of them, to fight the Soviet government in the northern Russian interior, and to raise ”patriotic Russians” into open rebellion in pre-selected suitable locations like the Putilov metal factory in Leningrad.

In actual fact, the plan was pure fantasy. But Mannerheim chose to nevertheless agree to meet with the young Stolypin in his Helsinki home, to discuss the man's ideas. It is uncertain why Mannerheim accepted the visit, which was organized through Lieutenant Colonel Torsten Aminoff, Mannerheim's former comrade in arms from the Finnish Civil War and a former Russian Tsarist officer himself. Perhaps, at this point, the depressed old Field Marshal was ready consider any plan that would provide Finland some more positive outlook in the months and years to come. A prospective large White Russian emigré effort to help Finland and to overthrow Stalin's Bolshevik government might have seemed like a positive idea to the injured old man at the time, also due to his nostalgic memories about the old imperial Russia.

Stolypin arrived to meet Mannerheim, with a small entourage of fellow NTS activists, on the second week of February. There is not much to say about the meeting itself, apart from an extant comment by young Stolypin, recorded by Torsten Aminoff, of being surprised and saddened to see Mannerheim, the old White Finnish warrior, in such an obviously depressed and gloomy state.

Where the meeting became important was the realm of foreign affairs and Finno-Soviet relations. What would have otherwise been forgotten as a mere historical detail or an anecdote in fact created a crisis with far-reaching consequences. On February 17th, the Finnish ambassador to Moscow, Yrjö-Koskinen, sent a telegram to Helsinki detailing a story published in the Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's official newspaper that morning.

FINLAND PLANS INVASION OF THE USSR WITH COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES, said the story's headline, and the story itself went on to detail the discussions had between Mannerheim and Stolypin. In the opinion of the Pravda, the recent meeting between Mannerheim (called by the paper ”the arch-reactionary White officer and unquestioned military leader of Finland”) and the White emigré delegation was clear proof that Finland, under its current leadership, presents a clear danger to the USSR, and is actively planning anti-Soviet action with foreign allies. The story goes on to demand the sidelining of Mannerheim and ”likeminded reactionary, ultranationalist White officers”, and changes within the Finnish government besides to make Finland ”to start respect the agreements it has signed with the government of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”.

The same day, the Finnish government received the same basic demands from the Soviet embassy in Helsinki, along with a diplomatic note of heavy rebuke to Finland for allowing the action of ”foreign, anti-Soviet elements on Finnish soil”. In a meeting with Foreign Minister Voionmaa, the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Derevyansky, suggested some practical measures ”to help restore some trust in our mutual relations which these blatantly aggressive Finnish actions have so sorely violated”.

What the Soviets practically wanted was slightly unexpected. As the Gulf of Finland had been freezing solid, it had caused problems not just to Finland's shipping, but also to the Soviet effort to build their new military installations in the so-called Raasepori Archipelago Lease Area along the southern Finnish coast. On January 25th, the Soviet Ambassador had already contacted the Finnish Foreign Minister with a suggestion that, to offset the problems caused by the heavy sea ice, the Finnish government would allow the Soviet military (”in the interest of the letter and spirit of the Moscow Agreement”) to run special trains to the Hanko area through the Finnish rail network, to help in bringing goods and materials to the lease area. Now, the same idea was repeated as an obvious demand, with the attendum that Moscow was again questioning the Finnish government's commitment to good relations with the Soviet government, given that according to the Soviet commander in the lease area, the borders of ”sovereign contractual Soviet territory” had also been violated by Finnish reconnaissance aircraft in the last few days.[5]

After a number of discussions among the Finnish cabinet and the military leadership, on February 27th the Finns agreed to the Soviet demands, and a regular train service from the Karelian Isthmus to the RLA was set up, to run until the end of April at the outset. The State Railways were ordered to liaise with the Soviet military attaché to agree upon timetables and guidelines for the service. In a move criticised by many, the government also agreed to add a railway halt and rudimentary port facilities on the mainland to the lease area ”on a temporary basis”.[6] On Soviet insistence, the no-fly area around the RLA was also expanded to cover the new lease area and an ”additional security buffer” besides, and the Finns were now expected to report to the Soviets in advance all aircraft, civilian or military, that would pass this area in within 40 km to any direction, ”to avoid unnecessary escalation by either side”. Finally, the Finns also agreed to ”rein in ultranationalist elements among the military and the government, and to work diligently to rebuild mutual trust that the recent hostile, anti-Soviet actions by the Finnish military leadership had so egregiously violated”.

As a result, the Finnish political right exploded in protest. The people who bore the biggest brunt of domestic critism for this perceived capitulation, in the public and especially in private, were the President and then the Minister of Defence, Arvi Oksala, who was singled out as indecisive and ”out of his depth” by the political right and the Civil Guard leadership. After the new concessions to the Soviets, calls for Oksala's resignation were made in parliament by the Patriotic People's Movement. In Eduskunta, Paavo Susitaival called the minister ”responsible for single-handedly sabotaging the morale of the Finnish military and the civilian population”. The President, however, stood by Oksala who was from his own party, and responded to Susitaival's comments by saying that ”this is not the damn time to rock the boat”. At this point, then, the public criticism was not enough to lead to Oksala's resignation even if he apparently seriously considered this move himself.

In discussions among the Finnish military intelligence, it was concluded that the Russian emigré delegation that visited Mannerheim had obviously been infiltrated by a Soviet operative, who had promptly reported the meeting's minutes to the Soviet authorities. In other words, it was likely that the meeting itself had been a trap into which both the depressed Mannerheim and the young Stolypin had unwittingly walked right into.

In early March, despite the cold, Helsinki saw several demonstrations and counter-demonstrations by the far left and the nationalist right. This was especially true after the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society, in reality a far-left front under Moscow's direction, was officially allowed to be established on the 7th, given a permission now to function where far left organizations had been banned in the past. The Helsinki police struggled to contain the demonstrations that followed, and the Civil Guards militia called to assist the law enforcement often joined the nationalist right wing demonstrators instead of keeping them in check.

On March 15th, a group of men in suits and military uniforms met at the Königstedt manor in Helsinki. It was an unofficial meeting, and one which the president and the top cabinet leadership were not aware of. The meeting had been called by the Second Minister of the Interior, Urho Kekkonen, and it included both the director of the State Police, Paavo Säippä, and his hardline predecessor, Esko Riekki. Present were also, at least, the industrialists Ragnar Nordström and Gustaf Wrede, the Helsinki Civil Guards leader, Colonel Per Ekholm and the military staff officer, Colonel Kustaa Tapola. Some of the people present are not known, but the reason for this meeting is quite clear: the men at Königstedt, and the interests they represented, were unconvinced about the wisdom of the way the Finnish government was handling its relations with the Soviets. There appeared to be a tacit understanding formed among them that in the prevailing circumstances, there was good reason to create unofficial channels through which administrative and military cooperation and plans could be advanced without the overt possibility of Soviet knowledge and interference. The men present were all well-connected in different important circles across the Finnish society, but they were also people who were not at the very top of their organizations. This was deliberate, to allow their superiors a measure of plausible deniability.

Historians versed with the period do generally agree that the March meeting at Königstedt was the beginning of the process that later led to the creation of the so-called Board [7], the clandestine, semi-governmental organization that would play an important role in subsequent Finnish WWII history.

…


September 2009

Wet gravel crunched under her running shoes as Nora took a left across the little patch of forest. She was somewhere north of central Helsinki where she had, to her amazement, found an area of almost wilderness some days ago, with gravel and sand paths crisscrossing it, ideal for a nice run. While the weather could have been better, she felt it was peaceful enough to run here, barely another human being in sight.

Yesterday, she had finally applied for the official permit to use the Finnish Archival System, and was now waiting for the reply. In the meanwhile, she had already received a pile of papers from Rantanen with notes on how to go about her research. She had very little to go on: her grandfather had left Finland in a hurry, and then lived in the States under an assumed identity. What she remembered from going through the old man's belongings before the fire that consumed the mansion did not help much – especially as her skills in the Finnish language were definitely lacking.

Once again, she cursed the fire. It had destroyed most of the old man's legacy. Not in a financial sense, of course – not only did she get the funds in his savings accounts, but also the insurance money for the mansion – but in a sense of understanding where her family had come from. She had only had mere days to explore the dusty old house before it had been annihilated by the soaring flames – literally before her eyes.

Nora took another turn and ducked into an old concrete underpass. The wet concrete was covered in graffiti – mostly tags and random scribbles, bu then also some even rather elaborate bits of art. There were of course the usual swastikas, SS runes, red stars, and hammers and sickles, like she would encounter everywhere in Helsinki it seemed, with the ubiquitous word NORDLICHT among them. Here, also the words KRASNYI BOR seemed to complement the assemblage. Nora made a mental not to ask Rantanen about these apparent staples of (what she assumed as) political graffiti at some point.

She picked up the pace down a slight incline, feeling the drizzle to start turning into an actual rain as the autumn evening was getting darker. Nora needed to do her eight miles before bed, or otherwise she would feel guilty for being lazy. She had been running daily seven months now, and she was being very conscientous about it. It had really grown on her.

Addicts will always need some addiction at least.

Nora remembered the night that had changed her life.

She was sitting in a cafe just across the metal depot on Drake Street. She was nursing a glass of cola with hands that were shaking in anticipation for meeting her supplier in the park in an hour or so. She had tried to get clean for some weeks, she even had found herself a job, but that day it had all come crashing down. That day, the manager had found out that she had been skimming money from the till (one of her coworkers must have ratted her out), and he had fired her – as ceremoniously as you like, in front of most of her coworkers, spittle flying from his mouth as he hurled insults at her.

After that, she had made her decision - fuck it. She had calmly filled a cup of soda from the machine, and then thrown it to the frothing man's face.

”I quit”, she had said, dropping her neon-coloured cap to the sticky floor.

It was one of those times every addict knows, one of those times you give up on the world and elect to fall deeper into your very own spiral of self-destruction, pretending it is your own choice, a form of rebellion against the ordinary and the commonplace.

It isn't. It is just your addiction taking over.

There she sat, her thirst rising, jonesing for a fix, waiting for her dealer to take up his usual position.

She took a sip from her glass of cold cola, acutely feeling the ice cubes touching the sides of the sweating glass in the tips of her fingers.

The door opened with the sound of a chime. It was a black woman in her early 50s, in a business suit, looking stylish and sharp as they come. In the worn confines of the grubby little cafe, she looked distinctly out of place.

To the surprise of the young woman in the corner, the woman at the door looked directly at her and then started approaching her, looking determined.

RUN!, Nora felt her instincts shout at her.

But it was too late, she had her cornered.

”Nora Farrah?”, the woman asked her, tilting her head slightly with an estimating look on her face.

”Who? I don't know that name”, she lied, and made as if to stand up and walk away.

The woman smiled a cold smile at that.

”You really don't want to take that tack with me, dear. You just stay put now”, she said and put her briefcase down on the chair.

”I know you are Nora Farrah. There is something I need to tell you.”

Across the street, Anton had finally arrived to his spot. Only if she could get rid of the woman, the anxious young woman thought.

”I'm not the police, if you're wondering. I am an attorney...”

She produced a glossy business card with the company name ”Byrne & Brubaker, Attorneys at Law” on it.

”My name's Beatrice Brubaker, and I've come bearing important news.”

She wasn't lying. What the sharply-dressed woman told Nora changed her life. To the tune of twelve million dollars in liquid capital, and a grand old mansion added to the bargain. It turned out that the young, strung-out woman was the sole heir to the fortune of a Finnish emigrant who had struck it rich in America and died just two weeks previously at an advanced age.

Her great grandfather.

The very next morning, the lawyer drove Nora personally to the clinic. Stepping out of the Thunderbird and entering the glass doors of the modern facility, she signed up for a drug rehab program.

Nora was roused from her thoughts as she noticed that she was being approached by someone. She turned around to see the figure of a man behind her.

”Hei”, the young man in a tracksuit said, and asked something in Finnish. Nora answered to him in English, saying that her Finnish was still quite poor.

”Ah – you're a foreigner”, the man said and smiled, ”that explains it.”

”Explains what?”

”Why you are running here in the dark.”

It had started getting dark now, Nora realized.

”Yeah, what's up with that?”, she asked, ”why are the lights not on along the path?”

The man dug his mobile phone from his pocket, flipped open the Ericsson and opened his text message prompt.

”You need to send a text to turn them on. Observe.”

He quickly wrote a text message and sent it. In thirty seconds or so, Nora could see lights come on over the path.

”Of course it costs a few marks”, the man said, shrugging, ”but it's certainly better than stumbling through the dark.”

Nora had come to understand that this sentiment, in general, was quite common to the Finns these days.

”Well”, she said, ”thank you, I guess.”

”Don't mention it. Welcome to Finland”, the man said, turned around and started jogging away from the young woman.

After the man was sure he was out of sight and earshot from the American, he called in to report his encounter with the surveillance subject.

…

...

Notes:

[1] Istumasota.

[2] Originally titled Lied eines Jungen Wachtpostens, the song would also become a minor wartime hit in its native German language.

[3] ”The Traffic Company of the North”

[4] It is said that the name of the booklet, turned into a popular slogan, was first uttered by the sidelined former Swedish Foreign Minister Christian Günther.

[5] The Finns looked into the matter, and found out that the plane in question had been a scheduled Aero passenger flight en route from Helsinki Malmi to Stockholm Bromma. The pilot agreed that heavy snowfall might have caused the plane's route to veer closer to the lease area than was planned.

[6] Skogsby on the Hanko Peninsula, part of the Tenala (Tenhola) municipality.

[7] Johtokunta.

…

To Be Continued