AHC/WI: Communist Finland after WWII

First of all, I have to say that I am not interested in any PoD during WWI/WWII or before WWII. Basically, I am reading Tony Judt's "Postwar. History of Europe since 1945". Judt mentions that the Western backlash against the Czech communist takeover in February 1948 saved the Finns from becoming another Soviet satellite.

How? Stalin in April '48 signed the Friendship Treaty with the Finns and thus his attempts to unite the social democrats (by splitting them) to the communist 'Finnish People's Democratic League' failed, unlike other countries that went communist in which socialist/social-democratic parties were absorbed by communists during the takeovers in 1947-1948.

How could a commie Finland be achieved? I guess that by not having the Czech communist take over the Czech government violently. But well I was looking at a Finnish internal PoD.

However I am more interested in what would have happened had the communists and Stalin succeeded.

1. Would Mauno Pekkala become Finland's communist dictator?
2. If so, given Wikipedia's limited information of the FPDL, who could have been his successor and his policies?
3. Also, how could this affect Swedish minorities and relations with Sweden?

PS: Umm... I feel this is my first well-researched question in the post-1900 forums.
 
The Finns on the board will be better placed than me to answer this, but I don't think there's a post WWII POD that could turn Finland communist without ASB involvement.
 
I don't see easy way make as Finland communist state after WW2. In Finland wasn't much support for communism and Finland had strong democracy and that hasn't occupied like other Soviet satelites. And other Soviet satelites were dictatorships or occupied during WW2.

But if Finland somehow become communist Sweden probably join to Nato.
 
Well one way would have been to invade Finland. Yes that did not go so well the first time but by 1945 it would have been a very different Soviet military. While the chances of reaction by the United States and Britain would have increased over time in 1945 or 1946 I doubt that either would have done much more than protest.
 
Well one way would have been to invade Finland. Yes that did not go so well the first time but by 1945 it would have been a very different Soviet military. While the chances of reaction by the United States and Britain would have increased over time in 1945 or 1946 I doubt that either would have done much more than protest.

Occupying of Finland wouldn't has been easy thing. The Finns were ready possible occupation and many has hide much weapons. The were ready for long guerilla war. Probably red army would win that but it would last many years.
 
I don't see easy way make as Finland communist state after WW2. In Finland wasn't much support for communism and Finland had strong democracy and that hasn't occupied like other Soviet satelites. And other Soviet satelites were dictatorships or occupied during WW2.

But if Finland somehow become communist Sweden probably join to Nato.

To be honest, let's use Czechoslovakia as an example, they were a decent democracy and they went under the Soviet boot even when there were no Soviet troops in the country after '45, the Soviets didn't need occupation to impose their will. Also most countries where soviet style of government was imposed had strong histories of anti-communism, to no avail.
 
I think Finns equated Communism with Russians, and having been attacked by them repeatedly, the chances of the Finns taking to Communism, (I suspect in their minds, that would be surrendering their independance, at that point, only just won again at that point), so I would suspect, unthinkable. The socialist governments they had I suspect were left leaning enough to keep the Soviets from becomming aggressive, but probably no more socialist than the British Labour party.
 
Don't see it happening after the "facts" established by the Continuation War. Would really have to be done by "facts on the ground" by an aggressive, reckless Stalin that in OTL didn't exist.
 
There are few problems with this - the primary one is that Finland was more useful to Stalin in it's OTL form and he had already achieved his strategic goals in this area - there was little need to pressure Finland any further since that would have only pushed Sweden from neutrality to the opposing camp.

In OTL Finnish Communists were eager to start a revolution - but they never managed to gain control of regular police and the Army, despite the fact that Finnish political leadership ceded the domestic intelligence agency VALPO to their control for a short period. And they never received enough votes to start salami tactics they used elsewhere in Eastern Europe - the peculiar negotiated peace and unique war experience of Finland, lack of direct Soviet military occupation and the harsh fate of half a million relocated Karelians made Finnish society rather resilient to Communism despite the initial support they received in the polls.

Yet there are few possible PODs that can achieve Communist takeover.

Economical ones are easiest - let Stalin impose even harsher war reparations and occupy the country when Finland is unable to pay them in time. In OTL Stalin was wise enough not to do this, being busy enough annexing the three former Baltic states and former Polish territories to his empire to start yet another guerrilla war against local resistance fighters, but let's assume he changes his mind.

Another good way to do this is to kill Arvo Tuominen. He was a former Communist who had fled to the West and turned his coat during Stalinist purges, and was living in Stockholm.

Tuominen had contacts to the Amerikan Federation of Labour, which in turn made him a suitable contact to the Free Trade Union Committee within it. FTUC in turn worked as a CIA proxy that provided funds to anti-Communist trade unions in Europe. Jay Lovestone, the former general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States worked with Tuominen in this project. Thus CIA funded the Finnish Social Democratic Party, SDP, and SAJ, the main Social Democratic union organization. Additional support to SDP and their labour union arrived from German CDU and from Swedish Social Democrats.

This enabled the SDP to rise to the challenge of the revolutionary left, and defead them in the strategically important union elections in 1947 and in the parliamentary elections of 1948 with their famous ”Enough of this!"-campaign (see the poster below:

The title says "It is Enough!" and blames the opposition (Communists without saying it directly) of rising prizes, false promises, terror tactics against free speech and "forced democracy", adding that "Only order will secure the future - join to the Social Democratic Party!"

vesikansa_01_400.jpg


After defeating the immediate danger of Communist takeover, SDP later on split when they elected Väinö Tanner to lead the party in 1959. Tanner was a right-wing Social Democrat, a wartime politician and thus persona non grata to the Soviets. This strain within the party led to a formation of a short-lived minority group, Työväen ja Pienviljelijäin Sosialidemokraattinen Liitto (TPSL).

Such a split could have been possible earlier, and with more aggressive Communist tactics it could have been enough to make them confident enough to attempt a coup - that would in turn have started a new low-scale civil war in Finland. At this point Stalin would have been more or less forced to intervere and install a puppet regime of his choosing to the country.
 
To be honest, let's use Czechoslovakia as an example, they were a decent democracy and they went under the Soviet boot even when there were no Soviet troops in the country after '45, the Soviets didn't need occupation to impose their will. Also most countries where soviet style of government was imposed had strong histories of anti-communism, to no avail.

Baltic countries and Ukraine are better examples. Though in the end it didn't matter, there was sizable resistance in those countries which could be described even as a civil war in some sense.
 
Another good way to do this is to kill Arvo Tuominen. He was a former Communist who had fled to the West and turned his coat during Stalinist purges, and was living in Stockholm.

I think you might overestimate the importance of Tuominen in this regard. He was a very important go-between, but still just that. There were also other Finnish emigrants in the operation, most importantly Oskari Tokoi, the former Red leader, who had been campaigning for support to Finland in the US throughout WWII. The organization and a lot of the money would have been there; without Tuominen other ways to channel money to the SDP would have been found. The post-war covert US support to Finland and the SDP is a tangled web. The money came from many sources and in many innovative ways. Mikko Majander, though, apparently says in his Demokratiaa dollareilla ("Democracy for Dollars") that the CIA started to support the SDP only after 1949 - after what we see as the "Years of Danger".


Such a split could have been possible earlier, and with more aggressive Communist tactics it could have been enough to make them confident enough to attempt a coup - that would in turn have started a new low-scale civil war in Finland. At this point Stalin would have been more or less forced to intervere and install a puppet regime of his choosing to the country.

I am not entirely in agreement. The Tannerians and the "Socialist Brothers in Arms" seem to have consolidated their position in the SDP already in 44-45 when there was still less western support and the OTL SDP split happened over a decade later, due to different reasons.

The Communists were too weak and timid for an actual coup in themselves even when in government during the Pekkala cabinet, and a more aggressive showing might even work against them as Tanner and his faction could use Communist excesses in the post-war years to rally their base for the 1948 elections (also with a potentially smaller war chest).

But let us say the opening for a Communist coup would be if the SKDL, victorious in the 1948 elections, manage with Stalin's support to browbeat Paasikivi into making them a dominant partner in the new cabinet and use that position into taking over the state apparatus. Only from the position of a "legal government" they could believably then appeal to the USSR for military help to overcome the "rebels" that would be opposing them. The question, though, would be how they could manage that now if they couldn't during the Pekkala cabinet when they had most of the same benefits on their side?

Anyway, even if the SKDL wins in the popular vote in 1948, President Paasikivi might stick to his guns and keep the SKDL out by putting together, say, a "Red Earth" coalition cabinet out of the Agrarians and a smaller SDP. In effect that would mean just supplanting a Kekkonen cabinet for Fagerholm's SDP minority cabinet two years early. And a Kekkonen cabinet would seem so reasonable and accommodating to Stalin that working with it would be a much more prudent thing to do than fomenting an unsure revolution.

Hmm... Maybe if we can find a way of taking out all three Paasikivi, Tanner and Kekkonen before 1948... That would make for interesting times in Finland.;)
 
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Hmm... Maybe if we can find a way of taking out all three Paasikivi, Tanner and Kekkonen before 1948... That would make for interesting times in Finland.;)

Finns really had good herraonni (good luck translating that :p) at the time, one would have to get rid of several key political characters to significantly alter the domestic situation.
 
Mikko Majander, though, apparently says in his Demokratiaa dollareilla ("Democracy for Dollars") that the CIA started to support the SDP only after 1949 - after what we see as the "Years of Danger".

My estimation is that money started to flow in by then - the organization to do that was set up and prepared earlier, during the aforementioned key elections.

I am not entirely in agreement. The Tannerians and the "Socialist Brothers in Arms" seem to have consolidated their position in the SDP already in 44-45 when there was still less western support and the OTL SDP split happened over a decade later, due to different reasons.

It is indeed rather hard to find a plausible way to split the party at this time, but perhaps the Soviets offer more acceptable (but still unacceptable) peace terms in spring 1944, creating a stronger peace opposition?

I agree on the part of SKDL, they simply weren't popular enough to make a violent coup by themselves, and the existing state and power structures in Finland were too sturdy to be toppled with the domestic and democratically gained powers they had in their disposal in late 1940s.
 

yourworstnightmare

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It would have to happen '46, when things was a bit chaotic due to the war being over, the Karelians displaced (again) and Finland was trying to somehow stumble into a peacetime economy.
 
I agree on the part of SKDL, they simply weren't popular enough to make a violent coup by themselves, and the existing state and power structures in Finland were too sturdy to be toppled with the domestic and democratically gained powers they had in their disposal in late 1940s.

Too low popularity is one part of it. The other part, of which I got to thinking only after the previous post, would be that the SKDL didn't have the leadership to make a revolution. Pekkala and Leino, et al, had all the key posts of the cabinet and still managed basically nothing in that field.

The Finnish Communist movement had been gutted by the Civil War, Finnish anti-Communist activities (official and unofficial) in the 20s and 30s and the Winter War (showing the true face of the Soviet Union). And those Communists that fled to the USSR had lost most of their competent leadership in Stalin's purges. In short, IMO the people leading the SKDL or any similar party in the post-war years were not of the caliber to have the ability to inspire a successful coup or a serious civil war in Finland.

To return to the OP:

Nanwe said:
Judt mentions that the Western backlash against the Czech communist takeover in February 1948 saved the Finns from becoming another Soviet satellite.

I find it very hard to support Judt's conclusion. In 1948 it seems that only a much more decisive SKDL leadership could have seriously tried to take power on its own. And by that point Stalin seems to have decided that he will not provide serious support unless the Finnish Communists manage to do something substantial themselves first.


Karelian said:
It is indeed rather hard to find a plausible way to split the party at this time, but perhaps the Soviets offer more acceptable (but still unacceptable) peace terms in spring 1944, creating a stronger peace opposition?

That might help in splitting the SDP, yes. And we might add another curveball like, say, more successful Soviet bombings of Helsinki in early 1944, or other such wartime events. But all of this would be outside the limits put up in the OP, where it was said there should be no WWII PODs.:)

yourworstnightmare said:
It would have to happen '46, when things was a bit chaotic due to the war being over, the Karelians displaced (again) and Finland was trying to somehow stumble into a peacetime economy.

The Communists mostly took over the State Police by early 1946 and Pekkala's cabinet, key posts controlled by the SKDL, was appointed by Paasikivi in late March. So spring 1946 could be, in theory, the starting point for a serious coup attempt. And the attempt could be tied to the investigations into the Weapons Cache Case, information of which had been starting to come out since early 1945. If different people were running the SKDL, actual revolutionaries, this could have been the time to pounce, with tacit support from the Soviets in the allied Control Commission. There might have even been a chance.

IOTL, the far left worked in a far too gradualist manner - the "Red Valpo" was doing something like actual investigative work to break the Weapons Cache Case when - if it was a really making a revolution - it should have used the case as an excuse to be hauling generals and leading bourgeois politicians into cells on trumped-up charges to break the old establishment and the opposition.
 
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