Churchill and Finland: A Study in Anticommunism and Geopolitics

CHURCHILL AND FINLAND

This book examines the intertwined dynamics of Churchill’s anticommunist and geopolitical thought. It looks at the ways in which he attempted to use Finland as both tool and ally in the anticommunist projects of the twentieth century. Finland appeared a staunch ally in Churchill’s recurring efforts to destroy or negate international communism, but the broader concerns of geopolitics and Great Power diplomacy complicated what might have been a simple task of teaming up with like-minded Finns. The resulting tensions are explored and explained in this study of comparative anticommunism based on Churchill’s private papers and on additional British, Finnish and American documents. Markku Ruotsila is an Adjunct Associate Professor of British and American History at the University of Tampere, Finland.

CHURCHILL AND FINLAND A study in anticommunism and geopolitics

Markku Ruotsila

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Markku Ruotsila All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ruotsila, Markku. Churchill and Finland: a study in anticommunism and geopolitics/ Markku Ruotsila. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Finland. 2. Anti-communist movements—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. RussoFinnish War, 1939–1940—Foreign public opinion, British. 4. Finland—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 5. Finland—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 6. Soviet Union—Foreign relations— Finland. 7. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874–1965. 8. Cold War. I. Title. DA47.9.F5R86 2005 327.4897041′09′041–dc22 2004010397 ISBN 0-203-31141-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-34971-0 (Print Edition)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

v vii

Introduction

1

1

Before the Bolsheviks, 1900–1918

7

2

Churchill, Finland and the Russian intervention, 1919–1920

17

3

The travails of anticommunism in the interwar years, 1921–1939

45

4

The anticommunist challenge of the Winter War, 1939–1940

69

5

Churchill as ally of the Soviet Union, enemy of Finland, 1940–1944

101

Churchill, Finland and the early Cold War, 1944–1955

141

Conclusion

155

Notes

163

Bibliography

185

Index

197

6

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The appearance of an English edition of this book has afforded me the opportunity to make several revisions to a manuscript that emerged from research for a different but topically related doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge. Research for that dissertation required prolonged contact with the private papers of Sir Winston Churchill, including those hitherto unused portions of these papers which dealt with his contacts with Finland. These private papers, especially those relating to his various contacts and collaboration with Finland, are the main source for this study. Without the financial assistance of the Osk. Huttunen Foundation it would not have been possible to examine these collections in detail, and I want to thank the board of the Foundation for their support for my PhD studies. I gratefully acknowledge also the financial assistance that I received while a PhD candidate from the Prince Consort and Thirwall Fund, the British Council, the Cambridge University European Trust and from my own college, St John’s. Essential to the fruitful development of the larger project from which this study has evolved were my supervisors, Dr John A.Thompson and Professor Peter F.Clarke. I want to thank them for encouragement and advice. I wish also to thank other historians who helped to shape my research and conclusions, including Professors Seikko Eskola, Tuomo Polvinen and Marjatta Hietala, each of whom read the manuscript and gave useful comments, criticisms and suggestions for revising. Docent Hannu Heikkilä did likewise. At an earlier stage of a long project Professors Keith W.Olson and Olli Vehviläinen were very helpful, as was the late emeritus Professor Arthur S.Link, and Sir Martin Gilbert, Michael Heale and Eugenio Biagini. I have benefited greatly from the expertise of each of these historians, covering as it does both the British and the Finnish context of this book. Special thanks must also be given to my friends from Cambridge, especially to Selwyn Blieden, Anna Lindsay and Damien Browne. Since the first publication of the book, in Finnish in 2001, many others have offered useful (and sometimes not so useful) critiques and suggestions, and these have been taken into account in the preparation of this expanded and revised English-language edition.

vi

Parts of Chapter 2 have been previously published as ‘The ChurchillMannerheim Collaboration in the Russian Intervention, 1918–20’, The Slavonic and East European Review 80 (January 2002), and they appear here with permission. Permission to quote from the private correspondence of Winston Churchill has kindly been granted, on behalf of the estate of Winston Churchill, by Curtis Brown Ltd, London (copyright Winston S. Churchill). Markku Ruotsila Helsinki, February 2003

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAR CHUR CR

CS

CV

CWP

FO PREM

Winston Churchill papers, Chartwell papers, Churchill College, Cambridge Winston Churchill papers, Churchill College, Cambridge Warren F.Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, III, Alliance Declining, February 1944-April 1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1984) Sir Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 8 volumes (New York: Chelsea House 1983) Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston S.Churchill, Companion Volumes, Documents, Volumes I–V (London: Heinemann 1966–1981; Volume I edited by Randolph Churchill) Martin Gilbert (ed.), The Churchill War Papers, Volume I, At the Admiralty, September 1939-May 1940 (London: Heinemann 1993) Foreign Office papers, Public Record Office, Kew Prime Minister’s papers, Public Record Office, Kew

viii

INTRODUCTION

Winston Churchill never visited Finland. His knowledge of Finnish history, culture and the Finnish political system was very limited. His interest in the affairs of the small northern country was slight and his intercourse with Finns intermittent. In Churchill’s lifetime, Finland did not have any major international role to play and none of Great Britain’s direct, intrinsic interests were involved in Finland. Nevertheless, Churchill forged contact with Finland at each of the crucial moments in the first 40 or so years of that country’s history, and he impacted on the development of Finnish policies in sometimes crucial ways. This applied, in descending order of importance, to Finland’s War of Independence and civil war in 1918, to its Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, to its de facto alliance with the Axis powers in 1941–1944, and to its vicissitudes during the early Cold War. At each of these moments, Churchill saw in Finland a country which, because of its geographical location and the predominant anticommunism of its leadership, could materially assist in the solution of the world communist problem. In the fight against Nazi Germany, Finland seemed to Churchill to be a complication more than anything else, and in other contexts it seemed more or less irrelevant; however, in the context of Churchill’s perpetual anticommunist projects it was a country without which Churchill thought it would be either impossible or very difficult to reach his desired outcomes. This assessment was of great significance, especially in 1918–1920 and in 1939–1940 when Churchill was in a senior Cabinet position and tried to forward anticommunist policies which called for active Finnish cooperation. As his knowledge about Finland grew, so did his interest in using it as an ally, proxy and pawn for his purposes. In the context of Finnish history, these periods of Churchillian interest in Finland are both interesting and very little known. Given that Churchill was one of the most important statesmen of the twentieth century, it would appear that everything in his thought and actions relating to Finland would be of interest to students of Finnish history. Yet very little is known of his relations with and thinking about this small country—a country which gained its independence in the aftermath of the First World War and gradually established its place in the

2 INTRODUCTION

new political geography that emerged in Churchill’s lifetime and survived beyond it. In fact, there has not existed to date a single scholarly study on Churchill’s various interactions with Finland, either in Finnish or in other languages. Churchill’s impact on Finland has, of course, been assessed by many historians, but this has taken place on the basis of very limited documentary material and for the duration only of a few short periods deemed the most important for a Finnish audience. Churchill’s Finnish policies have not been contextualised with any broader spatial, historical or ideological context. Yet several rather acerbic and putatively comprehensive assessments have issued from Finnish historians— assessments where Churchill’s motivations and impact have almost invariably appeared in an unfavourable light.1 This does not merely distort Churchill’s biography but also constricts our understanding of the role that Finland played in international politics in the twentieth century. The perspective hitherto characteristic of Finnish writing on Churchill and Finland no more recognises the important role that Churchill played in shaping the trajectory of Finnish history at several crucial moments than it allows for the fact that Finland’s own role was at times central in the shaping, and limiting, of Churchill’s own policies. Finland’s place in the central, anticommunist endeavour of the twentieth century has also been obscured by misrepresentations of the Churchill-Finland relationship. The Finnish involvement in anticommunism provides a particularly helpful case study for assessing the dynamics of small power interaction with Great Powers—the options available to the leadership of the latter for the shaping of the policies of the former. Arguably, personal relationships such as the one that was forged between Winston Churchill and the Finnish General, future Field Marshal and President, C.G.Mannerheim, are primary among the tools that a smaller country’s leadership has available for influencing the Great Powers. For that reason alone, a study centred on the biography and worldview of one man defends its place among the many diplomatic inquiries which exist on British-Finnish relations. The history of Finland and of Finland’s place within Western anticommunism is illuminated further if the kinds of personal contacts and influence that are manifest in the Churchill-Finland, and especially in the Churchill-Mannerheim, relationship, are explored. Through such a case study it is possible to offer conclusions on the ways that Great Powers typically approach, evaluate and also use smaller powers as tools in their policies. Churchill’s case is particularly fruitful for such a study, given that Churchill’s knowledge of Finland was limited, as was his interest in the country itself, but at several critical moments he nevertheless decided to involve himself in its development and to use it as a tool of his own policies. It can be argued that such a correlation between knowledge and action—this kind of objectification of small powers based on limited information, this utilisation of small states as

INTRODUCTION 3

means to an end—is typical of the interaction between powers of unequal resources. Churchill in particular was an upholder of realpolitik. For him, smaller powers were tools only; that much fodder for high politics. ‘Small nations must not be allowed to tie our hands’, he stressed.2 This principle is of broader significance than just as a reflection of the thought of one of its practitioners. It reflects the belief in the anarchism of the international system, a belief which regards nation-states as inevitable competitors over limited resources, as inherently selfish actors. This kind of belief has been waxing strong in the twentieth century, and geopolitics have become a primary shaper of policies, whether about the defence of empires—as in Churchill’s case—or about the expansion of a given ideology and system of control—as in the case of the Soviet Union. Because of its geographical position, Finland has of necessity been one of those countries in which Great Powers have shown an interest and which have been forced, often painfully, to feel the consequences of geopolitics. When Churchill interacted with Finland, this took place repeatedly. Thus, the Churchill-Finland interaction illuminates the ways in which theories of geopolitics have been implemented in practice. But the case of Finland serves also as an example of the other main Churchillian and twentieth-century constant: communism and anticommunism. Throughout the century, the demands of geopolitics were frequently moderated by the perceived demands of anticommunism. Ideological anticommunist promptings often challenged that deterministic approach which characterised geostrategical thought and also drove nation-states to policies that were at variance with the demands of geopolitics. When this happened, Finland once again was at the very centre of events. More often than not, Churchill was also present there. Through such dynamics the cause of anticommunism undoubtedly impacted on the development of Finland as much as did geopolitics and Finland’s geographical position. At least such a hypothesis—one that challenges the deterministic materialist-structural approach to the past—further prompts inquiry into the Churchill-Finland interaction, given that Churchill, if anyone, was an upholder of ideas. He was also a geostrategist and a geopolitician; thus he stood at the very nexus of power politics and the demands of ideas which, arguably, shaped the course of the twentieth century. The Churchill-Finland relationship, therefore, is primarily an aspect in the history of twentieth-century anticommunism. It is important to recount this history, and it is not enough to isolate the Finnish experience from the bigger concentrations of power which in the end nourished Western anticommunism. Finnish relations with the West have all too often been studied from a perspective which tries simply to ascertain what it was that the Great Powers did to Finland or what they were kept from doing to Finland—whereas the apposite and more fruitful approach would be to place Finland in its proper place in a larger international constellation of forces and actors. Whether in relation to the

4 INTRODUCTION

ideology of anticommunism or to its geopolitical and military application (in the Russian interventions, during the Winter War or later), Finland was part of a larger European and global community of anticommunists. A small and peripheral but by no means inconsequential actor, its influence grew when its leaders recognised the anticommunist capabilities and inclinations of more powerful actors and when they then positioned themselves so that their country could gain from or contribute to the plans hatched by those with more resources and more power. Throughout his political life—for 65 years—Churchill was one of the most important anticommunists in the world, and his and Finland’s interaction was particularly illuminative of the coalitions forged and the strategies chosen in the course of the century-long anticommunist struggle. Churchill’s contacts with Finland were, however, uneven, and so will be the attention paid to the various phases of this interaction. Considerable attention will be paid to the years 1918–1920, when the Finnish War of Independence was brought to a conclusion and when the Russian interventions and the simultaneous, separate Finnish campaigns in Eastern Karelia and the Olonets were being planned. Less attention will be paid to the Winter War, to its pre-history, and to the Russo-Finnish War of 1941–1944 (the so called ‘Continuation War’). Other periods in Finnish history will receive even less attention. This is so because there is less documentation on the Churchill-Finland relationship in these latter periods, and also because in these periods Finland was largely irrelevant to Churchill’s purposes. The uneven attention paid to these different phases of the relationship reflects the fluctuating role that Finland played in Churchill’s thinking, and it helps place Finnish anticommunism in its proper international context. The study does not try to ascertain what Finns thought about Churchill or about his links with their country. It will not assess how Finland fared in Churchill’s hands, nor will it systematically chart Finnish reception to Churchill’s activities and opinions. On the contrary, its perspective is from the centre of anticommunist action to the periphery. It charts Churchill’s opinions on Finland, and the meaning of Finland for projects that were important to Churchill himself. The book is a case study of how Winston Churchill, a realpolitiker and anticommunist, has shaped the history of a number of (often unexpected) states, and it is based on a lengthy, broader study of Churchill and Anglophone anticommunism. This background will undoubtedly be evident in the approach that the study takes, and indeed it should become evident, for the study is primarily that of Churchillian anticommunism in the broader context of twentieth-century anticommunism and geopolitics. This study is based primarily on private correspondence. It does not fall into the field of diplomatic history sensu stricto since it does not try to chart Churchillian anticommunist activities from the official documents of British and Finnish Foreign Ministries and other Cabinet departments. Churchill’s own extensive collections of correspondence and memoranda, not previously used to

INTRODUCTION 5

recreate his Finnish contacts, are the main primary source. For the sake of convenience, such private memoranda have been referenced from the more readily available, published sources whenever these are to be had. Structurally, there are three basic parts to the study. The period of the Russian interventions (1918–1920), of the Winter War (1939–1940) and of the War of 1941–1944 are prefaced by a short background chapter on Churchill’s views on Finland before Finnish independence. A rather short chapter on the early years of the Cold War completes the chronologically proceeding narrative. The shortness of this chapter reflects Churchill’s gradual lack of interest in and disillusionment with Finland after Finnish leaders opted for neutrality instead of anticommunism after 1945. The prefacing and concluding surveys underline the basic thesis of the study. To Churchill, Finland was a peripheral country, and he wished to influence its policies only on a few crucial occasions. His involvement with Finland was dictated throughout by his anticommunism. Driven by his anticommunist beliefs, Churchill wanted to make sure that limited Finnish perspectives would not endanger the larger projects on which he was decided and which he regarded as in the interest not only of Britain and of Europe but also of Finland itself. Churchill was certain that he himself had devised the perfect mean between anticommunism and geopolitics, and that smaller nations like Finland would just have to slot themselves into the place that he had prepared for them in his overall framework.

6

1 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS, 1900–1918

In early 1888, just after the ice in the Baltic Sea had receded enough to allow navigation, a family party of British aristocrats travelled through the territorial waters of the Grand Duchy of Finland. They were on their way to Berlin after a several weeks’ trip to St Petersburg and Moscow, where they had met the Czar and Czarina of Russia and got acquainted with the life of Russian high society. The family name of the aristocratic party was Spencer-Churchill, better known as Churchill, and its Russian excursion was led by Lord Randolph Churchill, son of a one-time Viceroy of Ireland and a descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough, famous for having defeated Louis XVI of France. At the time of the trip Lord Randolph was no longer one of the rising young stars of the Conservative Party, having already lost his position as one of the most influential and controversial Chancellors of the Exchequer. His trip to Russia and to the Grand Duchy of Finland, then an autonomous part of the Russian Empire, was of a private nature, and the British Government had had specially to point this out after a controversy had arisen over the possible hidden, high political agendas of Lord Randolph’s journey. Neither the Conservative Party leadership nor the Queen looked kindly on Lord Randolph any longer. His private activities abroad were deprecated and his motivations suspected. In Russia itself, it was hoped that the trip by a known leading Slavophobe could herald a possible new direction in Anglo-Russian relations, for he was thought to have changed his earlier opinions while in Russia and was expected to emerge as an advocate of friendlier relations once he returned to Britain. This is what happened.1 Lord Randolph Churchill was, of course, the father and ideological inspiration of Winston Churchill. The causes which Lord Randolph championed throughout his career remained very close to the heart of his son throughout Winston’s long life. The father-son relationship was, however, troubled, as was shown by the fact that neither Lord Randolph nor his American wife, Lady Jennie, stayed in touch with their son while they were on their Russian trip. They had not even told him they would be going. In St Petersburg they were in receipt of a series of letters from young Winston in which he complained about not having been taken along on the exotic trip.2

8 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS

Young Winston was not taken on the Russian and Finnish trip in 1888, and he never came as close to visiting Finland again. Towards the end of his life he did seriously think of making a yachting trip with his wife Clementine and with Aristotle Onassis which would have retraced the steps of that fin d’siècle journey of his parents, but illness prevented this from happening.3 These two abortive trips, separated by 75 years, illuminated the dearth of Churchill’s Finland contacts which characterised most of his lifetime, and no period so much as the decades before the Russian Bolshevik coup d’état. Had it not been for anticommunism after 1917, Churchill would never had had a reason really to concern himself with Finland. A survey of his knowledge of the country in the decades before Bolshevism is, however, requisite for a proper contextualisation of the eventual Churchill-Finland relationship. In the decades before 1917, Churchill was already concerned with the questions of ideology and geopolitics which were to determine his relations with Finland, and in this earlier period, too, Finland came to his attention in connection with these very matters. Churchill, Russia and the Grand Duchy of Finland At the time of his parents’ Russian journey, Winston Churchill was fourteen years of age and close to finishing his elementary education. His had been a typical, even if unhappy, childhood for a scion of an aristocratic British family, in the course of which no attempt had been made to acquaint him with other countries or cultures. It is most likely that he did not even know of the existence of the Grand Duchy of Finland. No major change took place here once Churchill embarked on his early political career. For the first 40 years of his life he had no discernible contacts with or knowledge of Finland. He had had very few opportunities to learn about the smaller nations of Europe, since he had chosen for himself a military career which unfolded with the Royal Hussars in India, Egypt, Sudan and South Africa.4 Had such opportunities presented themselves, it is unlikely that Churchill would have shown any interest in a country like Finland. Since returning to Britain in 1900 he had decided to concentrate almost exclusively on colonial affairs and domestic social reform; not on the broader European context and not on foreign policy in general. As a young Member of Parliament, Churchill’s activities were constrained to purely British and Imperial themes, and he had a reputation as a ‘Little Englander’, uninterested in foreign countries.5 A Finland then aspiring to independent statehood did not fit with Churchill’s early interests. It is, however, likely that Churchill was to some extent aware of the Finnish struggle for independence. Since 1809 Finland had formed a part of the Russian Empire, an autonomous Grand Duchy with its own parliament and currency, which prided itself on its special status in the Empire and, as its elites were wont to emphasise, on its self-image as a nation among nations. Since the 1870s, however, successive Czars of Russia had settled on a Russification programme

BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS 9

with which they tried to make uniform and centrally rule all the different, often autonomous, parts of their realm. This policy of Russification led to the abolishment of the special powers of the Finnish Parliament, to various laws discriminating against non-Russian speakers in employment, forced military service in the Imperial Russian army, expulsions and various other repressive measures by Russian authorities. All of this was strongly resented by the majority of Finns and instigated various resistance movements, including the military resistance movement of the Jägers (jääkäriliike) and the affiliated publicity work of exiled nationalist publicists and aspiring politicians (ulkomaanvaltuuskunta). The former was a collection of some hundreds of young independence-minded men who, from February 1915, went to German army training camps in preparation for what they envisioned as the coming violent struggle against Russian overlordship in Finland. The latter group was more peaceful in its approach, although connected with the Jägers, and it managed to disseminate an image of Finland in the major cultural and political centres of Western Europe as a small, liberal and democratic nation, painfully wronged and patiently struggling for its freedom and national rights.6 The latter version of the Finnish struggle in particular was widely broadcast in the British (and other European) press at the time, since the exiled activists regarded as the building up of a Western pro-Finnish public opinion as the best hope of eventual independence. To this end, several delegations of eminent Finnish politicians and artists were sent to Western Europe, where they were tasked with converting as many as possible of the European intelligentsia and political elite to the cause. By the end of the nineteenth century these efforts had managed to generate considerable British interest in Finland, although almost solely in the Liberal Party circles which, under Prime Minister W.E.Gladstone, were attempting to decree a Home Rule regime in Ireland. In these circles the Finnish case seemed a useful argument for Irish political autonomy as a workable imperial policy. It was not exactly the kind of argument that the Finns wanted to hear, struggling as they were for independence rather than autonomy, yet they could draw some solace from the broader dynamics of the Gladstonians’ investment in the idea of national self-determination and in their foreign policy programme predicated on implementing moral and Christian tenets. Imperial considerations played their role, too, when the Liberals criticised Russian autocracy, but the palpable Liberal animosity to and rivalry with Russia was more closely rooted in a moralism that had a life of its own, a life that might benefit the Finnish cause of independence as well.7 Winston Churchill’s father was, however, one of the leading opponents of Irish home rule, as well as being a consistent and passionate critic of broader Gladstonian worldviews. As long as he was alive, it was impossible for his son to join those Liberal circles that supported the idea of self-determination for small nationalities. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, however, Churchill’s views neared the Liberal position, and when he separated from the

10 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS

Conservative Party in 1904 he affiliated with precisely those Liberals who had been sympathetic to the cause of Finland. In his first ministerial post as Undersecretary at the Colonial Office, Churchill exerted his efforts on behalf of (limited) self-determination for some of the nationalities in the British Empire. In addition, he took a central part in the creation of a new body of social legislation. However, even after this change of parties Churchill clearly was not to be counted among those who championed the Finnish cause. By this time the most prominent champions of that cause were not just the leading Liberal periodicals but also—above all—those socialist and communist circles with which Churchill was not in contact and the activities of which he disapproved. If Churchill did form a conscious image of Finland at this stage of his career—itself not likely—that image was most likely akin to the one that his Liberal allies had formed of the Grand Duchy of Finland: an image of a progressive and democratic, liberal nation struggling peacefully to gain independence.8 This impression may have changed somewhat in the course of the first decade of the twentieth century, when Britain witnessed the first major popular campaigns against Russian antisemitism. Churchill took an active part in these campaigns, and it was customary for the campaigners to regard the Grand Duchy of Finland as a particularly antisemitic territory.9 It is impossible to ascertain whether Churchill, too, reached such a conclusion, or whether he treated Russia as just one large entity and did not want, or was unable, to distinguish between the antisemitism of its different parts. Anyway, he did not specifically exclude Finland from his pronounced denunciation of Russian antisemitism.10 His strong position against Russian antisemitism notwithstanding, Churchill did not become a traditional Russophobe. He was not interested in any such weakening of Russia as Finnish independence would have implied. Indeed, while his father was still alive Churchill had already made his own conclusions on Russia’s geostrategical meaning for the British Empire, an assessment that materially differed from his father’s Russophobe inclinations towards dismemberment of the Russian Empire. Churchill thought that Britain should not act to dismember but rather to build friendship, that friendship rather than the hostility traditional to British public opinion vis-à-vis Russia was in the Empire’s interest. In such a framework the cause of Finland was bound to suffer, and the perceived demands of geostrategy were bound to offset any Gladstonian moral considerations. As early as the 1890s, when he served in India, Churchill had been concerned about Russian imperial expansion. It was precisely because he regarded that expansion as potentially very dangerous to the British Empire’s Asian possessions that he thought it best to search for Russian friendship. The young Churchill would have wanted to construct an arrangement of mutual constraints and limited benefits which would have removed the immediate Russian threat

BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS 11

without forcing Britain into an expensive and dangerous war against Russia. He opposed late nineteenth-century pressures for a pre-emptive strike because he thought that, while such a strike would not materially hurt an empire the size of Russia, it would cause a series of reactions and counter-reactions on such a wide front that the balance of powers in all of Europe would have tottered. This would have led to a dangerous strengthening of Germany, another potential enemy. The German threat, more than anything else, drove Churchill towards the advocacy of a tighter cooperation with Russia.11 There was nothing unusual in these views. Similar views were acceptable both to those early twentieth-century Conservatives who were interested in geostrategy and to the Liberal imperialists who, at that time, were closer to Churchill. The latter grouping represented that part of the Liberal Party which, after the splits caused by the Home Rule struggle, had taken up the moralistic social politics of Gladstone but which in other respects was in conflict with the Gladstonian vision, and especially so regarding foreign policy. The Liberal imperialist foreign policy doctrine was in many respects similar to that of the younger, radical generation of Conservatives. It was typical for both to stress Great Power rivalry as a fact of international life and, given that fact, to search for new ways to defend British imperial interests. One shared method tended to be some form of social reform, often argued from Social Darwinism, and another method was either direct or implicit alliance policy.12 Churchill himself was converted to these kinds of methodologies before the First World War. As a matter of fact he accepted, largely in toto, the basic theses derived from such premises by the leading Liberal imperialist, Sir George Sydenham Clarke—theses which stressed the need for Anglo-Russian friendship, the Royal Navy as the sole agency capable of securing the Empire, and other naval powers as the sole major threat to the Empire. Russia, in other words, was not a topical security threat as long as it did not try to control the seas.13 Churchill’s thinking did not significantly differ from that of the rising spokesman of the extreme Conservative right, Earl Percy (later 8th Duke of Northumberland), either. Earl Percy stressed that an Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance was necessitated by ‘mutual dependence and community of interest’. It was in this congruence of interests, Percy felt, that lay the ultimate guarantee against any Russian assault against the British Empire. It was the same congruence of interests that, according to him, forced Britain to search for necessary assistance against emerging German power, and to search for it from a grand, encircling alliance. Percy also stressed that as Russia was militarily vulnerable in Poland and in Finland it behoved Britain, in need of Russian assistance for its own purposes, not to oppose any extraordinary measures that Russia might implement in those two territories.14 As much as Churchill agreed at this point with Percy’s and Clarke’s leftist opponents on social reform, on the Russian question he did not want to join the majority that these left-wing commentators formed in the Liberal Party. Instead,

12 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS

convinced by the geostrategical series of arguments, Churchill emerged as one of the leading supporters of the Anglo-Russian alliance in several fin d’siècle Liberal governments. His role as a spokesman for the Franco-British entente cordiale and for the Anglo-Japanese naval pact was at least as prominent as was his desire to ensure Russian friendship.15 This realistic and imperial approach to foreign policy prompted Churchill to keep largely silent on internal Russian affairs in the early decades of the twentieth century. With regard to other countries he did keep voicing his support for self-determination, but never in the context of Finland. Not even the conflict between geopolitics and morality, which in the case of Russian antisemitism he had resolved on the side of morality, seemed to him relevant as far as the Finnish struggle for independence was concerned. Churchill, Finland and anti-socialism before 1917 To Churchill, geopolitics were primary before 1917, but it must also be taken into account that by the early twentieth century it was the British left that had taken leadership in the pro-Finnish cause. This fact was of considerable importance to Churchill. Because of this left-wing championship of the Finnish cause, British commentators were increasingly configuring the Finnish struggle against Russification as an aspect of political revolutionarism. This impression was greatly strengthened when, in 1904, an independence-minded assassin had murdered the Russian General-Governor for Finland, General Bobrikov. From that moment onwards, British elite opinion started to turn against Finland, frightened by the unexpected switch to political violence that the assassination seemed to herald. Churchill regarded these developments with great unease. They gave impetus to his other main conviction, parallel to his geostrategic beliefs—his anti-socialism and anticommunism. The Bobrikov assassination was followed by growing cooperation between Finnish independence activists and émigré Russian revolutionists. This cooperation led many a British observer to conclude that Finland had become a major training and recruiting ground for Russian socialists. Further confirmation of such a conclusion seemed to come from the Pro-Finlandia mass meetings, which after 1910 had become favourite agitation grounds for leading members of the Labour Party, the support given to Finnish independence by the Socialist International, and the known presence of some of the leading Russian revolutionists (such as V.I.Lenin) in Finland. Also illustrative of the change of cast among those Britons interested in Finnish independence was the fact that Liberals began to be supplanted in the Anglo-Finnish Society, created in 1911, by Marxists such as H.M.Hyndman and his future wife, Rosalind Travers (who had lived in Finland for a while). One of the official goals of the Society came to be the strengthening and assisting of Russian socialist revolutionaries.16

BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS 13

In the absence of precise documentation, it must be assumed that, after circa 1911, Churchill, too, tended increasingly to equate political radicalism with the Finnish campaigners for independence. It stands to reason that he no longer regarded the latter as interested only in national self-determination but also in revolution, and in a socialist economic and governing system. In any case, Churchill ceased his championship for small nations’ self-determination precisely at the moment when British socialists took the lead in that cause. In 1896 he had supported the Cretan uprising and contested the support given by his father’s Conservative Party to the opposing, Turkish authorities. In 1895 he had supported the Cubans when they fought against Spanish rule, and in 1898 he had protested the British army’s anti-Sudanese activities. Also, the Turkish revolution of 1908 had seemed to him a major triumph for liberalism, given that it supplanted the repressive authorities of the 1890s with more nearly Western-minded men. The Russian uprising of 1905 Churchill had likewise configured as a manifestation of the ‘legitimate’ grievances of an oppressed people. He deemed the violent repression of that uprising a violation of all Western concepts of freedom, and typical of an arbitrary despot. Churchill did not blame the Czar specifically, but rather the whole ‘system’ of centralised oppression which he thought had needlessly rendered the Russians ‘stupid’, unproductive and stagnant. He hoped that before long the Czar’s subjects would gain freedom so that they could release themselves from these structural impediments to their progress and growth. The demands of geostrategy had, however, caused Churchill to moderate his conclusions in the case of Russia, and he had stressed that it was inappropriate to engage in too strong a critique against a ‘friendly’ state.17 Geostrategy did not play a role when, in 1911, Churchill opposed the republicans who won in the Portuguese Civil War. He regarded these republicans as socialists and terrorists who were not interested in forwarding their own people’s freedom, but rather only their own socialist theo ries.18 It is important to note that Churchill refrained from supporting this revolution even on the basis of national self-determination or liberal, democratic progress. This he did because the Portuguese revolution did not seem to him to be a nationalist or a liberal revolution, but a socialist one. There had, in other words, been a fundamental change in Churchill’s views between 1905 and 1911, and after 1911 he no longer regarded supposedly nationalist revolutions as worthy of support. Therefore, on the outbreak of the First World War Churchill should be seen as viewing the Finnish independence fight, too, through the Portuguese prism of social, not national, revolutionism. Support for national freedom fighters was to him always of secondary importance, subservient both to imperial interests and to the pursuit of controlled, non-radical change; after 1911 it was the latter element that came increasingly to the fore, not least because Churchill had come to regard ascendant Germany as such a major threat to European and imperial security that he was loath to support any destabilising

14 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS

forces or series of events anywhere. Consequently, Churchill did not support the Finnish cause. Few historians have dwelt on this early anti-socialist perception in the context of Finland and revolutionary Russia. Taking it into account may, however, be of significance even greater than would at first appear, for the fact is that Churchill was by no means the only Western observer who, after the 1905 Russian uprising, had begun to view supposedly nationalist movements in this new way. Whereas the 1905 uprising had encouraged the Anglophone left to believe that an international revolution had now begun and that the particularly progressive Russians were to inspire other peoples to complete it,19 the political right and the moderate liberals were roused to concern and began to scale down their previous support for nationalist movements. Even the liberal Woodrow Wilson, then Professor of History at Princeton University and later Churchill’s presidential antagonist, had begun to think that the cause of nationalism was being used as a cloak for entirely different purposes. Wilson represented a sizable section of Anglophone observers when he stressed that in countries like Russia, no real conditions existed for genuine nationalism as long as they were deficient—as they then seemed to be—in a spontaneous communitarian consciousness. Wilson thus also regarded the Finns as deficient, and compared their level of civilisation to that of the Hottentots and the Iroquois.20 The British Liberal thinker and parliamentarian, Lord Bryce, whom Wilson greatly esteemed, also thought that the Finns had become racially retarded through too long a contact with the ‘lower’ Slavic races.21 Indeed, from the early twentieth century onwards quite a number of Anglophone liberals grew in the conviction that socialist revolutionaries were manipulating for their own purposes the supposedly retarded or lower races.22 This perception is of great consequence, given that it was Woodrow Wilson who later emerged as a champion of national self-determination and who then stressed that Russian communism, or Bolshevism, was the greatest threat to genuine self-determination. The start of the First World War in 1914 made other threats a priority for the moment, and these kinds of anti-socialist concerns receded in importance and in public discourse. However, they should not be entirely ignored, for they did also impact on the support that the Finnish fight for independence got from the West. All such considerations were, however, put aside once the First World War began. Thereafter Finnish fighters for independence receded into near oblivion, and for a while Churchill no longer referred either to the desirability of national self-determination in principle or to its perversion by socialist revolutionaries. The demands of geostrategy were now primary and intense. During the war, Churchill therefore stressed the importance of the Eastern front and tried in all ways available to him to assist the Russians in their war-making. He wrote in an admiring vein about the campaigns of the Russian army; took care, while the First Lord of the Admiralty, of the supply of new submarines for the Russian fleet; and, while Minister of Munitions, saw to it that munitions and, later,

BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS 15

troops were sent to assist the Russians. The entire Dardanelles operation, which temporarily brought him down, was in large part an aspect of Churchill’s attempt to maintain supply to the Russian armies and thus to make sure that the Eastern ally would continue to aid the British war effort. Afterwards he was for a time in charge of the supply of munitions to Russia, part of which was arranged through Finland. It was in the course of these responsibilities that Churchill had his first direct contact with Finland, albeit from a great distance.23 However, although versing himself somewhat in Finnish geography, it would not seem that experiences of this period in any way changed Churchill’s views on Finland or on Russo-Finnish relations. No such change was to be expected, and no such change took place. Finland was not a battlefield, as such, in the First World War, but it did, as a constituent of the Russian Empire, take part in the war. Some Finns, like General C.G.Mannerheim, later Churchill’s main Finnish contact, fought in the Russian armies. To others, however, the war gave new impetus to the struggle for independence. Many of those who saw the war in this light (especially those in the Jäger movement) tended to orient themselves towards the Germans, if for no other reason than the fact that Germany was fighting the Russians and could therefore be hoped to lend assistance to the Finns’ separate fight. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, the independence-minded Finns seized the opportunity and declared Finland an independent state. Many of the Jägers had by this time returned to Finland and, together with indigenous volunteer corps (the Civil Guard), they formed the core of a ‘White’ army, which was commanded by Mannerheim and set out to crush the Finnish appendix to the Russian revolution, a Red revolt which had broken out. According to some accounts the resultant fighting was a civil war, but for the bourgeois ‘Whites’ it was a war of liberation and of independence—a war liberating Finland from domestic and foreign Bolsheviks and making it independent of Russia. German troops took part in the fighting on the ‘White’ side, and among the entente powers Finland came to be associated with the German push for hegemony in the east.24 While the Finnish Civil War raged in January–April 1918, Churchill played no role in the affairs of the Northern or Eastern theatres of war, and it would seem that he had no real interest in what was taking place in Finland. Instead he concentrated on the battles of the Western front, where the war had just reached a decisive point after the Russian collapse in the east and the resultant major German offensives in the west. Thus Churchill had no contact with those Finns who, after December 1917, began to travel to London and Paris in search of diplomatic recognition and food aid for the new Finnish state. On several occasions he did voice general support for President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of future world order, among which was the right to national self-determination. Once again Churchill stressed this right. War propaganda was, however, at least as strong a motivation for such utterance as was principle, since Churchill was known to be concerned about the rising anti-war feeling and wanted to combat

16 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS

this feeling with idealistic war-aims statements. Moreover, he carefully limited his support to only those of the Fourteen Points that did not impinge on the standing interests of the British Empire. At no point did he specify that Finland was one of those nations that should be granted self-determination or independence. During the war, such a specification was not forthcoming from President Wilson either; on the contrary, his Fourteen Points included an undertaking to keep the Russian Empire territorially intact—an undertaking which obviously was in direct contravention to any Finnish independence. Although he was later converted to supporting Finnish independence, and played a major role in prompting Western recognition for it, originally the President had named only Poland as a nation which should be separated from the old Russian Empire.25 On this point, therefore, Churchill’s ambiguous stance was well in line with the Wilsonian position, itself ambiguous in practice and internally conflicting in its theory. No major conclusions can be drawn from Churchill’s stance. In other words, nothing in Churchill’s experience up to 1917 was such as to make him interested in Finland. Generally speaking, he was aware of its autonomous position under the Czar, and of its struggle for independence, but neither made him regard Finland as relevant to his own purposes. Finland was to him a peripheral and relatively insignificant country, the people of which were possibly liberal and civilised, or revolutionary and dangerous. It belonged to Russia, and its fate was of no real concern in the view of British interests. Moreover, the primary demands of geostrategy required that Russia be kept, if at all possible, as a friendly and strong country, and Churchill was assured that no moral conceptions on small nations’ self-determination should be allowed to interfere with this primary task. The palpable links that Finnish independence activists had forged with socialist and communist revolutionaries had further cooled Churchill towards Finland. Only after Germany had been succeeded by Russian communism as the greatest unpredictable factor in the equation of Europe and the world did Churchill become truly interested in Finland. From then on, it was anticommunism and the geostrategic interests of the British Empire that shaped the Churchill-Finland relationship.

2 CHURCHILL, FINLAND AND THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION, 1919–1920

Churchill became interested in Finland immediately after the First World War. The Finnish Civil War was then beginning to transform itself into a war of liberation, proceeding from an effort to put down an internal communist rebellion into an attempt to secure Finnish independence and borders against the external threat of Soviet Russia. Churchill believed then that the most pressing need of the West was to suppress international communism, and he concentrated almost entirely on drafting detailed plans for a military anticommunist intervention in Russia. After he had been appointed as Secretary of State for War in early 1919, Churchill hoped to enlist all such countries in this intervention that could and were willing to contribute to freeing Russia from Bolshevism. In this context, Finland appeared an exceptionally promising country, and its palpable interest in military anticommunism led Churchill to conclude that it was central for the anticommunist and geopolitical tasks upon which he was setting himself. For the rest of his life, Churchill was to view Finland through the framework of anticommunism and geopolitics that was created in 1919. His realisation that Finland was both interested in anticommunist work and capable of providing significant resources for such work prompted Churchill to take part in sketching some of the planned operations of the latter stages of the Finnish War of Independence, when this war spilled over Finnish borders into Eastern Karelia and Olonets and especially when plans were made for a military intervention in St Petersburg. Because he had concluded that Finland was a potent anticommunist force in its region of the world, Churchill had an abiding interest in the country from then on. Churchill represented a minority view in the British discussions on the Russian problem which coincided with the latter stages and aftermath of the Finnish War of Independence. His activities must be understood in this context. From the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917 at least to the Russo-Polish War of 1920, the Russian question was at the very centre of Western debate, but no consensus was ever reached on how to deal with it. At first the whole question was interlinked with the war against Germany, since the Bolsheviks of Russia had, in March 1918, signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk with the Germans and

18 THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

were thus essentially allied with the Germans. This treaty had led to a de facto German overlordship in large parts of Eastern Europe, including in Finland. Yet during the First World War, decision-making on the Russian question was so dominated by the considerations brought forward by military experts and dictated by the highest decision-makers of the Allied and Associated countries that Churchill, who belonged to neither group, had very little impact on it. The views that he did express were private opinions, significant in the autobiographical context of Churchill’s own anticommunist development but not relevant for immediate policy. This had changed by the time of the Paris peace conference, in which Churchill participated. By the time that conference began to discuss the Russian and Bolshevik problems and to sketch new arrangements for a postwar, hopefully more peaceful, Europe, Churchill was a major and influential policy-maker. By that time, an entire school of anticommunist thought, ‘Churchillism’ (or military anticommunism), was associated with his name.1 Of all Western anticommunists, only Churchill and his supporters were then interested in using armed force against the Bolsheviks, and only for them was Finland a relevant, indeed central, country. Background, contexts and premises Churchill’s interest in anticommunism was based on two distinct but mutually supportive grounds, the geostrategic and the ideological. Both of these factors tended to direct his attention to Finland in the years immediately following the First World War; they also tended to objectify Finland, to make the country only a means to an end. For Churchill, the most pressing task of the post-First World War period was to make sure that Russia did not become a hostile and expansionary state. Russia’s geostrategical position at the heart of Eurasia was such that she could, if she wanted to, easily endanger the security of British possessions in Asia and perhaps the very continuance of the British Empire. On this point, nothing had changed nor could anything change. Russia could easily prompt Britain to tie up such a significant part of its military forces in far-off conflicts, especially in the Afghanistan-India region, that the European flank would become dangerously exposed. Such an exposed European flank would be most useful for Russian purposes of expansion, if it had any, since in any European war Russia could rely on its much shorter lines of transport and communication. Russia’s lines were shorter in Asia, as well, so if a two-front war ever broke out, Britain would be in a very difficult situation. If into this mix were added the greater manpower reserves that Russia had at its disposal, a two-front war became an ever more nightmarish prospect for Britain. Because of these facts, British governments had for centuries followed a diplomatic practice which tried either to build alliances against Russia or, alternatively, to maintain friendly relations with Russia. Churchill’s own

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 19

geostrategic musings in the period of Finnish autonomy had fitted into just this tradition, but, as far as he was concerned, Finland’s importance only grew after the Russian Revolution. After 1917, Churchill and many others feared that the relative success of British Russian policies would now suddenly come to an end, since power in Russia had been seized by a group of ruthless ideologues hostile to all Western countries and values, and especially to Western imperialism. There were definite and well-grounded reasons to suppose that these Bolshevik communists were neither interested in cooperation with the West nor about to live in peace with the West. Russia was torn by civil war and remained, for the time being, a weakened state, but it was in search of new allies at the very time when a supposedly revanchist Germany was also looking for allies, possibly from Russia. British resources had been dangerously depleted, and she needed allies of her own. Therefore, restoration of a continental balance of power became a crucially important task. At the very core of that task was Russia, this time a Bolshevik Russia. It had to be sorted out. Bolshevik Russia did not, of course, create the problems of post-Armistice Europe, but it did considerably complicate the work of solving them. As far as Churchill was concerned, the key to a sustainable balance of powers was the removal of the Bolshevik complication. By the time that Churchill set out to remove the Bolsheviks, his geostrategic vision had crystallised.2 Churchill’s starting point was the assumption that every single state, including Russia, sought above all the maximisation of its own interest. In a world of limited resources this competition inevitably led to wars over natural resources and power. This would happen unless there could be created such an overall framework of constraints, binding upon all states, as would restrain every state by offering a certain amount of benefits and removing the temptation to search for additional gains through war. According to this classic model of the balance of powers, British interests were best served if Britain changed allies according to the dictates of every given situation—that is, by making sure that no single nation could ever gain mastery or dominion over the Eurasian landmass. This goal necessitated the tacit admission that Great Powers were justified in arranging their immediate environs in whatever ways they felt their immediate security needs demanded. This was the price to be paid for the broader balance of powers, which also meant that small countries like Finland were disposable. To this classic doctrine of a balance of powers Churchill appended some of the tenets of the so-called Mahan school. This school diverged from the old Liberal imperialist set of assumptions in that it assumed that land powers were always and inherently threatening to naval powers. The major land powers could be contained only through a comprehensive alliance. In the course of the First World War, Churchill had embraced the further concept of the ‘heartland’, a concept based on the insight of the Mahan school and proffered above all by the Conservative MP Sir Halford Mackinder. This concept further highlighted the

20 THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

supposedly inherent geostrategic and logistical superiority of the land powers, and it, too, hoped to counter this superiority through alliances. Churchill’s embrace of the Mahanite and the ‘heartland’ concepts conspired to make his geostrategical thought even more deterministic than it already was, as well as making Russia, a land power, into a more significant piece of the geostrategical puzzle. Once communist theories of world revolution were added to this mix, Russia appeared as a state that could have a potentially catastrophic impact on the future of Great Britain and of the entire world. In Churchill’s view, the likely threat of Russia could thereafter be negated only by removing the Bolsheviks from the equation and by then returning Russia to her proper position as an integral part of a balance of power system. Convinced that a major country like Russia would not long remain on the margins of world politics, Churchill therefore developed what was an unusual argument for a British imperialist: he suggested that a strong Russia was actually in the British interest. Those tendencies inherent in its nature as a land power could not be effaced, but through skilful policies they could be turned into areas where they were no threat to the British Empire. This necessitated the maintenance of the territorial integrity of Russia and—in the post-1917 situation—the destruction of the Bolsheviks. By definition, it was not necessary to grant independence to nations like Finland. On the contrary, Finland’s continued subjection to Russia might well be necessary. Churchill’s relatively pro-Russian stance prior to the Bolshevik coup d’état had resulted from such geostrategical beliefs. After the First World War, Churchill began to stress that Russia was, before long, bound to rise again. Therefore it was important to assure that once it did so, its leaders were sympathetic and owed a debt of gratitude to Great Britain. This meant that that side of the Russian Civil War that was more likely to emerge victorious and pro-Western must be supplied with war equipment and humanitarian assistance, and that military cooperation be undertaken with it. The guarantee of Russian territorial integrity was another precondition, and one that called for the subjection of nations like Finland. Russia must not be forgotten in its hour of need, for there would be retribution after its civil war if it felt itself abandoned or used, or its war sacrifices given in vain.3 Churchill also hoped for a new, overall balance of powers in which Russia and Germany would cancel each other out. He forcefully advocated a nonpunitive peace in 1919, and then for years after the Versailles Treaty called for the Treaty’s revision. His intent was to make certain that no Russo-German alliance of the vanquished could emerge to endanger the balance of powers. Because of Russia’s size, geostrategic position and natural riches, it was crucial to prevent her from entering the camp of Britain’s likely enemies.4 The absolute centrality of the geostrategic was shown also in that Churchill was initially willing to accept even the Bolsheviks as partners, provided that they would stay away from Germany. In early 1918 many British, American and

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 21

French diplomatists sought for some such arrangement, and there were lengthy negotiations regarding this in Moscow and St Petersburg. Churchill’s readiness to countenance an Anglo-Bolshevik cooperative arrangement was thus not unusual for the time.5 Seen in the context of Churchill’s known and long-standing anticommunism and antisocialism, this readiness, however, powerfully underlined the primacy of geopolitics. The fact was that in the chaotic situation of 1918, not even Churchill took it for granted that the anticommunist ‘Whites’ would emerge victorious in Russia or that they would be capable of meaningful geostrategic collaboration with Britain if they did win. Therefore it was expedient to see whether the Bolsheviks might be interested in such collaboration. As late as April 1918—a month after the Brest Litovsk Treaty—Churchill was convinced that the Bolsheviks did not want to fight alongside the Germans. He thought it possible to reconstitute an Eastern front by giving the Bolsheviks materiel assistance and general cooperation. What is more, Churchill regarded the Bolsheviks as part of the ‘intellect of Russia’, believed that they knew well the moral difference between the entente and Germany, and counted them not just as ‘hostile to Prussian militarism’ but also as sympathetic to Western parliamentary democracy. Given all of this, Churchill would have wished to send special political advisers to Russia who, under the direction of the former US President Theodore Roosevelt, could have managed Russian armies, guided its government and moderated the revolutionary process. At the same time the Allies would have recognised the Russians’ right to whatever economic and political system they wished. At one point Churchill was willing personally to become one of the projected political advisers to the Bolsheviks.6 Churchill’s readiness to cooperate with the Bolsheviks disappeared once the Bolsheviks made it plain that they were not interested in any joint anti-German military operations. Thereafter Churchill joined those who, in the spring and summer of 1918, advocated the use of Japanese and Czech troops in reconstituting the Eastern front. Before long, the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Canada, Japan and Serbia decided to send a total of some 14000 troops of their own to Siberia to assist the Japanese and Czech contingents. The Western intervention was directed against Germany and not against the Bolsheviks, and the troops sent to Siberia were forbidden from engaging the Bolsheviks in battle. Britain and France intended eventually to transport the Siberian-based intervention troops (especially the Czechs) towards the primary, European battlefields, while the United States had undertaken to manage the supply of these forces and to use its presence in Siberia to encourage local movements towards autonomy.7 Churchill himself insisted that the British persist in the former project. Minister of Munitions at that time, he based his planning for future munitions production and distribution on the assumption that a real Eastern front would indeed be created. While the First World War raged, he did not directly

22 THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

participate in decision-making on the Russian intervention; nor did he comment on the landing of British and American troops in the Archangel-Murmansk region of Russia, which was effected as a part of the intervention. He must be assumed to have supported this landing, too. Churchill did strongly support the Anglo-French decision, also taken as part of the broader intervention scheme, to assist those ‘White’ Russian forces which were willing to fight on the Allied side. Victory over Germany was, in other words, the priority, but Churchill thought that it could best be achieved if Russia was kept with the Allies one way or another. However, Churchill played no role in the making of relevant decisions. The memoranda that he wrote regarding Russian affairs during this period were the product of a minister who did not occupy a position at the centre of power. Those who did, often criticised Churchill’s presumption to offer opinions on matters outside his departmental remit.8 In summary, then, Churchill was above all interested in the creation of a Russia that could act as a counterbalance to Germany and its allies, that would be friendly towards the Western coalition, internally strong and geostrategically inactive. As long as the German threat was acute and there remained hope of Bolshevik cooperation in negating that threat, he was ready to accept the Bolsheviks as the new rulers of Russia. This stance was the result purely of geostrategic calculation. By no means was it clear in 1918 that the Bolsheviks would not emerge victorious in the Russian Civil War, or that they would not eventually acquiesce in such a network of multipolar restraints and mutually balancing alliances that Churchill regarded in the national interest of all powers. It was reasonable for Churchill to suspect that in their hour of need and weakness even the Bolsheviks might be interested in such an arrangement, despite perhaps later wanting to disengage from it. However, ideologically Churchill was already a convinced anticommunist. He was given to suspecting the Bolsheviks all the time and on all matters. When Germany was no longer an immediate threat, it did not take long for Churchill to come to regard communist theory and practice as the greatest threat to the British Empire. Inasmuch as the Bolsheviks were believers in a strong state and in unscrupulous methods of operation, and therefore the potential creators of a strong Russia, Churchill was always in theory willing to cooperate with them for geostrategic reasons. After mid-1918, however, the Bolsheviks showed that they were not interested in cooperation or in friendship but rather only in aggression, and Churchill thus concluded that they had become a most topical and major threat. At issue was not just the communist ideology and the resultant hostility towards the capitalist West, but also the interpenetration of communist ideology with a range of other topical dangers—most important of all, with the punitive and hated Versailles peace settlement, against which communism could rally dissatisfied peoples, and with the continued existence of a potentially revanchist Germany, which could be tempted into an alliance with the communists. Even before the German quest for European dominance, Churchill

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 23

had been aware of the danger that communist ideology posed to the British Empire. Now he added new and worrisome geostrategical scenarios to that pre-existing concern and concluded that only by destroying communism could the world become free from the ideological and geostrategic dangers alike. Only in that way could the European balance of powers and the security of the British Empire be assured. From the beginning of his political career, Churchill had been an anticommunist. His aversion to communism was ideological and entirely separate from all geostrategic considerations, but in the post-1919 situation this aversion led him in the same direction as his geostrategic considerations. As early as 1900 he had written of the socialists of that time as a group of foreign, immoral cowards who were dedicated to the coercion of others, to conspiracies and subversion, to requisitionings of private property and women, and to sacrificing individual freedom to an abstract ‘society’. Even at this early stage, Churchill had been one of those British thinkers who believed that socialism would eventually transpire into a totalitarianism (he did not, of course, use the word), where a state directed by an ideology would concentrate all power in itself, would demand absolute, mechanical obedience from all citizens, violate the customary laws of economics, and abandon all known ethical principles. In 1906 he described Marxists as ‘political adventurers who are willing to remodel the world by rule of thumb, who are willing to make the infinite complexities of scientific civilisation and the multitudinous phenomena of their great cities conform to a few barbarous formulas which any moderately intelligent parrot could repeat in a fortnight’. In the place of such doctrines Churchill recommended the model of slow and orderly change which he associated with Liberals and moderate trades union leaders, and which he depicted as the root of the British Empire’s success and stability. Churchill also criticised the then non-socialist Labour Party by suggesting that it represented an anti-national, atheist and semi-communist philosophy of life.9 Churchill was further strengthened in his conclusions by the private study of major socialist writings in which he engaged on a trip to Africa in 1908. This study led Churchill to conclude that the socialist theory was ‘a monstrous and imbecile conception which can find no real foothold in the brains and hearts…of sensible people’. In his view socialism was based on envy and spite, removed the old restraints provided by religion, family, community and state, and violated the manifest economic laws of nature in ways that could only lead to diminished production and general immiseration. Thus socialism and communism would destroy the pre-conditions of the British Empire’s continued existence, which were based on free trade, innovation and regulated individual freedom.10 Later, Churchill’s certainty on these points was further strengthened as he watched the rise of the British Labour movement, recurrent strikes and the violence of continental European syndicalists, revolutionaries and Portuguese

24 THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

republicans, and then the emergence of Russian Bolshevism. Churchill was significantly nearing the ascendant form of conservative anticommunism when, a few decades before the Bolshevik coup d’état, he concluded that Western socialism and Russian communism (or nihilism, as it then tended to be called) were part of the same phenomenon. Also symptomatic of Churchill’s increasingly conservative brand of anti-socialism was his habit of referring to socialism and communism as ideologies, not as economic systems or as ethical frameworks—as ideologies entirely alien to all civilisation, as ‘a deliberate, world-wide, profoundly conceived conspiracy’ which intended to lead mankind into ‘universal slavery’.11 Churchill’s overriding hatred of communism became a sine qua non of his outlook in late 1918, when the Bolsheviks unleashed their ‘Red Terror’. The statement made by Prime Minister Lloyd George, that it was Churchill’s. ducal blood that revolted at the sight of so many Russian Grand Dukes being butchered, was unjust regarding the depth of feeling that now seized Churchill. At play was a much more profound conviction, a conviction based on a denunciation of socialism as inhuman and unworkable, on a deep moral and humanitarian aversion to all systematic use of violence by the state against its own citizens, and on a intense respect for the rights of the individual. The murder of the British military attaché, Captain F.N.A.Cromie, on the steps of the British Embassy in St Petersburg in October 1918 had also been a particularly great blow, given that Churchill knew the murdered officer personally. In Cromie’s murder were incorporated all those aspects of communism that Churchill had resented since the beginning of the century. The Conservative press in Britain regarded the murder as ‘the greatest of all infamies’ and as a ‘pathological study…in homicidal mania’, the leaders of which should be shot at sight. Churchill agreed entirely. He demanded that the British government hold Bolshevik leaders personally responsible and punish them for this war crime, no matter how long it took to hunt them down.12 Cromie’s murder and the Red Terror as a whole showed to Churchill’s satisfaction how communism operated in the country that it had seized in 1917. However, even more important for the development of his anticommunism was Churchill’s assessment of the ways in which the communists acted outside the borders of Russia. The revolt of the Reds in Helsinki, Finland, in January 1918 was one of the first attempted Bolshevik-style coups that took place outside Russian borders, and Churchill paid close attention to what happened there. His conclusions further shaped his views on the nature of communism. The events in Finland confirmed what had thus far been hypotheses. In his memoirs of the First World War Churchill painted a stark picture of the Finnish Reds’ revolt and the resultant civil war, a war in which Churchill did not see the local Red Guards as independent actors but rather as a subversionary movement directed from Moscow and St Petersburg, and which he saw as an attempt to topple the free bourgeois system of Finland and to expand the

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Bolshevik regime’s sway. Certain that the whole Red operation was directed from abroad, Churchill regarded the counterattacks of the Finnish ‘Whites’ as an anticommunist war which had a profound moral and strategic justification. According to him, after the Finnish Red Terror the bodies of murdered bourgeoisie filled the hallways of government offices and gardens, and it was therefore quite appropriate and understandable that ‘this dour, northern people, roused to fury’ made retribution without compunction and in a prolonged fashion. Churchill refused to accept the charges about a White Terror that were flying about at the time in the left-wing press in Britain—about an ‘example of organised ferocity and wholesale brutality…[with] no parallel in modern history’—or about the Whites’ leader, General Mannerheim, the alleged ‘butcher’ of more than 20000 of his opponents and one of the pantheon of all-time great and reactionary dictators. Such claims were, according to Churchill, entirely ‘absurd’, and Mannerheim was ‘the saviour of Finland’.13 Churchill was ready to accept all the measures that the Finnish Whites employed, and to go even further than they had gone. The tactics of the communists were to him so cunning and efficient that only extreme measures could be effective against them. V.I.Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, had himself stated in a 1918 interview (published in British newspapers) that the tactics tried in Finland would be used in other countries before long. The communist coups d’état that took place the year after, in Bavaria and in Hungary, only convinced Churchill further that this was indeed the case. When Russia then attacked Poland in 1920, still using the same tactics, Churchill could then note that the warnings he had given about these tactics two years ago had been borne out and that there remained no hope whatsoever of any peaceful coexistence between the Bolsheviks and the rest of the world. The communist way of war that had been exposed in these cases was, in his view, entirely new, an innovation that employed armies ‘with bayonet and with cannon’ as well as ideological ‘typhus bearing vermin…which destroy the health and souls of nations’. The Bolsheviks had written a ‘veritable drill book prepared in a scientific spirit for subverting all existing institutions’, Churchill believed, where ‘the method of enforcement is as much a part of the Communist faith as the doctrine itself’.14 In each case the process unfolded according to a simple sequence: first Moscow would agitate peasants and workers against their employers, railroads and public services, into strikes; soldiers into revolt; and the lower classes against the upper classes; then it would create pacts and alliances with the moderate left and champion free speech and democracy, all in the pursuit of further destabilisation of the society under their attack; and after all this it would inject its secret allies in the moderate socialist movement into government as the supposed rectifiers of the chaotic situation. However, socialists were inefficient and indecisive; they might well curb freedom of speech and curtail the rights of the bourgeoisie, but they were incapable of rectifying the broader unrest that

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communist agitation had created. Communists would further stoke the embers of the unrest at this point. Moscow would do all this in the confident expectation that once things got really unbearable, someone would invite its ‘peacekeepers’ and ‘stabilisers’ into the country to restore order. A Bolshevik peace was thus but another name for war.15 In this scenario, geostrategic and ideological threats became intertwined in a potent and unprecedented fashion. According to Churchill, the resultant compound necessitated that the spider be crushed at the centre of its web, the monster strangled at birth.16 This was a conclusion practically identical with those reached in large parts of the British and American right, but Churchill was one of those who gave the conclusion its most eloquent rhetorical expression. He drew his own conclusions first as he watched the events in Finland in 1918, and it is not surprising that he assumed he would find men and women in that country, in particular, who had come to the same kind of conclusions and would be willing to undertake extreme measures to remove the threat. Churchill, Finland and the anticommunist front As soon as he became the Secretary of State for War in early 1919, Churchill began to search for allies both at home and abroad for his anticommunist projects. In the situation then existing, an excellent group of allies was available in that group of Finns known as the ‘Activists’, who were already planning operations in Eastern Karelia, in the Olonets and in the St Petersburg region. These people were not the only ones in whom Churchill became interested, but they certainly were not among the least important. His entire anticommunist scheme, which he was beginning to implement, rested on the assumption that it would be possible to destroy the Bolshevik regime only if military assaults were directed against the Bolshevik heartland from a number of directions, simultaneously and on a coordinated basis. Simply because of its geographical location, Finland would inevitably be central to any such multi-front offensive. Throughout 1919, Churchill therefore worked at Versailles, in the British government, in the press and in secret consultations with foreign allies for the construction of such a multinational anticommunist coalition of which Finland would be a key part. Churchill’s search for allies occurred in a context where the Paris peace conference had already begun to ponder the Russian question and the overall peace settlement. As the minister in charge of the British army, Churchill had cause to participate in the Paris deliberations on many occasions, and in simultaneous public debates he soon emerged as the primary spokesman and symbol of the type of anticommunism known as ‘Churchillism’. This military anticommunist option competed with a negotiation and pacification option that was associated with the American President, Woodrow Wilson, and also with Prime Minister Lloyd George’s preference for trade cooperation as the solution

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to Bolshevism. Both these alternatives to ‘Churchillism’ hoped to contain any territorial expansion of the Bolshevik regime, but neither envisioned or set out for the outright destruction of that regime. There were tactical reasons for declining this option, but the decision was also shaped by a manifest, if limited, sympathy towards some aspects of Bolshevism that was shown by Wilson and Lloyd George alike. Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George had long believed in the necessity and inevitability of increased collectivism in the operations of Western societies, and they regarded collectivism as ethically superior to unregulated capitalism. Even after the Bolshevik coup d’état, these two men believed that eventually Western-style New Liberal/Progressive collectivism and Soviet-style socialism would converge. This expectation was in the background when, concurrently with Churchill’s embrace of military anticommunism, the Paris conference began to offer several initiatives to the Bolsheviks.17 It did not take long for the so-called Prinkipo Plan to flounder, and for its successor, the April 1919 Hoover-Nansen Plan, to do likewise. The former had proposed a peace conference with the Bolsheviks and all their Russian opponents, and the latter offered food aid to the Bolsheviks in return for certain concessions. While these two initiatives were proffered, Central Europe plunged ever deeper into the welter of Bolshevism, with Bolshevik-style coups d’état taking place in Bavaria and Hungary and soviets of workers and soldiers being founded in Britain, France and even the United States. The extreme left expected an imminent revolution even in South America, where it organised syndicalist unrest. As the world situation escalated in this way, and the Paris conferees continued to vacillate, it gradually became clear that Wilson’s and Lloyd George’s plans were bankrupt. In the constellation that followed, the military anticommunist option that was represented by Winston Churchill and by the British, French and the American right gained in popularity. Churchill knew well that Great Britain did not have either the monetary or the manpower resources necessary for a successful military intervention against the Bolsheviks. Therefore he, too, needed the support of countries like Finland. It is true that in late 1918 he had still talked about a possible joint intervention by the five major Western powers and the Russian Whites.18 However, after he had been informed of the views of the army commanders, in early 1919, he concluded that it was impossible to use British conscript troops either in suppressing domestic unrest or in a foreign military intervention against the Bolsheviks. His conclusion was further confirmed by the series of military revolts that swept the British army in early 1919. These revolts placed the reliability of the British conscript army in serious doubt.19 Churchill therefore concluded that British troops could not form the bulk of an anticommunist intervention army. Churchill did hope to employ, for as long as possible, those Allied and Associated troops which had been sent to Russia during the World War. As of

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early 1919, there remained some 160000 Allied and Associated troops in various parts of Russia, sitting largely idle, proscribed by Allied orders from undertaking anti-Bolshevik offensives and engaged mostly in the training and instructing of local anti-Bolsheviks. Some 8000 of these troops were positioned on the Kola Peninsula in the north of Russia, up to 80000 in Siberia (from Vladivostok to the Ural Mountains), and the rest in southern areas around the Caspian Sea and Afghanistan. There was also a Royal Navy flotilla in the Baltic Sea, and several technical and political military missions in Finland, in the Baltic States and in Omsk in Siberia (and eventually in the south of Russia). In each of these areas there operated sizable ‘White’ anti-Bolshevik forces, many of which had come to cooperate with Allied troops in the course of the wartime intervention. Under the direction of General Denikin in the south, Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, General Miller in the north and General Yudenich in the northeast, indigenous Russian anti-Bolshevik troops amounted to approximately 400000 men. An additional 50000 Czech troops assisted the ‘Whites’ in Siberia.20 In calculations prepared at the War Office in January 1919, it was assumed that all of these Allied and ‘White’ forces together could field some 600000 active fighting men against some 800000 Bolsheviks.21 In addition, all the newly created states of northeastern Europe—Finland, Poland and the Baltic States—were interested in anti-Bolshevik operations and could field considerable contingents of soldiers, as could other longer-established Border States, including Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. In his plans of December 1918 and January–February 1919, Churchill envisioned the creation of a special Allied general staff which would concert and direct the offensive of all of these various anti-Bolshevik forces, as well as a wide-ranging regimen of Allied technical assistance and supply of munitions and other military equipment.22 Churchill hoped to use all these troops. If they were directed to anticommunist operations, Churchill thought that the existing Allied intervention forces could successfully cooperate with local ‘Whites’ and with the Border States and together destroy Bolshevism. It was a plan which its French supporters called the ‘encirclement of Bolshevism on all fronts’, and was inspired by the conviction that the Bolsheviks were a force so utterly determined and unscrupulous that their menace could be negated only by a concerted, international military attack into their heartland, and further, that all of Russia needed be seen as one theatre of operations, all of its four geographical fronts interlocked and standing or falling together.23 When he assumed office, Churchill had an opening of some months, possibly up to half a year, in which to effect such a combined attack, for climatic and transportation conditions made it impossible to evacuate Allied troops before the spring of 1919.24 The original plan for Allied operations had to be abandoned at a fairly early stage—certainly by 14 February 1919—because of vociferous opposition from Prime Minister Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George intervened secretly with the American peace delegation to prevent acceptance of

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Churchill’s plan, and that initial defeat was followed by President Wilson’s unilateral decision to withdraw American troops from the north of Russia (13 February 1919) and by the British War Cabinet’s decision to do likewise (4 March 1919).25 Given the climatic conditions in the north, the evacuation decisions could not be immediately implemented, and this left Churchill with a window of opportunity. Until evacuation could be effected, Churchill was empowered to take the measures that he deemed necessary for the defence of British troops, and to supply the ‘White’ armies with various kinds of assistance. Taking advantage of these powers and of the forced period of waiting before any evacuations could take place, Churchill recast his original plans so as to put the premium on making proxy fighters of interested ‘White’ and Border States troops. It was at this point that he began to concentrate more and more on Finland. The more he learned about existing Finnish plans for proxy fighting, the more interested he became in Finland. Finland was only one of many actors intended as parties to his war coalition but, given Churchill’s guiding strategic conception, it was a central and indispensable one. It lay within miles of St Petersburg, had a large army with a well-trained officer corps eager for anticommunist duty, and a leadership amenable to offensives intended for the destruction of Russian Bolshevism. The Commander-in-Chief of the army was General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the hero of the recent Finnish War of Independence and the interim Regent of Finland from the middle of December 1918 to late July 1919. A former officer in the Czar’s army and a conservative aristocrat who was deeply suspicious of communist theory and practice, Mannerheim was to round off his long career in 1944 by becoming the President of Finland, having in the meantime commanded Finnish troops in the Winter War (1939–1940) and in the War of 1941–1944.26 In 1919, as throughout his adult life, he was above all interested in securing the eastern border of Finland and, like Churchill, he thought that such security could only be found through the installation of a friendly non-Bolshevik Russian government. In his view, a friendly Russian government could in turn be produced only by assisting the ‘White’ anti-Bolshevik armies that were active in several outlying parts of Russia. Such assistance alone could create such a bond of gratitude between the ‘Whites’ and the Western world as was necessary to mitigate Russian traditions of expansionism. To this end, Mannerheim and his supporters in the Activist party (not a political party but rather a collection of right-wing Jägers, Civil Guard officers and publicists) devised plans for ridding Russia of the Bolsheviks using the force of Finnish arms.27 This vision was unpopular in Finland, not least because the Russian ‘Whites’ seemed unwilling to countenance Finnish independence, wrested violently and at great cost during the Russian revolutions. Most Finns were also traditionally anti-Russian and suspicious of all propositions which would have aided Russia to regain national strength, utterly unable to conceive of safe or friendly Russians. These deeply entrenched perceptions and prejudices complicated

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Mannerheim’s self-assumed commission, and meant that Mannerheim, as much as Churchill, needed foreign allies. Thus, even before Churchill had become interested in military intervention, Mannerheim had travelled to London and to Paris in search of influential allies. In early December 1918 he had broached his intervention plans at the Foreign Office and also at the War Office (before Churchill’s tenure there), and had talked about them to leading Conservative newspapers.28 Such rather general plans reached Churchill some time in the early months of 1919. At least since the beginning of the year, the Finnish government’s representative in London had maintained contact with a close Churchill ally in anti-Bolshevik tasks, the Conservative MP Sir Samuel Hoare, formerly an intelligence officer in Russia and then the head of a Coalition Group for Foreign Affairs, a pressure group for a military interventionist Russia policy.29 This seems to have been the avenue through which Mannerheim’s suggestions first came to Churchill, although it is possible that the War Office staff had informed him of the General’s December 1918 talks there. Hoare was certainly aware of Mannerheim’s plans from early February, and he made them one of his main lines of argument in the following months.30 Churchill himself referred to these plans for the first time in March 1919, when he consulted the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, about them.31 King George V had also become interested in the plans after ‘White’ generals had contacted him in the course of their ongoing attempts to move sympathetic Finns to action.32 The same were further brought to Churchill’s attention by the Liberal MP Sir William Sutherland, Prime Minister Lloyd George’s former private secretary.33 Churchill did not immediately pursue the suggestions, apart from sending them to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. When word reached him of Mannerheim’s plans he was still seeking the support of the Versailles Conference for authorised military operations by Allied troops, but once Wilson and Lloyd George had turned this plan down in February, Churchill came to perceive in Mannerheim’s plans a promising contingency option in case he did not prevail in further persuasion among the Allied powers. Without ever explicating it in so many words, he seems to have concluded that by proceeding with secret encouragement to Mannerheim’s alternative plans he could set in motion a series of events which would force the hand of the recalcitrant Versailles Conference and pressure it to support the (by then assumedly) well-advanced military operations. All Churchill’s intervention-related activities after February-March 1919 must be seen in this context. Throughout, Churchill’s premise was both simple and demanding, coloured by geostrategical considerations but rooted in passionate anticommunism. ‘Most people wish to get free from Russia and to leave her to work out her own salvation or stew in her own juice’, he wrote in a late 1918 memorandum:

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Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a very large country, a very cold country, a very disagreeable country, inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off. We on the other hand have just finished an important and expensive war against the Germans. We have won this war. We do not want to have a new war…Unhappily, events are driving in a different direction, and nowadays events are very powerful things. There never was a time when events were so much stronger than human beings. We may abandon Russia: but Russia will not abandon us. We shall retire and she shall follow. The bear is padding on bloody paws across the snows to the Peace Conference….34 The first St Petersburg plan (May–July, 1919) The Mannerheim-Churchill collaboration began in a situation where Churchill’s area for manoeuvre had been severely restricted by the 4 March evacuation decision and by the Hoover-Nansen effort to reach pacification of Russia by non-military means. However, a broad coalition of Anglo-American and Finnish Conservative politicians, high-ranking British and French officers and émigré Russians was mightily exerting itself on behalf of a military intervention.35 The authorisation to supply ‘Whites’, which had been given to Churchill, afforded, if expertly seized, the means of building an independent war coalition. By the middle of 1919 Mannerheim’s proposals had begun to be examined in detail by Churchill’s staff in Paris, especially by General Spears, a confirmed anticommunist, who got in touch with Mannerheim during his intermittent residence in Paris.36 It was also decided that a special military mission under Lieutenant-General Sir Hubert Gough was to be sent to Finland, there to make contact with Mannerheim and his coterie. It was an odd choice, given that Gough detested the Chief of the Imperial Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, almost as much as he detested Churchill. Indeed, Gough had confronted Churchill with a threat of mutiny when, in 1914, Churchill had been the First Lord of the Admiralty and had contemplated coercing Ulster into Irish Home Rule. Subsequently, Gough had become convinced that Churchill was secretly pro-German and thoroughly unreliable. Moreover, Gough personally opposed Churchill’s intervention plans, and when he arrived in Finland he immediately made contact with some of the more notorious extreme left figures of that country. So close was this contact that the commander of the British naval contingent in the Arctic Sea regarded Gough himself as a Bolshevik.37 Churchill nevertheless told the chosen intermediary of his desire to have Bolshevik Russia attacked as soon as possible. His walls festooned with maps of the Russo-Finnish and Siberian battlefronts, Churchill was already convinced that Finland was eager to oblige, that victory was relatively easily obtainable, and that what remained was to keep the process going as details were hammered out.38

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Gough reported from Finland that General Mannerheim was indeed ‘dying to attack Petrograd’, and that he was supported in this eagerness by the Russian émigré General Yudenich who commanded the northwestern ‘White’ armies from Estonia but was then living in Helsinki.39 There followed a lengthy series of consultations and meetings in Paris, London and Helsinki, and trips by General Mannerheim to other interested states as Churchill’s intermediary and co-conspirator. In the course of these consultations a very special relationship emerged between the two military anticommunists, which had potentially significant repercussions for policy. Churchill was always to remember the collaboration into which he entered with the Finn, whom he regarded as ‘a real man, strong like a rock’.40 The broad framework for the planned operation was sketched in the so-called Golovin Memorandum, which was presented to Churchill in early May. In this plan, an émigré ‘White’ general then residing in London suggested that the Allies recognise Admiral Kolchak’s regime and supply him with assistance on a grand scale, and that simultaneously there be unleashed a major anti-Bolshevik assault consisting of coordinated attacks from Finland and Estonia, from Siberia, and from the north of Russia. In the north British troops would take the lead, in Siberia Admiral Kolchak’s force, and on the Western front Finland would be enlisted.41 Coming at such a moment, the Golovin Memorandum seems to have given Churchill the idea of altering previously designed British evacuation plans and having the evacuation preceded by an offensive that was timed to coincide with a westward push by ‘White’ troops. In the resultant, highly secret Kotlas-Viatka plan, British troops would advance from their far northern positions towards the town of Viatka on the Vychega River and Kolchak’s forces would simultaneously march to the town of Kotlas, linked with Viatka by a strategically crucial railway. Once the link was effected, the British could finally withdraw, leaving the control of most of Siberia and all of northern Russia safely in Kolchak’s hands. Churchill himself referred to this plan as the first ‘definite aggressive action against the Bolsheviks’, and he was very careful never to admit its existence in public.42 The Kotlas-Viatka plan was approved by the War Cabinet on 11 July 1919. Concurrent with its finalisation was a major push for Finnish action. Churchill, as Golovin, regarded Finnish action as an integral part of the Kotlas-Viatka offensive in that it would provide a needed diversion in the west while the British and Kolchak operated in the north and the east. Generals Spears and Gough were therefore enjoined to impress Churchill’s (unofficial) earnest request for a speedy Finnish advance on St Petersburg. General Mannerheim, however, felt constrained to set several significant preconditions to the launch of the operations which he had already generally planned. Although he was at this time the Regent of Finland and a hero to a large section of Finns, his position vis-à-vis the Finnish Parliament had always been relatively weak, and he was well aware of the persistent opposition to military interventionism which

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animated influential parliamentary groups. To pacify and negate this opposition, Mannerheim asked, repeatedly from May onwards, that Britain officially encourage his planned operations and provide a loan of £15 million. He also asked Britain to put pressure now on the expected representatives of a future non-Bolshevik Russia so that it would recognise Finnish independence, and arrange for a plebiscite in Eastern Karelia and for automony in the Archangel and Olonets areas, and for the demilitarisation of the Baltic. Once these and some other, minor, conditions had been met, the General promised speedily to march to St Petersburg and take control of it.43 Churchill regarded these demands as preposterous and completely unrealistic.44 Yet he would also have known that his main means of getting information on Finnish affairs at that moment, General Gough, was notorious for his intimate contact with the extreme Finnish left and had a most ungenerous view of Mannerheim’s politics, values and motivations.45 Things might not therefore be as bleak regarding Mannerheim as Gough was suggesting, and Mannerheim might simply be trying to play for extra benefits. In any case, Churchill endeavoured to do what he could to acquire official approval to as many of Mannerheim’s requests as possible. Far from abandoning the Mannerheim contact or the plan, Churchill, Hoare and a host of others interested in encouraging a Finnish assault on St Petersburg began a frenzied series of behind the scenes pressurising at crucial points. Not unbeknownst to Churchill, Mannerheim himself was at the same time closeted in secret negotiations with representatives of General Yudenich, the leading ‘White’ general operating in the areas bordering on Finland. These negotiations were conducted on 8 and 20 May, and on 18 June they produced a secret Mannerheim-Yudenich Memorandum which was speedily transmitted to the War Office (and from there to Versailles). This document settled the respective roles of Finnish and participating ‘White’ Russian armies, nominated Mannerheim as the commander of the offensive, and stipulated that after victory had been achieved Finnish forces would remain in Russia for an unspecified period of time to assist the ‘White’ forces in keeping order.46 The arrangement was never precisely coordinated with the Kotlas-Viatka plan, but operationally it wove in with it, and it was clear that Churchill would have preferred Mannerheim’s attack and the Kotlas-Viatka plan to unfold simultaneously. It was to this end that Churchill began to exert himself. The extent and purpose of these exertions is not readily apparent in his official memoranda—which, in deference to Lloyd George’s attitude, had by this time fallen in line with official policy and, on the whole, envisaged mere material assistance to ‘White’ armies and territorial guarantees to Border States.47 Yet all this could be changed by the force of events which Churchill was busy arranging behind the scenes. At this particular point, in May-June 1919, all hinged on the final attitude of Yudenich’s superior and the Siberian commander, Admiral Kolchak, and on British replies to Mannerheim’s loan requests.

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The breadth and coordination of efforts that ensued in the latter half of 1919 to bring about a concerted military assault has been obscured by historiographical concentration on the simultaneous Council of Four discussions on the recognition of Admiral Kolchak as the de facto head of a Provisional Russian Government. Much attention has been given to the surprising 23 May decision conditionally to recognise and assist the Admiral, but the entire episode has oddly been dissociated from the military plans it was intended to serve. Historians have correctly noted that Wilson and Lloyd George were willing to give that belated subsidy and recognition only because they had become convinced that Kolchak was winning in any case. It has also been correctly noted that they actually envisaged humanitarian and not primarily military subsidies, and that even these—let alone any official recognition—were conditional on Kolchak giving certain specific promises on social and other reforms. Wilson and Lloyd George, in other words, were interested in assuring the future liberal policy of a victorious Kolchak regime, and they made subsidy and recognition conditional on such assurances.48 What this undoubtedly correct reconstruction of these two men’s intentions has obscured is the fact that the whole recognition/subsidy decision was, in fact, both initiated by and guided through by Churchill. It was intended as a surety for the Kotlas-Viatka plan and the St Petersburg operations, not as a measure to bind Kolchak to liberal policies. Churchill deliberately manipulated Wilson’s and Lloyd George’s known desires for a liberal Russia by taking the lead in demanding a coupling of Kolchak’s recognition with specific promises on social reforms. In an interminable series of memoranda to the Prime Minister in April–June 1919 he kept hammering away at this, memoranda in which Churchill sketched the queries and conditions which were eventually to be sent to Kolchak. But what was truly important was that amongst such conditions were hidden the military conditions which had to be met if the Kotlas-Viatka and St Petersburg plans were to be put in operation.49 The fact is that from the point of view of the military interventionists, Admiral Kolchak did not himself matter. They did not really care whether he was to be a liberal or a traditional autocratic ruler. He mattered only because he was the man who could launch eastern offensives simultaneously with Mannerheim’s western offensives, and who alone could also set loose the Finnish side of the putative assault, given the Finnish conditions. Without a two-pronged assault Churchill and his military advisers could not foresee a realistic chance of success, but with the Admiral’s concurrence to the Mannerheim-Yudenich, Golovin and Kotlas-Viatka plans it would be possible to overturn Council of Four recalcitrance by presenting a fait accompli. This was why Churchill took the lead in urging recognition. Unofficial behind-the-scenes pressure on Kolchak was a crucial aspect of Churchill’s strategy. To make sure that Kolchak accepted the Wilsonian-Lloyd Georgian conditions—within which were embedded the

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Churchillian-Mannerheimian conditions—Churchill and Hoare intervened with Kolchak, repeatedly and directly, to remind him of the implicit linkage between pleasing the liberal leaders, receiving recognition and military assistance from them, and being able to put in motion the St Petersburg plan.50 These secret communications are often forgotten when the 23 May decision conditionally to recognise Kolchak is discussed, and it has not been apparent to historians how crucial Churchill was in procuring the reform promises which Wilson and Lloyd George wanted. That such promises were needed was an idea that Churchill himself had insinuated into Wilsonian-Lloyd Georgian conversations, and he had even covertly dictated the very terms requested. All the while he was in touch with the assigned promise-maker, trying to make sure that he complied. All this manoeuvring was designed to help unleash the St Petersburg/Kotlas-Viatka operation. As it happened, all the tracks simultaneously bore fruit. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, replied from Paris on behalf of the British delegation that he had no objections to the Mannerheim-Yudenich Memorandum, and that he subjected it merely to Kolchak’s final approval.51 Kolchak gave that approval on 4 and 23 June, when he replied to the Council of Four on its list of recognition conditions. The Council of Four immediately confirmed its (equivocal) recognition of the Kolchak regime and promised to send greatly increased material and military assistance.52 The Finns were also told that the Allies would greatly appreciate the start of the St Petersburg operations. In one document circulated to Churchill’s Finnish collaborators it was even claimed that the Americans had agreed to participate in the operations, from southern Russia (where they didn’t actually even have troops) and under British overall direction.53 Plainly inauthentic though it was in the form in which it was communicated to the Mannerheim group, this document did convey the very considerable optimism which had suddenly seized Churchill (and other military interventionists). Churchill was now convinced that the Americans had accepted his comprehensive Kotlas-Viatka and St Petersburg plans, and that at long last the Allies had chosen ‘definitely and irrevocably to take sides against the Bolsheviks’.54 In this hopeful situation, British operations began in the north and Admiral Kolchak’s forces started a slow march westwards. In the end it proved impossible, however, to nudge the Finnish Parliament into keeping their part of the hoped-for bargain. The loan and the other guarantees requested by Mannerheim never arrived, and without them Mannerheim was in no position to convince sluggish Finnish political leaders.55 He could have declared a state of war and gone ahead regardless—indeed, this was the ‘Activist Party’ preference, and a coup d’état conspiracy was hatched to follow it through before Mannerheim was due, on 25 July, to relinquish his office as Regent. However, Mannerheim was aware of the dangers that such a constitutionally suspect procedure, carried out in the face of parliamentary opposition, would involve, especially at the time when the new Finnish

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Constitution was just about to transfer his Regency powers over to his parliamentary critics. Mannerheim decided against any coup, and instead put up a losing bid in the first Finnish presidential elections on 25 July. After this he continued to negotiate with the new Finnish leaders for a declaration of war and for the continued preparation of the St Petersburg offensive. The conditions for Mannerheim’s continued service as Commander-in-Chief were, however, not accepted and, admitting defeat, he travelled abroad.56 While all this was taking place in Finland, the other planks of the KotlasViatka edifice rapidly collapsed. President Wilson did not follow through with his promise of military assistance (until September 1919, when shoes, underclothing and some rifles were sent). Lloyd George insisted—and had the War Cabinet decree by late August—that only one final, fixed sum of British assistance be set for the ‘Whites’ and that no more aid was to follow at any time.57 Kolchak’s offensive then suddenly bogged down and began to teeter precipitously on the verge of a serious reversal. British troops had to be evacuated from the north without the Kotlas-Viatka link-up having been achieved, and without any Finnish assault on St Petersburg. The second and third St Petersburg plans (October 1919–January 1920) A new attempt to procure a coordinated attack on St Petersburg was launched in October 1919. By that time General Yudenich had begun a major offensive on the city, coordinated with simultaneous offensives by Kolchak and Denikin from the east and the south. British forces could no longer be of assistance, for they had gone from the north, but Yudenich asked at least for the Finnish assistance that had been agreed upon in the earlier Yudenich-Mannerheim Memorandum. This request, and Yudenich’s evident success (for within weeks he was within 35 miles of St Petersburg), inspired Mannerheim once again to redouble his efforts and Churchill to do likewise. So promising was the situation for most of October that Churchill decided to send considerable shipments of supplies to Yudenich—including tanks and aeroplanes—and even stated that come Christmas he himself would enter St Petersburg and draft a new Russian constitution.58 A concerted Finnish assault on St Petersburg would have been extremely important in this situation. However, having lost the presidential elections, Mannerheim no longer had an official position with which to back up his interventionist plans and requests. Although he continued to enjoy significant support in the right-wing ‘Activist Party’ and in the Civil Guards, the complexion of the Finnish Parliament and the doubts of the new President, the anti-interventionist K.J.Ståhlberg, severely restricted his influence. Mannerheim didn’t even live in Finland any longer, but rather shuttled between residences in London, Paris and various Scandinavian cities. Nevertheless, he remained optimistic and was determined to create, with

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Churchill, such an international coalition as could impress and force the hand of the Finnish leaders. On 10 October 1919, Mannerheim therefore travelled to London for his first personal meeting with Churchill. No documentation has survived from this meeting, but the British press reported at the time that Churchill had again asked for Finnish intervention and Mannerheim had indicated that one was still possible.59 He had been greatly encouraged by Churchill’s resolution and emerged convinced that finally success was within reach.60 The General proceeded speedily to Paris, from where he sent a public appeal to the Finnish Parliament on 28 October, asking for acceptance of his revised plans in the name of Finnish guardianship of Western civilisation.61 Planning and consultations also proceeded apace between Mannerheim, Parisian émigré Russians and General Spears, and Spears in turn reported all news back to Churchill. From Paris, Mannerheim also sent a personal representative to see Churchill, bearing further memoranda and verbal suggestions. The result of all this renewed activity was that Mannerheim revised downward his loan request, from £15 to £3 million, asked for surplus military aircraft and tanks instead, and offered to march to St Petersburg immediately upon having had his reduced conditions met. Mannerheim was reportedly certain that he could deliver ‘the fatal blow to Bolshevism’. Churchill was also told that if President Ståhlberg could still not be persuaded, Mannerheim’s supporters in the ‘Activist party’ might take matters into their own hands, engineer a coup and proceed with the attack on St Petersburg without normal parliamentary approval.62 At this point Churchill himself tried (unsuccessfully) to have his intermediary, General Spears, transferred from Paris to Helsinki so that the uncooperative Gough could be eliminated from the equation.63 Churchill, however, was no more successful than before in persuading the British War Cabinet. Instead of receiving support for Mannerheim’s newest requests, he was told that Britain was ‘in no position to afford them any assistance’. He was also ordered to start winding down the assistance being given to remaining ‘White’ armies.64 Consequently, for the second time Mannerheim decided that he could not march to St Petersburg, and Yudenich was so informed on 5 November. After this second failure, Churchill seemed to lose interest in the Finnish option. He concentrated on operations in southern Russia, on the last stages of that fall-back option of intensifying military assistance to the ‘White’ armies with which he was never truly contented, and on cultivating new links between Poland and the ‘White’ forces in the south. Personally embittered,65 he kept reminding Cabinet Ministers of lost opportunities and dwindling time, and of how it was nothing short of catastrophic not to follow his and Mannerheim’s policies.66 Mannerheim felt the same way, and wondered about the ‘immense’ powers of ‘those socialist forces, in all countries’, which he thought had forced the British and Finnish (and

38 THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION

other) governments to decline the ‘only sensible course of action, that is, a powerful military attack into Russia’.67 Yet even this was not the end of the Churchill-Mannerheim collaboration. In early December 1919, Mannerheim again travelled to see Churchill at the War Office. The situation on the Siberian and northwest- ern fronts had not changed for the better, but new opportunities for coalition warfare had opened up after the spectacular victories of General Denikin, operating from southern Russia with Churchill’s assistance. Now it was Denikin’s turn to have advanced to within walking distance of Moscow, and the military interventionists were confident that with a little more assistance and coordination a final victory could still be achieved. Despite the apparently propitious situation on the Moscow front, the military interventionists’ task was no easier than before. By this time British and French leaders were operating more from ideology than from empirical calculation, while the Americans had already completely lost interest in all military operations. Meeting in London in December 1919–January 1920, British and French leaders decided not to enter into new military commitments or to give more assistance to Denikin. The territorial integrity of existing Border States would be loosely guaranteed, but they would be encouraged to enter into peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, and no more support would be given to ‘White’ attempts at destruction of the Bolshevik regime. At the same time the anti-Bolshevik blockade would be lifted and a new effort at pacifying Russia through non-military means attempted. While France eventually disengaged itself from the anti-interventionist parts of these decisions and began to stress anew the need for combined military operations, Lloyd George began doggedly to pursue his own alternative to military interventionism. This consisted of complete cessation of military assistance and of attempts to have trade resumed with the Bolshevik regime. Churchill lodged an official protest against the decision, but received no support from his colleagues.68 Churchill and Mannerheim were, however, determined to disregard these decisions and still to push for military action. At their meeting on 12 December—on the very day of anti-interventionist Anglo-French decisions— Churchill, Sir Henry Wilson and Mannerheim reviewed recent developments and their meaning for the St Petersburg plan, and Mannerheim stressed the need to act before the Bolsheviks could concentrate all their forces against General Denikin.69 Churchill had already consulted Sir Samuel Hoare, the most consistent parliamentary champion of Mannerheim’s plans, and it would seem certain that it was Hoare’s latest proposal that was the main topic of discussion at the December meeting. Hoare had brought to Churchill a plan for the creation of an ‘Eastern European antiBolshevik bloc’ which had originated with the émigré Russian General Boris Savinkov and the former head of the Archangel anti-Bolshevik government, Pjotr Chaikovsky. This plan would have created an offensive coalition consisting of all or most of the Border States, gathered

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 39

around Finland and Poland, that was to act in conjunction with the armies of General Denikin. The General was to affirm Finnish and Polish independence, offer autonomy to the Baltic states, and institute a series of social and land reforms in areas under his control to assure the security of his flank. Thus cohered, the war coalition would attack the Bolshevik heartland.70 Savinkov’s and Chaikovsky’s suggestions merged with separate French plans for a coordinated military operation, and the compound emerged as the latest variation of the original St Petersburg scheme.71 It is impossible to ascertain what role Mannerheim played in the complicated formulation of this plan, but it is known that at least from October onwards he had been in touch with Savinkov, one of the émigré generals most amenable to Finnish independence, and a man greatly admired by Churchill.72 In any case, the plan fitted into Mannerheim’s long-standing framework as fully as it fitted into Churchill’s, and the two men staked again everything on it. Mannerheim travelled to Poland to consult the anti-Bolshevik military leader of that country, General Pilsudski. The visit had been arranged before the latest coalition plans were finalised, but it was always intended as a part of the search for offensive action. From Poland Mannerheim reported back to Churchill via General Spears, while Spears continued his consultations among the émigré Russians in Paris and with the French.73 Pilsudski’s support for the plan was achieved, and Mannerheim advised Churchill to have the operation begin without delay. At his end, Churchill had proceeded to draft a letter to Denikin, endorsing the plan, promising to exert himself for more Allied materiel assistance, and stressing that he still pursued ‘only one object, namely, the destruction of the Bolshevik tyrannies which menace the ignorant, thoughtless, and tired-out nations’.74 In the following months the Finnish, Polish and ‘White’ Russian conspirators engaged in frenzied preparations and consultations, and they put further pressure on Churchill to have the British government commit itself to the planned operations.75 Churchill did what he could, appealing to the Cabinet with various variations of the latest plan and even becoming implicated in a brief ‘war scare’ in January 1920.76 The scare was possibly born of genuine concern, but it certainly assisted Churchill’s wider interventionist plans, as did the series of virulent anti-Bolshevik speeches which Churchill began now to make across the country. Indeed, everything that Churchill did in these tense months of early 1920 was calculated to inflame anti-Bolshevik passions and to foster a belated realisation that a major international coalition did exist, deeply committed to the antiBolshevik ideology, ready and eager for a final anti-Bolshevik offensive. All of it was designed to force the hand of the recalcitrant Prime Minister. Nothing, however, could shift Lloyd George from his opposition to further military action. The Prime Minister had already irrevocably committed Britain to an entirely new policy—to that of trade as an antiBolshevik lever. He proceeded on the basis of the Anglo-French decision to lift the blockade, and by

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the time that Churchill and Mannerheim offered their latest offensive plan, he was well on the way to completing preparations for what was to be the first instant of a Bolshevik diplomatic delegation in Britain in May 1920.77 Lloyd George was deeply committed to this initiative, and there was no force in Britain strong enough to prevent it from being followed through, much as Churchill and the ‘die-hard’ right tried. There was therefore no chance whatsoever of the British government accepting the Churchill proposal for a new military intervention. In the Lloyd George scheme, guarantees were indeed offered for the territorial integrity of the Border States. However, it soon became clear that Lloyd George was not serious about these guarantees. When war broke out between Russia and Poland in 1920, Lloyd George refused to give unstinting support for the Poles, and he ordered Churchill to cease all supply to and encouragement of the Eastern European anticommunists, and to inform every such anticommunist accordingly. Churchill no longer had either the authority or the resources to proceed with his chosen policy.78 Once the Russian invasion of Poland was underway in April 1920, Churchill suddenly noticed that he was almost the only one in the British leadership who argued for an aggressive anticommunist policy. He did once again try to encourage the creation of a Border States’ military alliance, an alliance which would have included Finland but which would have received only arms and munitions from Britain and no other assistance.79 This attempt was doomed to failure. No one embraced it. Defeat after defeat had shattered Churchill’s credibility and contributed to the final triumph of the anti-interventionist camp in Britain and elsewhere. After the Russo-Polish War, Finland and the other Border States did continue to search for some military alliance. In 1922 they signed a five-year so-called Warsaw Pact, which in theory created a military alliance between Finland, Poland, Estonia and Latvia. Terms of the pact included the provision of mutual military assistance in case any one of the pact’s signatories fell victim to Soviet aggression. Mannerheim supported this pact, but the rest of the Finnish leadership (and public opinion) was so averse to it that the government which took Finland into the pact fell, and Finland left the pact. The Finnish decision prompted the other signatories to cancel the entire arrangement.80 As the fate of the Warsaw Pact showed, there simply was no longer any real willingness for military action designed to destroy the Soviet Bolshevik regime. The last chance for such destruction of the Bolshevik regime had been passed some time ago. The opportunity had been lost by mid-1920, less than three years after Churchill had begun to campaign for a joint anticommunist military intervention. In theory, his proposals for a joint Allied and Border States’ intervention were still viable, but they had become entirely unrealistic. Recognising his defeat, Churchill had retreated to the south of France, and after his return to Britain he left the War Office for the Colonial Office and made the

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 41

prediction that before long Soviet Russia would again attack Finland. This coming attack could have been prevented, he claimed, had his and Mannerheim’s policies been followed.81 After this, Churchill had no more to say about the abortive St Petersburg plan. Assessing the Churchill-Mannerheim collaboration Those three years that preceded the final defeat of the St Petersburg plan had been years in which Finland was a central, very important state to Churchill. Later historians did not recognise this because their analysis of the intervention period tended to concentrate on foreign diplomats’ and foreign policy decision-makers’ memoranda and deliberations. However, the British Foreign Office was not all that interested in Finland, and was certainly not interested in any anticommunist military interventions. The Foreign Office was indeed led by conservative men (Arthur Balfour and Lord Curzon) but for some reason these men were not profoundly anticommunist, and nor were they well versed in the St Petersburg question. Even less were they interested in purely domestic Finnish questions. Arthur Balfour himself had very little impact on the making of British policy at this time, and, as he himself admitted to a member of the American delegation at Paris, he was ‘rarely consulted’ about anything.82 However, the Secretary of War, Churchill, did have an interest in Finland. He also had very real sympathies towards the thinking, categories of analysis and priorities of a Mannerheim and a Finnish ‘Activist’ party. For the most part, Churchill acted outside of official decision-making, and he consistently interpreted his own delegated powers in a most liberal way, always rebelling against the limits that the Cabinet set for him. All the while he worked strenuously to convert the Cabinet to his and Mannerheim’s way of thinking. Churchill’s activities cannot be documented from diplomatic reports or from official government memoranda—or even, for the most part, from Cabinet minutes. His methods and spheres of activity were much more private and secret than that. A continual search for foreign allies and collaborators was a key part of his method of operation, important to Churchill for strategic and bureaucratic reasons alike. Apart from Mannerheim, Finnish leaders simply did not comprehend the centrality of this point. They were unwilling to cultivate contacts with Churchill, and unaware of their own importance to Churchill’s success. Of course, there were no guarantees of success even if Finland had cooperated more fully with Churchill. Churchill certainly had plenty of enemies at home, and these enemies may have won in any case. Insofar as the Mannerheim plan for the St Petersburg operation was a feasible plan, though, it surely was implementable only through Churchill. The stronger Churchill was, the more likely was official British support for the operation. Churchill’s strength depended on his being able to gather together a great number of foreign

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supporters and putative proxies, and when he did not get those proxies his power decreased and so did the chances of ever convincing those with plenary powers. The crucial point may well have been reached as early as May 1919, when President Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George had briefly shown a willingness to undertake a military intervention on the Churchill plan. The two men did not know all the details of Churchill’s plan, but they were in any case willing to give the Secretary of State for War a chance. However, the Finns refused to go along with it. Observed from a different angle, the major flaw in all the ChurchillMannerheim plans for intervention was the built-in need for official British sanction. None of the Border States’ anti-Bolsheviks seemed willing to proceed with their plans without such official sanction or without promises of materiel support. Churchill in turn had predicated the entire collaboration on the assumption that only once independent Border States’ operations had begun could he ask for considerable British support with any realistic chances of it being granted. Here was a conundrum which no one faced up to, and which belied the fact that, despite all their detailed planning, Churchill and his foreign allies had never really understood their differing starting assumptions. As they waited, the military situation continually worsened and Admiral Kolchak, General Yudenich and General Denikin were eventually finished as fighting forces, thus making all plans for a multi-pronged offensive obsolete. All the while, Prime Minister Lloyd George intensified his pursuit of trade relations with the Bolsheviks and became decreasingly interested in ‘White’ antiBolshevik fortunes. Without these ‘Whites’ on their side, the Border States faced a daunting offensive challenge which none of them really wanted to seize. The Churchill-Mannerheim collaboration ended when the combined effect of these factors effectually defeated their anticommunist policy option by the middle of 1920. In terms of policy and practical collaboration, the secretive planning and preparing of the 1919–1920 operations proved to be the last, lost opportunity for a military destruction of Bolshevism in Russia. It had been aborted by multiple political opposition both in Finland and in Great Britain, by the indecision of the Council of Four and the Border States, and by the fluctuating fortunes of ‘White’ generals. Some of the blame must also go to Churchill for an eagerness not matched by detailed appreciation of all the elements involved. As with his championship of the better-known French intervention plans, so with the Mannerheim proposals Churchill seemed often more interested in action—any action—than in tending to the complex dynamics of the international coalition that he nurtured. Regardless of their eventual fate, the original St Petersburg plan and its later variations were significant attempts to solve the Russian problem in 1919–1920. A single element in a constantly shifting mass of proposals for offensive action, the longevity of this particular plan was considerable, not only because of the

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unique geographical position of Finland. No effective assault against the Bolshevik heartland could be undertaken without Finnish participation. However, Finland alone could do little, and therefore the St Petersburg plan had to be part of a far wider constellation that must be created if military interventionism was to be viable. Other military anticommunists did not exert themselves to this end in any degree approaching Mannerheim’s and Churchill’s persistence. The ChurchillMannerheim collaboration was in fact a collaboration of two anticommunists and geopolitically oriented men, unusually matched in their views on the needs of the hour and exceptionally dedicated to the amassing of an international anti-Bolshevik military coalition. Had such a coalition come about, history might have taken a drastically different turn. However, Churchill and Mannerheim were equally powerless to force the direction of events, either in their own countries or in Europe more generally. Churchill had very little persistent support in Britain, and Mannerheim had just as little in Finland. In both countries there existed only small pockets of conservative anti-Bolsheviks dedicated to the ChurchillMannerheim project and, ironically, each of these small pockets needed to have the others seen as moving forward first. Only after that could they influence the course of policy in their own countries. This applied also to other countries which in 1919–1920 were interested in military interventionism, as well as to many a ‘White’ Russian effort. So, despite all the hopes that Churchill had placed in the cultivation of foreign allies, he had to conclude that it was to no avail if public opinion was not there to support the effort. Much of his subsequent career consisted of the building of such an anti-Bolshevik public opinion, and even if he was not to return to the exact military interventionist methodology of these early years, Churchill always remained convinced that international action against Bolshevism was necessary. Yet for all that, the Churchill-Mannerheim collaboration remains a significant aspect of Churchill’s post-First World War anticommunist interventionism—theoretically a most viable way of creating a non-Bolshevik world, which could have yielded results if its many built-in variables had locked into place differently. It should not be forgotten.

44

3 THE TRAVAILS OF ANTICOMMUNISM IN THE INTERWAR YEARS, 1921–1939

After the failure of the St Petersburg plan, Churchill was never again to regard Finland as temporarily the most important foreign ally to him, which it briefly was in 1919. In the interwar years Churchill was in any case mostly out of touch with British decision-making regarding Finland; he was out of decision-making in general, and showed no real interest in Finland. Apart from the six years when he served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–1929), before the outbreak of the Second World War he concentrated on literary pursuits and later, in the 1930s, on obstructing the Indian independence process and critiquing the policies of appeasement. Inasmuch as Finland impacted on Churchill’s thought or activities in these years, this was evident only in retrospect, after Great Britain had joined the Second World War and Churchill had become Prime Minister. A certain cumulative mass of interwar impressions did then help to shape his views on Finland’s meaning in the contexts of the war, anticommunism and building a new world order. The only activity of Churchill’s that in these interwar years touched directly upon Finland was his decision in the 1920s, while Chancellor of the Exchequer, to impose stiff tariffs on foreign pulp and paper products. In preparation for this decision Churchill had, to some extent, to verse himself in the state of Finnish foreign trade, even if the new tariffs were primarily directed against Russian slave labour and cheap imports.1 Apart from this, Churchill’s interwar knowledge of Finnish affairs was very limited and his interest practically non-existent. Finland was no longer relevant to a former interventionist anticommunist who was now out of political power and viewed the world through the prism of his geostrategical realism. In theory, Finland did still potentially retain that function which it had acquired in 1918–1920 by virtue of its geographical position and the anticommunism of its leadership, but this was of no immediate practical importance. The Soviet Union had established its position as a member of the international community, and even if Churchill was concerned about it he concluded before long that no new anticommunist war was feasible. The only real function of Finland, as far as he was concerned, was therefore largely latent throughout the interwar years.

46 THE TRAVAILS OF A NTICOMMUNISM

It was the rise of Nazi Germany as the primary threat to the peace and balance of powers in Europe that of course concerned Churchill the most. His later reputation was not based so much on the military interventionism of 1918–1920 as on the role that he assumed in the 1930s as the chief Western opponent of Hitlerite expansionism. In that role could be detected all the ideological and moral characteristics which in another context had driven Churchill to clandestine cooperation with anticommunist Finns. Churchill’s search for an inclusive alliance was apparent, one that would be not all that different from that which he and Mannerheim had sought to erect in the aftermath of the First World War. Significantly less concerned about the rise of Nazism, Finnish leaders simultaneously moved to a position distinctly opposite to Churchill’s. Finnish leaders regarded the anti-Nazi effort neither as a continuation of the anticommunist struggle nor as an aspect of an anticommunist worldview—as did Churchill and a large part of the Anglophone right—and few Finns could see any reasonable way in which Finland could contribute to any antiGerman effort. This divergence of views gradually drove Churchill and Finland into opposing camps. The immediate pre-war years, therefore, provide the context for understanding the often tortuous relationship between Churchill and Finland in the 1940s. Between 1921 and 1939 Churchill’s views on the European balance of powers developed in directions which required dropping the pursuit of an anticommunist war, but Finnish desire for anticommunist activity only increased. This resulted not just from a different analysis of the world situation but also from basic discrepancies between the Churchillian and the Finnish concepts of anticommunism, and from unique Finnish beliefs about national and strategic needs. The former type of disagreement was in no way limited to Finland, and was shared by a large part of Europe; however, the latter was a result of Finland’s weakness and of the general policy of appeasement that reigned at that time. On both levels, Churchill disagreed with Finnish leaders and avoided any close association or co-operation with them. From anticommunism to anti-fascism Churchill’s interest in anticommunism remained unchanged throughout the interwar period, and every one of his references to Finland during this time related in some way to it. However, his own view on the best way to counter the most pressing threat of the period moved from anticommunism to anti-fascism. A country like Finland, which in Churchill’s mind was associated only with anticommunism, lost most of the relevance it had once had for him. Churchill still defined communism as the inevitably failing attempt to implement a socialist economic doctrine, an experiment in social reordering which was inherently incapable of providing economic well-being or even sufficient food for the countries that it had subjugated to its theories. In

THE TRAVAILS OF ANTICOMMUNISM 47

Churchill’s estimation, a communism thus understood would drive Russia ever deeper into misery, want and despair. Not even the stolen gold and diamond reserves of the Czar would pay for the economic experiment for long, nor for any five-year plans, forced labour camps or dumping of raw materials in the international market. Aware of the inherent weaknesses of their economics, Soviet leaders would (as far as Churchill saw it) always be on the lookout for ways to expand their territorial sway, since they needed, like a vampire, to suck the life out of other nations and to steal their natural resources and the fruits of others’ work simply to survive as a regime. Churchill thought that this was an inevitable causal chain. In Russia itself, however, ‘the long night of another glacial period’ still radiated its ‘baleful, unnatural lights’ and inflicted ‘wantonly, callously inflicted pain’ on ordinary Russians. As late as 1931, Churchill stressed that it was this Soviet regime, not emergent Nazi Germany, that was the most direct threat to the Western world, and even as late as December 1936—almost ten months after the German occupation of the Rheinland—he referred to Soviet communism as the force that was trying to drive Europe into another war.2 It was not, therefore, that Churchill was any the less anticommunist in his public rhetoric than before, even if he came gradually to admit that the time of aggressive military anticommunism was now over. In 1928 he had still talked about the need for a new military intervention in Russia,3 one that the League of Nations would have directed, but thereafter his attention was increasingly fixed on the domestic communist threat and on the Labour Party, by then a self-professedly socialist party which Churchill regarded as a prefiguration and ally of communism. In these years Churchill invariably referred to the Labour Party as ‘the Socialist Party’. He regarded the 1926 General Strike as a Moscow-inspired and directed attempt to incite a civil war, one that had to be quashed mercilessly and after which some of the rights and privileges of the trades union movement should be abolished. He campaigned vigorously against an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement in 1921; in favour of discontinuing trade relations with Russia after 1921; against granting diplomatic recognition to the Soviets in 1924; and for a reversal of the recognition given by the Labour Government after 1927. One of his arguments in all these cases was that the Soviets had demonstrably financed the General Strike. Yet Churchill was concerned also about manifestly non-communist forms of left-liberal policy. For a while he even regarded President Franklin D.Roosevelt’s New Deal programme as a dangerous approximation to a communist system and a threat to the general welfare, which must in no way be replicated in Great Britain.4 When Churchill spoke thus, he showed how widely he had diverged from his Liberal background. Yet Churchill did still insist that communism and socialism could only be fought with a broad and comprehensive counter-programme which also included radical social reforms. In this connection Churchill also noted the reforms that had been instituted in post-1919 Finland (and in some

48 THE TRAVAILS OF A NTICOMMUNISM

other Scandinavian and Border States). He regarded these social reforms as a sort of safe middle ground between the pitfalls of socialism and unregulated capitalism. Churchill spoke of Finland as an exemplar of ‘radical democracy’, where military and ideological anticommunism was blended with the pursuit of such an internal order which, through safely limited social reforms, removed some of the injustices and grievances from which the appeal of communism arose. A ‘radical democracy’ of this type challenged Soviet claims about the progressive and democratic nature of the Soviet system, and it offered a most practical and efficient counter-ideology which could satisfy immediate labour demands without moving so far as to undermine the essentials of a bourgeois and Christian tradition.5 This line of Churchillian analysis did not flow from any detailed examination of the relevant Finnish legislation, but rather from an underlying set of prejudices and expectations formed when Churchill was in contact with Mannerheim and when he first got to know the Finnish type of anticommunism. Although Churchill was later associated with the military type of anticommunism, in the interwar years he was in fact still known as a champion of just this kind of ‘radical democracy’. His championship of interwar social reforms was a continuation of his earlier participation in pioneering early twentieth-century Liberal social reform, and post-1919 familiarity with the social appeal of communism across the Western world had further convinced him of the necessity for the preventative and palliative reform that he had championed in that earlier, pre-Bolshevik world. Indeed, even while planning for the St Petersburg operation Churchill had emphasised how all effective anticommunist policies had to consist not just of arms but of ‘far-reaching social reforms’, since ‘great social evils’ and maltreatment of the working classes were also causes for Bolshevism. As an interwar Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill did what he could to minimise this kind of exploitation, no matter that most of his legislative initiatives were later associated with the name of his successor at the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.6 The point is that it was anticommunism that made Churchill interested in such social reform, and that made him highlight the ‘radical democracy’ of countries like Finland. Churchill’s palpable early interest in the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, can also be explained through Churchillian anticommunism. From his experiences of the intervention period Churchill had concluded that Western parliamentary democracy would never yield a quick and decisive campaign against the Soviet regime. For a short while he suspected that maybe a fascist dictator might achieve such a campaign. Of course, Churchill did not accept fascist theory—a corporatist rather than ‘radical democratic’ theory—and he did not believe that fascist practice had a place in the historical continuity of the English-speaking world. He did, however, relish strong leaders who apparently wished to better the living conditions of their people and to smash international communism. When he met Mussolini in 1927, Churchill therefore told the

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dictator that, had he been born Italian, he would have ‘whole-heartedly’ been one of Mussolini’s staunchest supporters. He even emphasised that Mussolini was doing the world a great service with his ‘struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Lenin’. This public praise of the fascists served a very specific, immediate purpose, as well: Churchill hoped to graft Italy into a new, Europe-wide arrangement which would preserve the balance of powers. It is in that same context of geopolitics and anticommunism that one must also interpret the support that Churchill gave to the proto-fascist leader of Spain, General Franco. Churchill was still seeking anticommunist allies, and both Mussolini and Franco seemed for a while to be both available and suitable.7 In some ways, Churchill’s brief interest in the fascists resembled the broader interest shown by much of the European right—Finnish anticommunists included. In the early 1930s, some in the far-right circles of Finland began to admire Churchill precisely because he was regarded as being sympathetic to fascism.8 Yet while it is undoubtedly true that the Finnish and British far right were in those years travelling on parallel paths, it is also true that Churchill was moving in an entirely different direction. He was misunderstood by his Finnish far-right admirers. Churchill joined no far-right anticommunist organisations and gave his support to none, unlike a great number of his former Finnish anticommunist allies. Even General Mannerheim supported one far-right organisation, the Finnish Defence League (Suomen Suojelusliitto), and he did a fair bit of polemical yeoman service for the so-called Lapua Movement (lapuanliike), a major proto-fascist organisation which engaged in vigilantism.9 This activity of Mannerheim’s highlighted the general disillusionment with parliamentary democracy and the growing predilection for direct, often violent action against communists and socialists which was on the rise in Finland no less than on the British anticommunist right. There were even attempts to coordinate the actions of radical anticommunist organisations on an international scale—attempts that took place through the not very successful Entente Internationale contre le III:e Internationale, in which the Finnish Defence League worked together with some of the more notorious proto-fascists of Britain and continental Europe. Although all far-right organisations of this type were primarily concerned about domestic (not foreign) anticommunism, as time went on they did tend to show increasing ideological affinities to Italian fascism or German Nazism. This was especially so in Finland.10 Churchill, by contrast, concluded fairly early that ‘fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism…As fascism sprang from communism, so Nazism developed from fascism’.11 As has been seen, from the early 1900s he had been sketching a theoretical concept of what was later to be called totalitarianism, and in 1933 he gave it a precise definition. Now Churchill defined totalitarianism as that form of governance which combined the praxis of Italian fascism, German National-Socialism and Russian communism. The goals of these three movements were to some degree different, Churchill acknowledged, and their

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outer forms mutually opposed, but the methods and the consequences were the same. All three shared a dangerous ideology, inimical to liberty and to economic well-being, and all three were bent on aggressive foreign expansion and possibly on worldwide dominance. Each used state propaganda and re-education to change the nature and thoughts of individuals so that every individual would be reduced to nothing but a slave of an overpowering state. Each would result in just ‘the aimless, sterile activities of the unchanging antheap’.12 It was through such a syllogism that Churchill transposed onto Nazi Germany most of the ideological and geostrategical enemy images that had thus far characterised his views on Soviet Russia. The old passion was now directed at a new object, but was, nevertheless, still essentially the same old passion. Nor was Churchill’s syllogism by any means the production of a single individual. The same line of reasoning had influenced major sections of the political right in English-speaking countries, although it had had very little effect on the Finnish right. The political right of the Anglophone countries generally applauded the fascists for their apparent aptitude for nationalist and anticommunist work, but at the same time deprecated their circumscription of individual rights, their centralisation and socialisation of economic activity, and their tendency to substitute materialist or pagan concepts in the place of Christian public doctrine. Signs of ideational similarity between the fascist and communist ideologies were detected early on, and the conclusion drawn that a victory for one of them implied a victory for the other. On reflection, Churchill sided with exactly this conservative view.13 There is no reason to suppose that he was familiar, to any significant degree, with the contrary tendency among Finnish conservatives, but in actuality he was definitely moving away from his old Finnish allies. On the level of geostrategy Churchill concluded, moreover, that even though 1930s communism remained the monster it had always been, it was not then as close to reaching its worldwide goals as were fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. These two states, and the latter especially, were therefore the new and major threat to the balance of power and to Anglophone freedom, and against which an international coalition should be brought to bear. There followed the years in which Churchill led the anti-appeasers of Great Britain and demanded action against German aggrandisements, not just because of the inherent danger of German quest for power but because any new war could lead to a weakening of the West, which could in turn contribute to a general Bolshevisation of the world.14 On this level of geopolitics, Churchill’s conclusions differed widely from those of Finnish leaders. Churchill’s anti-appeasement activities unfolded in a popular movement which Churchill called the Arms and the Covenant movement, and sometimes the Defence of Freedom and Peace movement.15 It was a movement whose roots lay in an organisation created by left-wing anti-fascists, the Anti-Nazi Council, which Churchill joined at a comparatively late stage. The leftist activists of this organisation still believed in the traditional concept of a League of Nations, a

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concept of which Churchill had long been known to be critical, which meant that he was not entirely trusted by the powers-that-be of the Anti-Nazi Council. These activists proffered pacifist ideals, international opinion and economic sanctions as the most promising guarantees of peace. They were driven, in other words, by pacifist and internationalist convictions, and they hoped to wean nation-states away from the thinking that regarded warfare as a normal and legitimate dimension of policy. For Churchill, on the other hand, the Arms and the Covenant campaign was part of a broader attempt to forge a multilateral coalition for re-armament on a grand scale and for strengthening the collective security regime of the League of Nations. This was realpolitik, and it intended to challenge Germany with military might. Churchill used traditional League of Nations’ rhetoric when he argued his case, but in fact he hoped for regional military alliances based on considerable military force and not on pacifist or moral ideals. The requirements of coalition-building gradually led Churchill to speak more about the evils of fascism and the superiority of Western parliamentary democracies, and he honestly believed in this, but he was also convinced that emphasis on these themes was necessary if ever the left or public opinion in general was to be converted to what he really hoped for—that is, re-armament. By no means did he subscribe to the idealist goals and thought-forms of the original founders of the Anti-Nazi Council, but he did believe that by highlighting them his own task was made that much easier. However, beneath a public rhetoric that conformed to leftist polemics there remained a pronouncedly power-political way of thinking, a way of thinking which tried to append to old League of Nations’ ideals the means and methods of military force.16 In addresses given under the auspices of the Arms and the Covenant, Churchill emphasised that a strengthened League of Nations would act to negate the Nazi and Bolshevik threats alike. However, as the 1930s rolled on his theme became almost entirely anti-German. Twenty years ago I strove with all the energy in my power against Communism because at that time I considered Communism, with its idea of world revolution, the greatest danger to the British Empire’, Churchill told the Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky in 1938. ‘Now Communism does not present such a danger to the Empire. On the contrary, nowadays German Nazism, with its idea of world hegemony from Berlin, constitutes the greatest danger to the British Empire.’17 Churchill’s Arms and the Covenant campaign was, in other words, yet another attempt to call forth such multilateral international pressure which alone could nudge British (and other) decision-makers from their chosen policies of appeasement. Churchill himself had no political power to speak of, and therefore he had to seek for a domestic and foreign coalition to back up his demands. Only in such a circuitous way did Churchill think that he could topple the policies of appeasement and prompt the Western democracies to respond appropriately to the German threat. In his speeches and articles he did not

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directly refer to Finland as one hoped-for constituent of his putative coalition, but it was clear that his whole campaign was designed to apply pressure universally so that eventually enough people would have enough confidence in a strengthened League of Nations that they would unequivocally commit themselves to it. The whole Arms and the Covenant effort aimed at an eventual Europe-wide coalition of re-armed nations supporting a strengthened League of Nations, and it expected countries like Finland to join in. As he moved from anticommunism to anti-fascism and anti-appeasement, Churchill said little about Finland. However, as his views on the most pressing geopolitical demands of the period became clearer, they were also clarified regarding Finland’s place in the overall framework, whether he consciously thought about it or not. By the late 1930s, he no longer regarded anticommunism as the most pressing need of the moment. Resistance to German expansionism was more important. He thought that even small and marginal countries like Finland ought to recognise the many ideational and practical similarities between Nazism and Bolshevism, and face up to the threat that Nazi Germany posed to all nations. For the sake of their own security alone, all such nations should enter into an anti-German common front. Churchill and Mannerheim Throughout the 1930s, Churchill maintained his Finnish contacts. General Mannerheim was still at the top of the list. Churchill and Mannerheim met again in 1935. No documentation has survived regarding what was probably a short meeting, one that took place in connection with the funeral of King George V and most likely did not involve any major exchange of views on topical matters. One year later, the Finnish government sent Mannerheim to London to re-emphasise the continuing threat posed by the Soviet regime and to recommend clear countermeasures by the League of Nations. During this trip a somewhat longer meeting was arranged between Mannerheim and Churchill, and afterwards the two stayed in touch.18 In succeeding years Mannerheim travelled to Britain on several further occasions, and he may have met Churchill again. Whether or not he did, contact was maintained between the two men throughout the interwar years, and Churchill was well aware of the General’s views and activities, both through direct contact and through reports that he received from mutual friends. Churchill was interested in Mannerheim above all as one link in that network of informants which he had built up after 1919 both at home and abroad. By that time Churchill was out of office and in opposition to the policies of the British government, and for information he was increasingly dependent on this informal and unofficial network. At home he had forged secret links with leading civil servants in several ministries, who supplied him with classified intelligence and other materials from which he was barred by the government

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until 1931. Churchill seems also to have had informants in the French intelligence service, in some German ministries (including the office of Herman Göring), and in the Finnish Foreign Office. The Finnish intelligence services also continued to be a key conduit of information on the Soviet Union, and Churchill made a point of versing himself in the diplomatic and intelligence reports that came from Finland.19 Additional informants were, however, always welcome to him, since he wanted to build his anti-appeasement polemics on as solid an evidential base as possible. Churchill regarded General Mannerheim as a valued member of his network, since he respected Mannerheim’s anticommunist work of 1919–1921 and shared Mannerheim’s political and geostrategical views, but could get from him a different national perspective. It was during this period that Churchill called Mannerheim a ‘real man, strong like a rock’,20 an endorsement indeed from a man who was always on the lookout for strong anticommunist leaders. At this time Mannerheim worked as the Chairman of the Finnish Defence Council, a newly created government agency which was tasked with the modernisation and strengthening of the Finnish armed forces. His many trips to Britain were part of this work. As Chairman of the Defence Council, Mannerheim was indeed struggling with just those questions of re-armament and geostrategy that were of interest to Churchill.21 Of course, Churchill could not take part in the discussions that Mannerheim had with British officials, but after and in between many of these discussions he seized opportunities for them to meet. The most significant of these meetings took place in 1936, just at the time when Churchill launched the Arms and the Covenant campaign under the Anti-Nazi Council. A personal meeting between Mannerheim and Churchill was arranged by Sir Patrick Donner, a Conservative MP and close friend of Churchill’s. Donner happened also to be the son of Ossian Donner, the first-ever Finnish Ambassador to the Court of St James, and the nephew of Kai Donner, one of the leaders of the 1919 ‘Activist’ party. After the First World War Patrick Donner had become a naturalised British citizen, and he had quickly risen in the Conservative Party, which Churchill also rejoined in the 1920s. Donner was above all interested in British imperial questions, and was one of the leading opponents of Indian independence, but his Finnish background conspired to make him also a major proponent of Finnish interests and points of view in the Conservative Party.22 Knowing as he did that Churchill was eager to meet Mannerheim again, and hoping to bind two of the century’s leading military anticommunists ever closer together, Donner arranged for a private dinner in the spring of 1936. Present were only the Donners, Mannerheim, Churchill and Clementine Churchill. The dinner party had been kept this small deliberately, so that Churchill and Mannerheim could have ample undisturbed time for conversation. Churchill and Mannerheim exchanged views on the general security situation in Europe, on the rise of Germany and Italy, and on the role that communism

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played in the changed constellation of the world. By this time, Mannerheim had reached conclusions on these issues which diverged from Churchill’s on one single point, but this was an important one and thus a not altogether pleasant conversation ensued when the two men came to address it. Like Churchill, Mannerheim had felt certain limited sympathy towards the fascists because of their pronounced anticommunism. Again like Churchill, he had then begun to criticise the methods that fascists and Nazis used in the pursuit of their goals—methods that he saw as altogether communistic. Furthermore, Mannerheim was afraid of the expansionist promptings of the Nazi regime, and he thought that Germany was beginning dangerously to threaten the European balance of power. The Nazis were, according to him, trying to ‘turn the peoples of Europe into niggers in the service of the Third Reich’, and he was confident that Europeans would before long begin to resist this attempt, just as they had resisted a similar Bolshevik attempt earlier. Mannerheim himself thought that he was doing just this as the Chairman of the Defence Council (inter alia, by purchasing for Finland those British military aircraft which had not been forthcoming when the St Petersburg scheme was being hatched). Mannerheim hoped that other Western countries would also begin to re-arm.23 Churchill hoped for the same, and had begun to campaign for it. On this the two anticommunists’ thinking proceeded on closely parallel lines. However, there was another plane to their discussion on which significant disagreement was manifest. Churchill’s long and comprehensive exposition on the need for a stronger League of Nations’ collective security system left Mannerheim cold. Indeed, when Churchill elaborated on his thinking on this matter, Mannerheim asked him to stop and return to ‘reality’. He reiterated what he had told Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office—that is, that the League of Nations was entirely useless for the defence of small countries. The League seemed only to be engaged in moral pressure, and Mannerheim was sure that such pressure would never suffice to contain Soviet Russia—aggressive as it was despite being a League member.24 It is clear that Mannerheim failed to perceive the core of what Churchill was trying to do in the League of Nations. Mannerheim did not recognise that Churchill’s concept of the League of Nations was eminently force-based, and that it profoundly differed from all hitherto customary ideas of the League’s nature and competency. This misunderstanding was quite significant and considerable, but it testified to the profound loss of faith in the League’s collective security instruments that had for some time been the rule among smaller European nations. By 1936 the League of Nations had indeed become almost entirely discounted in the small states of Europe; a fact which considerably complicated the task that Churchill had taken upon himself. As a matter of fact, the small states’ distrust of the League was so marked that even as Churchill and Mannerheim were talking, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain had just decided unilaterally to renounce the collective security provisions

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of their League membership. In the so-called Oslo Declaration, these countries announced that from then on they would not automatically follow the League Covenant’s collective security procedures and would not necessarily defend any given fellow-member of the League that was attacked. By so declaring, the countries in question were falling in line with the German preference, satisfying German geostrategic desires, undermining Churchill’s Arms and the Covenant campaign, and endangering the very core of the League of Nations experiment. Seen from Churchill’s perspective, the situation was made even worse by the fact that distinct sympathies for just such a departure, but on a grander scale, were exposed in the deliberations of a special League of Nations committee which had been set up to consider revisions in the Covenant. Even those American internationalists who still campaigned for US membership of the League had come to endorse such a revision.25 Churchill managed to make no impression on Mannerheim when he tried to explain his views on the issue. In any case, theirs was a conversation between two men no longer at the centre of their respective countries’ decision-making, and even if it had ended differently this would not have had a direct impact on the policies of either Britain or Finland. It is clear, however, that even if Churchill did not publicly denounce the Oslo Declaration he had become sorely disillusioned with the small neutral countries, and regarded their action as a further encouragement to a putative German pursuit of continental domination. In the spring of 1936, Churchill mentioned to Mannerheim that he was planning to issue a new, Swedish-language edition of his First World War memoirs. The conversation and correspondence that followed further underlined Churchill’s and Mannerheim’s shared concerns over German expansionism, and over the significance and similarities between Nazi and Bolshevik tactics. While collaborating with Mannerheim on a rewrite of some parts of his memoirs, Churchill gathered additional information regarding the Finnish Civil War and was further confirmed in his conviction that Finland remained a major bastion of anticommunism. The war memoirs, which had been published seven years earlier, dealt with Finnish events through the prism of anticommunism. In them was developed that Churchillian theory about the peculiar subversion and war tactics of the Bolsheviks to which reference has already been made. The picture painted of General Mannerheim and his ‘White’ troops was most favourable. However, Churchill emphasised throughout that the role of German troops in the Finnish Civil War had been considerable, and he implied that without German assistance the Finnish Reds’ revolt could not have been put down. Churchill explicitly stated that the Republic of Finland had been born only because it was in Germany’s strategic interest to allow it to be so, and that Finland, like other Border States, had from the beginning of its independence been subjected to de facto German overlordship. Also, the repression of domestic Finnish communism had, according to Churchill, been part of German Ostpolitik, a

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tactical stratagem which assisted in the reaching of German goals and in which Finns had gladly acquiesced because of their own anticommunism.26 What characterised this whole analysis was a geostrategic framework which, in the context of the 1930s, again underlined the objectification of small nations like Finland. What Churchill wrote about the 1918 situation in Finland conformed to what most Western observers wrote about it in the interwar period. It was therefore no surprise that Churchill also popularised the view of Finland as a German proxy and tool, even though he knew well how different Mannerheim’s own promptings and goals had been at that time just prior to their collaboration. In 1918 Mannerheim had been sent to London to dispel just these kinds of beliefs about German dominance in Finland, and now, some sixteen years later, he again insisted on teaching Churchill. Mannerheim demanded that Churchill delete all portions of his war memoirs where German troops were portrayed as the key to Finnish independence. He recalled later that Churchill had been ‘unpleasantly surprised’ when Mannerheim informed him that the war memoirs had throughout been infested with a ‘strongly pro-German spirit’, and that the indigenous Finnish fight against domestic communists had not been sufficiently appreciated. In the correspondence that ensued Mannerheim was a little more specific, and Churchill thereupon asked him to provide redrafts for the memoirs’ sections dealing with Finland.27 Mannerheim responded with a typed manuscript of several pages, which he sent to Churchill via Patrick Donner. Mannerheim’s typescript was, it seems, written in Swedish (the only known extant copy is a translation into English by Donner). Mannerheim emphasised that communism in Finland had been destroyed by the Finns themselves, and that it had been the Finns who had prevented it from spreading westwards. It had not been necessary to employ Germans in the effort, and Mannerheim had never wanted them in Finland. Nor had it been necessary for the White Finns to break the Finnish constitution when they set out to destroy communists at home, since it had been the left which had acted illegally—had revolted—and had thus prompted lawabiding Finns to action. This indigenous left could not, contrary to what Churchill seemed to imply, under any circumstances have represented the true will of the Finnish people. Mannerheim did indeed admit that originally the socialist/communist parties had had a legal majority in the Finnish parliament, but he stressed that all the Finnish bourgeoisie and peasantry had immediately joined hands to oppose the left once it had shown ‘communistic tendencies’ and had begun ‘fraternizing with the bolsheviks’. The Finnish left had had to be repressed because it was in fact communist, and because it collaborated with the foreign Bolshevik power. The increasing ‘terrorism’ of the indigenous left had thus demanded organised, armed countermeasures so that peace and order could be returned. Entirely without German help or importunings, a domestic civil guard was created for this purpose. Led by Mannerheim, this army managed ‘in an amazingly short time’ to disarm Russian Bolsheviks in Finland and—still

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without the Germans—to move on to full victory over domestic communists. What was critical for that victory was the ‘White’ forces’ success in the Tampere region, a victory entirely owing to the efforts of Finns, given that the German troops of General von der Goltz had by that time been in the country for a mere two days and remained encamped far away from the Tampere. Later on in the civil war the German troops had indeed been useful, Mannerheim acknowledged, but then they were in Finland as a police force invited by the legitimate government of the country and not as an independent intervention army. As a matter of fact, Finnish independence and freedom from the Bolsheviks had been reached by Finns alone, and Finns had not consciously acted to satisfy German desires when they had wrested their own independence.28 Churchill accepted Mannerheim’s proposed revisions, and promised to incorporate them into the Swedish-language edition of his war memoirs. He let Mannerheim know that they would also be incorporated in subsequent English editions.29 The depiction that Churchill left for future generations of Russian and German activities in the Finnish War of Independence is thus based primarily on General Mannerheim’s input. Of course, Mannerheim’s views on the role that Germany had played in Finland in 1917–1918 did not change Churchill’s belief that Germans tended to engage in geopolitical machinations for territorial aggrandisement. Nor was Churchill’s own tendency to regard small nations as the tools of Great Powers changed in any way. However, at the very least Mannerheim’s insistence would have highlighted the fact that even in countries like Finland there remained important political leaders who recognised the threat that Germany posed and who were utterly dedicated to the defence of their countries’ independence of action against all foreigners. This perception and, above all, Mannerheim’s personal role as the medium through which Churchill was conducted to the perception were to have repercussions later on. When Churchill later replied to Mannerheim, he said that he often thought back to their conversations at the Donners’. ‘I hope that we shall meet again, and be united in our endeavours to prevent the whole world being ruined and afterwards Bolshevised by another war.’30 These comments encapsulated the interwar Churchill-Mannerheim relationship. Both of them remained above all concerned about Soviet communism, and both of them were averse to German Nazism and fearful of its impact on Europe’s future. Yet because neither of them had plenary powers, they had no direct or immediate means to counter either of these two perceived threats. Churchill recognised in Mannerheim a similarly minded man and an ally from whom he sought (and most often received) confirmation for conclusions which he had already reached regarding current events, and additional evidence for the polemics in which he engaged himself. He did not follow Finnish developments or points of view on their own terms, but to receive further illumination on the typical modus operandi of Bolshevik Russia and Germany

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and on what was to be expected in the near future. Not all of Churchill’s conclusions were by any means sympathetic to or supportive of Finland, since they must be placed in a context where Churchill had clearly concluded—despite Mannerheim’s protestations about the Finnish Civil War—that German influence in the policies of small countries was increasing. The Oslo Declaration highlighted this in a most glaring way, but Churchill also worried about the rise of the far right in such small countries—a rise that could easily be placed into the framework of Churchill’s original, unrevised writings about the interaction of Finns and Germans in 1918. Finland, the Soviet Union and the Grand Alliance British interests were set and unchanging. Britain chose allies on the basis of cost and benefit analyses, and contextual assessments of expediency. These two principles continued to characterise Churchill’s geopolitical outlook. In the late 1930s, they led him to his attempt at creating a comprehensive alliance and international coalition—the ‘Grand Alliance’— which would be directed against Germany and include the Bolsheviks. Finland’s geostrategical position required that it be part of the Grand Alliance but instead Finland became a major complication and obstacle, since its leaders, pleading anticommunist and historical knowledge about Russian perfidy, proved stubbornly resistant to all Grand Alliances of which the Soviets were part. The role that Finland played in hindering the creation of a Grand Alliance, though small, did not endear Churchill to a country which in 1919 had helped to defeat his and Mannerheim’s St Petersburg plans, which had sided with the Oslo Declaration when Churchill tried to strengthen the League of Nations, and which once again stood opposed to an arrangement that Churchill regarded as essential to continental peace and stability. Whereas admiration of Mannerheim tended to make Churchill sympathetic to Finland, this obstinate opposition to a Grand Alliance resuscitated old memories about a stubborn and wayward nation. Maybe Mannerheim was after all just an exception—and with regard to the League of Nations not even that—and maybe the rule was represented by the political elite of Finland which in 1919 had helped destroy military anticommunism and was now helping Germany. These kinds of suspicions were to influence Churchill’s views of and actions towards Finland in the difficult period of European history that was about to begin. For sure, Churchill had no doubt that Finland and the Border States were threatened above all by Soviet Russia. Therefore he had not been at all averse to these states’ attempts in the 1920s to forge their own regional military alliance under the more general League of Nations umbrella. The resultant Warsaw Pact was not a full-blown military compact, but Churchill was glad whenever any kind of steps were taken towards a cordon sanitaire that made German-Russian cooperation less likely. He was supportive also of the interwar re-armament

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undertaken by Mannerheim, partly with the help of British officers, since he still believed that the Soviets could at any time re-launch those subversive propagandists that had been employed in the Finnish Civil War and in the Russo-Polish War as the advance guard of invasion. If this happened, the Border States would be safe only insofar as they were militarily strong, allied with each other and supported by the great Western powers. Whenever the Border States were seriously threatened Britain was also threatened, and to prevent this Churchill insisted that France—since the Russo-Polish War, the primary link between the West and the Border States—remain militarily strong and engaged with the Border States.31 Throughout the 1930s, Churchill was also concerned about the potential German-Russian(-Japanese) axis which he had predicted in 1919. Only two, very different, courses of action could prevent such an axis from emerging—either the creation of a stronger Border States wedge between Russia and Germany, or the creation of a diametrically opposite alliance of Border States (and other Western powers) with Russia. On reflection, Churchill came to the conclusion that the latter was after all to be preferred, since it was the more comprehensive and imposing of the two options. He therefore began to advocate just this kind of a solution to the German problem, and insisted that Finland also endorse and join it. Consequently, Churchill gave only half-hearted support to the 1924 Locarno Pact which tried to re-graft Germany into the Western world and thus to prevent a German-Russian axis from developing. Churchill regarded as far preferable to this non-aggression pact between Germany and her Western neighbours a pan-European arrangement which would have covered Eastern European countries as well.32 As was shown in the Rapallo Pact between Germany and Russia, the danger of these two countries nearing each other was not really addressed by Locarno alone. Churchill, in particular, remained acutely worried about German-Russian cooperation, and for the ten years following the Locarno and Rapallo pacts he sought for ways to estrange the Russians from the Germans and to link the Russians to a strengthened League of Nations instead. In 1934 Churchill therefore contacted the Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, a man who had earlier in his career been stationed in Finland. Churchill also supported the Soviet-sponsored alternative to a Border States’ alliance, the so-called Eastern Locarno plan, where Finland and other Border States, Soviet Russia and the major Western powers would mutually have guaranteed each other against aggression and formed a de facto anti-German alliance. ‘There is safety in numbers’, Churchill emphasised. However, he made no impression whatsoever on countries like Finland: instead of contemplating an Eastern Locarno, Finnish leaders emphatically turned down the proposal.33 The attempt to forge an Eastern European defensive alliance of some kind was, in fact, at the very core of Churchill’s Arms and the Covenant concept. The attempt formed an accompaniment to Churchill’s efforts to bind the

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English-speaking nations closer together, first for an anticommunist and then for an anti-fascist purpose. In both cases Churchill was seeking a coalition of as many Western nations as possible, impressively re-armed and imbued with a self-assurance born of shared moral conceptions, to prevent a German or a Russo-German domination of the continent of Europe. Finland had to be part of this putative coalition, if for no other reason than it shared the longest border with Russia of any European country, and a sea with Russia and Germany alike. Once Nazi Germany began to expand its territorial realm, Churchill’s efforts to assure European balance of power through such stratagems became, of course, ever more pressing. The Finnish refusal to join the effort also became an even more significant obstacle to success. During the Czechoslovakian and Austrian crises of 1938, Churchill again proposed that Germany be encircled by a series of military alliances and that a formal defensive pact be formed between Britain, France and Russia (and, hopefully, Italy), who were then to impose it upon Finland and other Border States. Such a pact would have been based on ‘the purposes and ideals of the League of Nations’ and on ‘the moral sense of the world’, but its real significance would have been in its possession of concrete military superiority over the Germans. This was the only way left to prevent a full-scale war, Churchill felt, and moreover ‘the last chance’. Therefore, Churchill wrote to the British Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, proposing a joint note by the four major European powers, telling Nazi leaders that the four powers were opposed to German re-armament and that they would resist all future attempts by Germany to expand its territory. Germany should take heed, Churchill proposed, and seek mediation from the United States.34 The British Cabinet was not interested in Churchill’s proposal, but in the Soviet leadership there were those who took note. The result was that contact was established between Churchill and his former primary enemy, Soviet Russia. The Soviets’ London representative, Ivan Maisky, was the medium. Unofficially, Churchill had talked to Maisky of the Great Alliance plan as early as May 1936. It was, however, from late 1938 onwards that the two men’s contacts reached a new plane—on the Soviet leaders’ direct orders—and Churchill began to receive information on the Soviets’ own plans and search for a Grand Alliance.35 As this secretive but well-known collaboration proceeded, Churchill emphasised that only through common and resolute action by the Great Powers would it be possible to wean smaller states like Finland from the German orbit and from a deleterious neutrality, since these small states could be impressed only by overwhelming and concentrated force. Without a Grand Alliance even the Great Power opponents of German expansionism would remain so weak that fearful and even weaker small states would have no realistic option but to fall in with whatever mighty Germany demanded of them. The only alternative was a coming together of Britain, France and Russia, their joint guarantee of the security of all states bordering them, and joint general staff planning for a possible war.36

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Churchill emphasised that the Soviet Union was crucial for this plan to work. Without it, Germany could not possibly be contained, or peace maintained. ‘Russia is a ponderous counterpoise in the scale of world peace’, he stressed in April 1939. ‘No one can say that there is not a solid identity of interest between the Western democracies and Soviet Russia, and we must do nothing to obstruct the natural play of that identity of interest.’37 Nor did Churchill doubt the Soviets’ willingness to be parties to a military arrangement. He still assessed the Soviets from his old framework of analysis, assuming that ‘they accepted no moral code but studied their own interests alone’. These Soviet interests demanded that Germany not be allowed to move eastwards, and they led logically to a Grand Alliance designed to contain Germany.38 As logical as that may have sounded to some, Churchill’s concept of a Grand Alliance was profoundly at odds with the reasoning that had dominated the strategical and ideological doctrines of Britain, Finland and the other Border States since the end of the First World War. It rebelled, of course, against that anticommunism with which Churchill’s own name had so indelibly been associated, and which among the conservatives of all the countries named had acquired an unassailable position as something very close to a creedal object of faith. For nearly all of these countries’ foreign-policy elite, it was almost totally unthinkable even to contemplate cooperation with Soviet Russia, let alone enter an alliance with it. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who then dominated British policy, did not even think that a possible German expansion in Eastern Europe was a real threat to Britain, for he was such a convinced anticommunist that he welcomed all ways of containing what he still regarded as the primary and very real threat of Soviet communism. In a manner of speaking, Chamberlain and others like him hoped for a German war against the Soviets, because they feared the Soviets more than they feared Germany. Nor did the Chamberlainites believe that Britain could really guarantee the security of the member states of any putative Grand Alliance. Britain did not have the resources for this, they reasoned, and if there were to be a war in which such a promise figured, the end result could only be that the Border States would have to be abandoned to whatever Soviet Russia planned for them afterwards. Thus, Churchill was very isolated when he claimed that German influence in Eastern Europe was a threat to Great Britain, at that precise moment a bigger threat even than Soviet communism. He was also an exception in his belief that the Western powers did have the resources to guarantee the independence of small Eastern and Central European states. He believed that a Grand Alliance would prevent a war and that therefore any putative Soviet plans for postwar aggrandisement in her neighbourhood would never be actualised.39 One rare British politician who, generally speaking, agreed with Churchill was the young Conservative MP and future Foreign and Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. Eden had been a prime champion of Eastern Locarno in 1934, and afterwards he had remained relatively pro-Soviet precisely because he felt that

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geopolitics required close Anglo-Soviet relations. Eden was so consistent in his relatively pro-Soviet stance that he was willing completely to abandon Finland and the other Border States if that was required for Soviet cooperation and friendship. It was indeed this known position of Eden’s which had prompted the Finnish government in 1934 to send Mannerheim to London to underline the continuing threat posed by the Soviets. Since that time, Eden had been regarded as dangerously pro-Soviet in many Finnish circles.40 Given this, Finnish assessments of Churchill’s and Eden’s proposals tended to be very sceptical. It was not entirely surprising that Churchill’s Grand Alliance tended to be associated with Eden’s advocacy of Eastern Locarno. Churchill, however, dearly wished Finland to be part of the comprehensive military arrangement. Seen geostrategically, the participation of Finland and of other Border States was a necessity. This also meant that the Border States had to abandon the hitherto guiding theme of their mutual cooperation—containment of Soviet communism—and instead allow the Soviets to establish temporary military bases on their soil, and generally to acquiesce in the growth of regional Soviet power. Churchill was, of course, well aware of how profoundly difficult such a departure would be for each and every one of the Border States, and he hoped that the Soviets would be proactive in dispelling inevitable Border States’ reservations. As he saw it, the Soviets would have to promise that they would seek no more than naval and army bases, and that they would leave once the German threat had been negated. Apart from that, he was utterly convinced that the anticommunists of Finland, Estonia, Poland and Romania—and of Britain—simply had to face the fact that states had to be differentiated not only on moral or ideological grounds. In crisis situations, help must be accepted from directions that would not generally be countenanced, and cooperation agreed with the countries that were ‘the least bad, or least likely to endanger our safety’, even if the economic and value system and ultimate aims of the country in question were detested.41 Therefore Churchill hoped, first of all, that Poland would let the Soviet Red Army in. Originally he thought that the mere presence of this army in Poland would act as a deterrent against German designs, and then, after the Czechoslovakian crisis, he hoped the Poles would allow the Red Army to move to the assistance of the Czechs through Polish territory. Secondly, Churchill had no objections to the Great Powers discussing the futures of Poland, Finland and other Border States without the participation of these states, and he even supported the idea of Britain, France and Russia giving security guarantees to these countries whether they wanted such guarantees or not. Because he did not think that any Border State, acting singly or in combination, could meaningfully either secure their own territory or assist in pacifying the rest of Europe, Churchill did not think it necessary to consult them. For the same reason, he accepted, thirdly, Soviet demands for naval bases in Finland. He wanted Great Britain to put pressure on Finland on this matter, to tell the Finns that Finnish

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independence would not be under threat if they acquiesced, that ‘these bases are only needed against Germany’ and that ‘it is Germany alone that is the danger and the enemy there’. It would therefore have been a ‘mistake for us to stiffen the Finns against making concessions to the USSR’. Even if for the sake of diplomatic nicety there might outwardly be support for the Finnish position, no doubt should be left in anyone’s mind that actually Britain was on the side of the Soviets.42 British leaders, however, chose to encourage Finnish recalcitrance. Finland had made it known that it would not lease naval bases to the Soviet Union; nor would it accept security guarantees from the Soviet Union.43 General Mannerheim’s geostrategical vision was, indeed, such that he personally would have been ready to let the Soviets have at least some of those islands in the southern Gulf of Finland which they were demanding. However, even Mannerheim was afraid that any putative Anglo-French-Russian alliance would hurt Finland in that it would range the British and the Russians on the same side and thus make it impossible for Finland to appeal for British help once the Soviets began to make more demands on Finland. The rest of the Finnish leadership felt at least as strongly on this last point, and they stressed that Finland would lose its sovereignty if there was agreement to Soviet demands for bases or if it joined any alliance of which the Soviets were a part. Even though Finland was small, it would defend itself alone. This legalistic and unrealistic position was buttressed by the vain belief that before long the Soviets would stop making demands, if only they were resisted long enough, and that therefore there was no real danger of immediate war. The ultimate argument against the Grand Alliance was, however, given by Mannerheim when at one point he told a British diplomat that though he understood the logic of Churchill’s vision, as a Finn he would never be able to cooperate with the Soviet Union. After June 1939, the British government repeatedly let Finnish leaders know that they sympathised with this attitude, accepted it, and would not support Soviet demands on Finland.44 Prime Minister Chamberlain and his French colleague, Eduard Daladier, did send several deputations to meet Soviet representatives in the spring of 1939. These lower-level officials did, just as Churchill had hoped, discuss the possibility of a military alliance. However, Chamberlain himself remained steadfast in his chosen strategical and moral position and refused to encourage these negotiations. At one point he even referred to the Finnish and other Border States’ reluctance as grounds for inaction, and stressed that he had no desire to try to interfere with that reluctance.45 As a matter of fact, the negotiations were not about an alliance at all, as far as Chamberlain was concerned—not in the sense that Churchill and the Soviet leaders had in mind. The negotiations were part of a diplomatic effort to prevent the Soviets from becoming closer to Germany, and they aimed solely at a Soviet undertaking to provide military assistance to any such of its neighbouring countries that Germany might attack

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in the near future, but only if these countries asked for such assistance. In no way did Chamberlain want to use a Grand Alliance to force these small countries to accept Soviet assistance. Instead of welcoming the Soviets in a comprehensive defensive alliance, after long delays Chamberlain decided to give unilateral security guarantees only to Poland and Romania. He was not about to pressurise Finland (or other remaining Border States) to accede to any broader alliance arrangements, or into making concessions to the Soviets.46 Chamberlain was seeking Soviet neutrality; Churchill was seeking an alliance between the Western powers and the Soviets. Chamberlain believed that a formal defensive alliance would lead to war; Churchill believed that such an alliance was the best means of averting a war. Chamberlain wanted to respect the anticommunist fears of the small Eastern European countries and run the risk of this contributing to war; Churchill wanted to forget anticommunism entirely for the time being and, together with the Soviets, prevent a world war from starting. Chamberlain’s position, of course, doomed the project of a Grand Alliance. Soviet negotiators made it known that their government insisted on binding and explicit security guarantees. They would not countenance any consideration of the views of the anticommunist Border States, since they were convinced that Nazi Germany was going in any case to use these states as its tools and stepping-stones in an advance eastwards. Therefore the Soviets insisted that Border States like Finland bind themselves to a de facto cancellation of the Oslo Declaration and provide military and/or naval bases, and that a military alliance be formed between the Border States, the Soviets and the Western powers. The members of this military alliance would have to promise mutual assistance in the case of a war, both if one member state was attacked directly and if one was attacked indirectly—that is, if a given Border State officially remained at peace yet signed a political treaty with the Germans. These were the Soviet minimum demands, but it soon became clear that Chamberlain and Daladier would not accept even these. When Chamberlain did, in principle, and after months of delay and procrastination, in June 1939 give his support to the Soviet plan—and specified that Finland was one of the countries meant47—the Soviet leadership had already lost its faith in the Western powers’ abilities and trustworthiness. Instead, the Soviets chose the road of bilateral negotiations with its neighbours and tried to set up a network of regional non-aggression pacts. As a mere Conservative MP, there was not much that Churchill could do to influence the course of events. He could continue his public polemic, and he could continue to fret over the decisions that his own country’s government and those of Finland and other Border States had made. Repeatedly in the late summer and early fall of 1939 he insisted that no delay was safe, that Soviet demands had to be acceded to for the sake of peace, that they had to be accepted in toto, and that a multilateral ‘full and solid alliance’ had to be created immediately.

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Churchill was convinced that if a Grand Alliance was not soon forthcoming, the Soviets would make a pact with the Germans instead.48 In August 1939 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany did, of course, sign the so-called Nazi-Soviet Pact (or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) of mutual assistance, friendship and division of the spoils. Implementation of the pact began in September with the surprise German invasion of Poland, whereupon Great Britain and France declared war in accordance with the security guarantees that they had given to Poland. In October the Soviets increased their pressure on Finland, demanding first that it cede certain parts of its territory to satisfy Soviet security needs. Then, on 30 November, they attacked Finland. A major battle was now underway on two different fronts in Eastern Europe, and allied in it were just those two powers the alliance of which Churchill had feared greatly at least since 1919. The constellation was the worst possible, and Finland had helped to bring it about. Dividing the blame, scouting the future Up until the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and to a degree even after it, Churchill thought that a Grand Alliance could be formed. Maybe his belief was mistaken and unrealistic, but that was what he thought. After the attempt had failed he did not really blame the Soviets, who, according to him, had acted only out of national self-interest and geostrategical insight when, after the implosion of the Grand Alliance project, they made an alternative pact with Nazi Germany. Instead, Churchill blamed the policies of appeasement and the general indecisiveness of the appeasers. He thought that the series of appeasing compromises with Germany in the years leading up to 1939 had so completely lost the West the confidence of most of Europe that it was completely natural that the Soviets and the continent’s small states, Finland included, had begun to seek the best terms available from ascendant Germany. There was no other realistic option left once the opportunity for the Grand Alliance had been squandered. Therefore, Churchill blamed the appeasers for the Soviets’ decision to align themselves with Germany.49 Churchill could well have also blamed his own past anticommunist polemics. The fact was that the policies of appeasement were based in no small degree on the strong instinctual aversion of the appeasers (most of whom were anticommunists) towards any cooperation with the old ideological enemy. It was not that all appeasers failed to see Germany as a possible threat; it was only that they could not think of the Soviets as anything but the greatest threat. Churchill, too, thought that the Soviets were dangerous and threatening—and still an enemy—but he was convinced that geostrategy had to be primary, and that it necessitated an alliance with them. It was, of course, also true that in the decades leading up to the final showdown Churchill himself had done much to build and maintain just that kind of an anticommunist coalition and ideology

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which now, as far as he was concerned, obscured the primacy of basic strategic interests. Finally, Churchill blamed the Border States, including Finland. He thought that the short-sightedness and national pride of several Border States had been a major contributory factor to the war.50 Seen from Churchill’s perspective, Chamberlain’s tacit support for Finnish recalcitrance during the Grand Alliance negotiations had only encouraged the Finns to remain obstinate and obstructive. This support had contributed to the Grand Alliance’s failure, and it had also helped to preclude that other option, almost as useful, of informal Soviet collaboration with the Western powers. As far as Churchill was concerned, even the Soviet invasion of Poland would not necessarily have had to mean the impossibility of at least such an informal collaboration. The invasion underlined what Churchill had expected anyway if the Grand Alliance was not formed; that, in the absence of a satisfactory negotiated arrangement with the Border States and with Britain and France, the Soviets would satisfy their immediate security needs in another fashion. This, of course, may have meant that the Soviets were no longer interested in cooperation with the West. What it certainly showed was that the Second World War was now a war without a real Eastern front. Had Finland been persuaded to accept Soviet preconditions for a Grand Alliance, this potentially very serious turn of events could have been prevented. Churchill’s musings were coalesced by a purely power political assessment of the nature and likely policies of the Soviets. As an anticommunist, Churchill was convinced that the Soviets would, then and always, base their policies purely on national interest, and as a geostrategist he realised that in 1939 this Soviet trait was of use to Great Britain. Even if Soviet behaviour often seemed like a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, as Churchill put it in an oft-quoted sentence, he emphasised nevertheless that there was a key to the enigma, and that this key was ‘Russian national interest’. Russia’s national, strategic interest was opposed to German expansion, and before long it would lead the Soviets to join the Western Allies. Seen in this context, all tacit, informal Soviet actions which hurt German interests were also in the British interest.51 This meant that even the Nazi-Soviet Pact did not necessarily have to mean the impossibility of a de facto Grand Alliance. Therefore, Churchill regarded even the Soviet invasion into Poland as a benefit to the incipient Allied war effort. It was beneficial inasmuch as it forced Germany to keep several divisions in the East, just in case the unpredictable Soviets reneged on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and given that such a troop concentration weakened Germany in other areas of interest to Britain, such as southern Europe and the Middle East. Churchill therefore wanted to tempt the Soviets into a tacit anti-German posture, and to that end he suggested negotiations on Allied-Soviet cooperation in southeastern Europe.52 For the same reason, Churchill still wanted Finland to accede to Soviet demands for naval

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bases. If the Soviets were in no doubt that a possible Finnish acquiescence was the result of British pressure, all the better. According to Churchill, a Finnish granting of naval bases to the Soviets—even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact—would have helped to provide the desired result of a de facto Soviet siding with the Allies. Therefore Churchill tried—even after the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, and after the British declaration of war—to have the British government pressurise Finland into acquiescence regarding the bases. If Finland refused to acquiesce, Churchill hoped that the British government would tell the Soviets that it disapproved of the Finnish decision and recognised the Soviets’ legitimate security concerns. Churchill tried to have the Cabinet assure the Soviets on this point even as late as November 1939, a few weeks before the Soviets attacked Finland.53 Foreign Secretary Halifax did indeed put such pressure on Finland in late November, even if he was circumspect and non-explicit when doing so, but he had no success.54 Because Finland was the last of the Border States not to accede to Soviet demands (the Baltic countries had acceded in October), Churchill thought that its responsibility was heavy indeed. It is not clear which he blamed more, Finland or Chamberlain. In any case, he blamed both. It is evident, of course, that Churchill did not know in any detail what the situation was in Finland. He expressed his views as a private citizen and backbencher MP, and these views were grounded in a deterministic geostrategical analysis which cared little about empirical counter-arguments. However, what is essential is not whether Churchill knew enough about the Finnish situation or whether his demands were reasonable or not, but that Churchill did blame Finland, among others, for the Second World War breaking out as a war in which Germany was not encircled by a Grand Alliance. He blamed Finland, Prime Minister Chamberlain and all appeasers at least as much as he blamed the Nazis. This was not the first time that Churchill felt that Finnish leaders had made a grave strategic and tactical error which in the end would redound to their own ruin. The first such error by Finnish leaders had been their refusal to unleash the St Petersburg operation in 1919—a refusal that had made it possible for the Soviet Union to remain a state entity, and eventually to become the world threat that was now attacking Finland. The second major strategic and tactical error was the way in which the Finns refused to be party to a Grand Alliance for peace which included the Soviet Union. As far as Churchill was concerned, Finland had clearly misperceived the relative power of Germany and Great Britain—had, in a way, lost its faith in the superiority of those moral and spiritual resources of Western democracy which, by definition, would yield eventual victory for the Western Allies. At issue was a Finnish lack of courage. Churchill did not say that explicitly, not in 1939 (although he did say it in his war memoirs55), and it is clear that as an anticommunist he continued to understand the Finnish position. However, it is also evident that once again

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Churchill had been confirmed in those of his views which he had set down in his original First World War memoirs about the Finnish tendency to be subservient to Germany.56 Temporarily, maybe, but genuinely in any case, the Soviets had been willing to cooperate with Britain and Finland in ridding the world of Adolf Hitler’s menace, but it had some preconditions for doing this—preconditions that were entirely understandable—and Finland should have acquiesced in these. Refusal to do so was, according to Churchill, the second major mistake of Finnish leaders. Such was the mood in which Churchill perused the early Second World War. He had tried very hard to create a Grand Alliance to prevent the war but had failed, partly because of Finnish policy. Churchill therefore owed no debt to Finland, but was sorely disappointed in the leaders of his own country and in the leaders of the Border States, including Finland. Yet, when asked, he was eager to return to the Board of the Admiralty and energetically to prosecute the naval aspect of the war that he had been unable to prevent. He could not have expected the simultaneous outbreak of the Russo-Finnish Winter War, but he entered decision-making relating to that war in a very ambiguous state of mind.

4 THE ANTICOMMUNIST CHALLENGE OF THE WINTER WAR, 1939–1940

On 30 November 1939, the armed forces of the Soviet Union launched a premeditated attack on Finland. Acting without a declaration of war, the Red Air Force bombed several cities, including the capital Helsinki, and the Red Army began a massive land invasion. The Soviet Union expected a swift and decisive victory, but Finland put up staunch resistance which surprised and inspired all of the non-communist world. Even 105 days of intense fighting and a vast superiority in manpower and implements of war did not yield a military victory for the Soviet side. Had the Finnish Winter War begun at some other time in the world’s history, there would hardly have been any question but that Churchill would have emerged as a major supporter of the Finnish struggle. Churchill the anticommunist would no doubt have done everything in his power to assist Finland’s fight for its life in every possible way. However, the situation in late 1939 and early 1940 was more complex than this hypo thetical one. Churchill had to assess the meaning and implications of the Winter War in a difficult and conflicting situation where not just Finland and Soviet Russia were at war in Northern Europe, and Nazi Germany and the Western Allies in the rest of Europe, but where the demands and promptings of geopolitics, imperial self-interest and anticommunism were also in profound conflict. It was very difficult to choose between these demands, and very difficult to set them in a coherent and sustained order of priorities. However, for Britain to survive beyond the early period of the Second World War, during which it had only begun to build her war machine, the setting of clear priorities and sticking to them was exactly what was needed. Churchill’s negotiation of the Winter War, therefore, exposed the often tortuous attempts of a convinced geostrategist and at least as convinced an anticommunist to square the circle, and to square it in ways that would benefit Britain in the short term yet not hurt her in the longer term. Churchill’s attempt to do this began in a situation where his two previously compatible main promptings—anticommunism and geostrategy—were seriously at odds. The resources of Great Britain were limited. She needed swift victories, and victories gained without exertions or sacrifices that endangered the limited resources at too early a stage. As far as possible, Britain needed to gain these

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victories in theatres where it was more difficult for Germany to operate than for Britain, and where allies were available. The Scandinavian region was one of the few areas where these conditions might be met, where it would be relatively easy for Britain to operate and where potentially major gains were available, especially if it was possible either to gain control of the Baltic Sea or to isolate Germany from the raw materials that were available in Northern Norway and Sweden. If the mineral fields of the North were kept from German hands, and especially if the Germans were prevented from controlling the Baltic Sea, Britain might benefit considerably, gain more time for re-armament, and be able significantly to weaken the German capacity for war-making. It would be better still if these areas could be wrested for the Allies in ways that encouraged the Soviets to abandon their German alliance. It was therefore not in the British interest needlessly to pester or annoy the Soviets, or to oppose too forcefully the Soviets’ activities in Finland. Thus, immediate British interests in 1939–1940 did not square well with helping the Finnish struggle against the Soviet invader. Yet despite all his efforts for a Grand Alliance, Churchill remained a convinced anticommunist who did not want the Soviets to grow in strength or influence just because the West had to fight the Nazis. Even if both Churchill and Western public opinion regarded the Nazis as the immediate and greatest threat, both still detested all that Soviet communism represented. Somewhere inside Churchill there still persisted the temptation to destroy the Soviet regime once and for all, or at least to delegitimate it thoroughly in the eyes of all peoples. Moreover, Churchill regarded it as Great Britain’s moral and ideological duty always to come to the assistance of small democracies suddenly attacked by dictatorships, and nowhere was this conviction stronger than in the case of Finland—a country in which he had tried to prevent the Soviets from ever establishing themselves in power. Before long, Churchill devised a policy proposal by which he hoped to solve the problem that the Winter War posed in the context of the World War. He proposed war measures that would simultaneously assist Finland and hurt Germany, yet would not directly challenge the Soviets. It was a difficult and problematic synthesis, very hard to implement, and in the end it was never really tried. Churchill did not have the power to make final decisions, and the British War Cabinet was still dominated by former appeasers who were instinctually averse to bold and risky offensive moves. What is more, a range of external, mostly Scandinavian, complications were injected into the equation. All this meant that even after he had made up his own mind on how to deal with the Winter War, all Churchill could do was argue his case to those who would decide. Once again he undertook to persuade sceptics at home and abroad. That persuasion continued throughout the Winter War, but in the end did not yield the results that Churchill hoped for.

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Churchill did not assess the Finnish Winter War on its own terms, as an independent set of events. Such would have been no task for the First Lord of the Admiralty, which was the position Churchill again held after the British declaration of war. Nor did Churchill’s planning and arguing relative to Finland flow from any detailed knowledge of Finnish developments, or from a mass of information received from Finland, since after 1919 he had few Finnish contacts remaining. He knew little about the thinking and desires of Finnish leaders, and did not seem to care much about either. Quite simply, Churchill’s involvement in the Winter War was a case of one major British decision-maker trying to match the immediate requirements of war-making, the primary demands of geopolitics and the abiding moral and ideological considerations of anticommunism. Churchill’s activities related to the Winter War but were not prompted by it; rather, they were prompted by a realisation that the Finnish situation could be made use of in the pursuit of broader ideological and military aims. Planning for Operations Catherine, Avonmouth, Stratford, Wilfred and Lumps (September–December 1939) The start of the Winter War muddied plans that Churchill had already made. Before that war began, Churchill had envisioned policies for the north of Europe which presupposed a Grand Alliance or at least a tacit Soviet alignment with the Western Allies. He had hoped that Finland would accede to Soviet demands for bases precisely because of this hope for Allied-Soviet collaboration, and had sketched plans for a Scandinavian-Baltic Sea theatre of operations where all regional powers would stand shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany. Churchill’s war plans had been entirely and solely directed against Germany, and he had been ready to inquire into all conceivable means, to use every direct and indirect approach to deny Germany the raw materials and military and political benefits that could be derived from Northern Europe. Because the length of the Winter War was unknown, at first Churchill reserved the option of proceeding with these original plans. Gradually, however, he came to modify his plans so that they could be used simultaneously against Germany and Russia. In early September 1939, Churchill had begun to plan for operations that were to subject the Baltic Sea and its environs to British control. He assumed that Germany was dependent on foreign sources of raw materials, and would therefore attempt as soon as possible to secure the availability of iron ore from northern Europe, and oil from southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Should Germany proceed in the latter direction first, the British Empire would be seriously threatened; however, Britain also did not have significant numbers of troops available in southern and southeastern Europe and a battle there might be disastrous if engaged in too early in the war. For that reason alone, it was necessary for Britain to do everything in its power to encourage Germany to

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concentrate its offensive action on other parts of Europe, especially the north. In the north of Europe, Churchill thought it possible to employ the naval and amphibious capabilities of the Royal Navy in ways that would tie down significant numbers of German troops. A diversion like this would buy Britain much-needed time to prepare itself for other theatres, whilst also denying Germany crucial raw materials. For these reasons, Churchill thought that offensive action in the early period of the war should be undertaken only or primarily in the north of Europe. If such offensives managed to acquire control of the Baltic Sea, the road to an eventual victory would be paved.1 The hope to control the Baltic Sea was not new by any means. When Churchill had been the First Lord of the Admiralty during the early part of the First World War, he had strenuously campaigned for a naval campaign to exactly this end. It was only because of insurmountable War Cabinet opposition that he had eventually switched the Royal Navy’s main offensive to the Dardanelles in Turkey.2 With the Dardanelles operation having failed and Churchill having been forced to resign as a scapegoat, he particularly wanted to prove the viability of his earlier strategic concept. One opportunity to do this had been in the latter stages of the Finnish War of Independence, when the Royal Navy had, of course, controlled the Baltic Sea. Churchill’s memories of that period had further convinced him of the plausibility of such control being regained, and consequently he had not been one of the politicians who had applauded the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935. This agreement, which was part of the policy of appeasement, had practically eliminated a British naval presence in the Baltic Sea, and Churchill had seen it as dangerous in the extreme. He opposed appeasement in general, but he opposed this agreement in particular.3 In 1936 Churchill had started to plan for a future domination of the Baltic Sea. This plan was part of his broader Grand Alliance concept, and envisaged the permanent placement of a British naval squadron on the Russian island of Kronstadt. The Soviet Union was so interested that, in the 1939 alliance negotiations, it specifically asked Britain to do just this.4 After the Grand Alliance proved abortive the original plan had, of course, to be abandoned, but Churchill by no means lost interest in the scheme. In early September 1939—only three days after his reappointment as the First Lord of the Admiralty—Churchill seized his opportunity and forwarded to his senior planning officers a detailed plan that he had already prepared for the takeover of the Baltic Sea. The plan in question, Operation Catherine, was to be implemented as soon as the ice started to melt in the Baltic Sea, and it aimed primarily to disrupt German sea communications with Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union. Churchill hoped that the operation would make it impossible for Germany to import iron ore from the northern Swedish ore field of Gällivare, and to complicate German-Soviet interaction. The longer-term objective was a naval bridgehead which could be used for various future land

THE ANTICOMMUNIST CHALLENGE 73

and sea operations. The series of events leading to that hoped-for denouement was supposed to begin with sending a fortified naval squadron into the Baltic Sea: this squadron was to operate in the region for several months, until the summer of 1940, by which time Churchill expected the states of the northern Baltic to have provided the British with several more naval bases. The very act of bringing a British naval contingent into the Baltic Sea would, so Churchill hoped, so encourage the region’s states that they would want to join the Allies. These states included the Soviet Union, which to Churchill remained a putative member of a Grand Alliance.5 He appealed to Prime Minister Chamberlain to pressurise the northern countries—including Finland—to fall in line.6 Thus, Operation Catherine was Churchill’s last attempt to create a Grand Alliance. He wanted to use a naval show of strength to erase the unfortunate impression of British weakness that years of appeasement had created in Soviet eyes, and thus to tempt the Soviets out of their non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. His animosity towards Finland during this period was in no small part because the Finns opposed such a plan. Churchill also envisaged a series of secondary and more limited naval operations in the northern seas, which he hoped Britain would undertake before Operation Catherine got underway. He proposed that the shipments of Scandinavian iron ore to Germany be stopped, either through diplomatic arrangements for the British purchase of relevant Norwegian ships and Swedish ore, or through what came to be known as Operation Wilfred (the mining of the coastal waters off Norway) and Operation Lumps (the blocking of Swedish ports by sinking the ships in those ports).7 In the complex situation of late 1939, it was these latter kind of operations that gained the most support among British politicians and military planners. The most widely supported was Operation Wilfred, which came to be known as the ‘smaller plan’. Thus, Operation Catherine (which in any case was planned for no earlier than the spring of 1940) receded into the background. Personally, Churchill wanted both Wilfred and Catherine to receive Cabinet approval, and in plans that predated the beginning of the Winter War he proceeded on the assumption that this would indeed happen, and that both operations would be underway by February 1940. The Soviet Union’s attack on Finland complicated Churchill’s plans. It did not immediately impact on Wilfred and Lumps, but Operation Cather ine became much more contingent and problematic, given that it was impossible to know what the final aims of the Soviets were in Finland. Finland’s earlier refusal to grant naval bases to the Soviets or to others had, of course, made formal Anglo-Soviet naval cooperation in the Baltic impossible, but, as far as Churchill was concerned, formal cooperation was not necessary and de facto cooperation would still suffice. Therefore, the way in which the Soviets had forcibly taken their desired naval bases did not greatly disturb him. He was sure, however, that it was in the British interest to allow an increase in Soviet power in the Baltic Sea region only if this increase of power was not part of a secret Nazi-Soviet

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arrangement. No one knew for sure whether this was the case or not. In such an uncertain situation, Churchill thought it best (at least initially) not to commit Britain to any such overt action on Finland that might destroy the chance of a Grand Alliance, if any such chance still remained, and drive the Soviets to Germany, if they were not firmly with Germany already. Churchill refused to transform Operation Catherine into an anticommunist operation directed against the Soviets, a course of action which was suggested soon after the start of the Winter War by Lord Cork and Orrery, the Admiral in charge of operative planning. In Churchill’s view, Cork and Orrery’s plan did not make strategic sense, since it would have divided Britain’s limited resources in a crucial theatre of action, led to hostilities with additional countries, and possibly prompted the Soviets to even greater cooperation with Britain’s existing enemies.8 Churchill was similarly reluctant when other suggestions were made for specifically antiSoviet war measures. The result was that in the earliest stages of the Winter War—a clearly anticommunist war—Churchill remained reticent and reluctant to become engaged in any way. As an anticommunist, Churchill was, ‘of course, concerned about the Soviets’ actions in Finland—actions which fitted in with all that he thought he knew from 1918, 1919 and 1920 about the ways in which the Soviets were wont to expand their territorial dominion. His public statements after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and before the Winter War were as passionately anticommunist as ever.9 Moreover, upon the outbreak of the Winter War Churchill demanded that Britain make known its displeasure at what the Soviets were doing. Yet as a geostrategist Churchill remained convinced that, despite all this, the Soviets were not the major threat of the moment; they provided a potential direct or indirect alleviator of the main threat, which could in various ways be used to weaken the main threat—that is, Nazi Germany. This potential had to be squared with anticommunist and moral considerations, and Finland had to be assisted, if at all possible, in ways that avoided the danger of a war between Britain and the Soviet Union. Verbal protests did not increase the danger of such a war, since the Soviet leadership never listened to mere words anyway, and therefore Churchill was sure that it was safe to make known his strong anticommunist and moral disapproval of the Soviet assault on Finland. However, when it came to all other possible countermeasures, Churchill consistently stressed his hope that ‘war with Russia may be avoided’.10 The Winter War did, however, offer one opportunity that was so significant that Churchill was even willing to risk war with the Soviets if necessary in order to seize the opportunity. Churchill wanted to use the Winter War as a cover story and a public legitimation for his Norwegian and Swedish plans, and for a broadening of his planned operations into a full-scale all-Scandinavian front against Nazi Germany. He wanted to frighten the Scandinavians with the ideological fears prompted by the Winter War, and thus to tempt them to resist German, not Soviet, aggressions and to side with the Allies. He wanted the

THE ANTICOMMUNIST CHALLENGE 75

Winter War to be a pretext for his projected control of the Baltic Sea and all of Scandinavia. This project unfolded on two different planes. On the one hand, Churchill suspected that the Scandinavian countries could be induced to join the Allies out of pure national interest if the Soviet threat was highlighted enough. To this end, only a few days after the Winter War had begun he decided to scrap those parts of the projected Operation Catherine which envisaged Soviet cooperation. He did not accept Lord Cork and Orrery’s suggestion of an anticommunist war, and he did not want to encourage Sweden or Norway into any such a war. However, he thought it quite possible that before long events would range Finland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain and Italy in a common anticommunist war. In that case, naval domination of the Baltic Sea would be even more crucial than in other circumstances, and contingency plans had to be made. If by using the spectre of such an eventuality it were possible to tempt the Scandinavians to side with the Allies, a de facto regional Grand Alliance against Germany would be achieved. Churchill hoped that the Soviets would form the eastern flank of such an alliance, but if Scandinavia and Italy could be tempted into one instead, that, too, would be useful. This alternative strategic scenario was not something that Churchill dismissed by any means.11 Therefore, Churchill proposed that a League of Nations special session which had been called to discuss the Soviet attack on Finland (and which expelled the Soviets from the world organisation) be used as a forum at which to stoke anticommunist passions, and where Britain could associate its anti-Nazi struggle with Finland’s struggle against the other form of ‘barbaric aggression’. If the Scandinavian neutrals could through this be encouraged to view Nazism and communism as two sides of the same menace, the chances of them joining the Allies would be much improved.12 The plausibility of such an argument was, however, put in doubt by the other aspect of Churchill’s action. He regarded it as absolutely necessary for Britain to stop the neutrals from shipping iron ore and other products to Germany. If Sweden and Norway failed to bow down to mere diplo matic pressure on this matter—which seemed likely by December 1939—and if Churchill was forced to go ahead with Operations Wilfred and Lumps, the Scandinavians would be furious with the British and hardly likely to equate the Finnish struggle with the British war effort. Churchill had no intention whatsoever of respecting the Scandinavians’ professed neutrality if they continued to supply Germany with the raw materials for war,13 but he knew well that the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister’s office were not as determined on this point as was he, and problems might therefore ensue. It was the Winter War that offered the solution, as far as Churchill saw it, since it could be used as the technical justification for British offensives in the northern areas, whereby breaches of Scandinavian neutrality might be forgiven in the name of the greater cause. At the same time, Britain might gain control of all of Scandinavia. From late 1939, therefore,

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Churchill began in this way to link the Winter War to his unrelated offensive plans. In case the tactic did not bear fruit, he also continued to demand that Operation Wilfred’s ‘smaller plan’ be implemented when the time was right. In December 1939 Churchill proposed to the British War Cabinet that Great Britain should encourage Sweden and Norway to assist Finland in its defensive struggle, and offer these two countries security guarantees in case their aid to Finland led Germany to attack them. If Germany did attack, British forces could then arrive in Northern Sweden and Norway to take over the crucial Gällivare ore fields and proceed with Operation Catherine. Optimistic to the last, Churchill hoped that such a turn of events would start a chain reaction which before long would range Norway and Sweden on the Allied side, and make possible not just the stoppage of ore shipments to Germany but also a formal Allied-Scandinavian military alliance, the mining of the northern Baltic Sea, the acquisition of naval bases in Stockholm and in the Norwegian archipelago, the acquisition of air strips in Finland, and the setting up of a permanent naval squadron in the Baltic Sea. After all this had been gained, it would finally be possible safely to roll a major army group southwards to Southern Sweden, where, Churchill assumed, the Germans would have arrived by then. The Germans could then be finished off in Sweden.14 All this would be possible if the Winter War was used as a lever with which to prompt the Scandinavians to join the Allies. Churchill’s series of arguments was meant as much to convince a very sceptical British government as it was to be used to sway the Scandinavians. If all the pieces locked in as intended, Churchill promised that the plan would be ‘immediately decisive’. So decisive would it be, indeed, that for such an end, and for such an end alone, Churchill was willing to take the risk ‘that we might ultimately be drawn into a general war with Russia’. ‘This was a risk that we should have to run’, Churchill stressed, because British control over the Baltic Sea and over Scandinavia was essential for victory. Whatever countermeasures the Soviets might take in Asia were a matter for future concern.15 At first Churchill did not regard his ‘larger plan’ as in any way urgent. Although he wanted to link it with Operations Wilfred and Lumps, he thought that these two other operations would be enough to trigger the hoped-for change in Scandinavian allegiances which would pave the way for the larger plan. In all likelihood, Wilfred and Lumps would be enough to prompt Germany to attack Sweden and Norway, and therefore any measures that the latter two could be persuaded to take in aid of Finland would help to ensure that Germany did indeed attack. Churchill’s goal was, therefore, to spread the war to Scandinavia, rather than to help Finland as such. This goal could be reached, he thought, either in cooperation with Sweden and Norway by encouraging them to act in Finland, or without these countries’ cooperation by laying the Wilfred minefield in Norwegian waters and implementing Operation Lumps in the Swedish ports of Luleå and Öxelosund.16

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Churchill began to stress the Winter War aspect of this equation only after he had learned that the French government was being swayed by such emphasis. The French were interested in moving the main battlefront away from their borders, and were therefore not at all averse to large-scale naval and land operations in the north of Europe. Also, the emphasis on anticommunism suited the French well, since they were still battling at home with a powerful political far right which questioned the reasonableness of the war thus far, a far right that could be pacified if the war were given a more clearly anticommunist complexion or dimension. French military planners originally preferred an alternative operation in the Finnish Arctic Sea port of Petsamo—an operation which Churchill opposed, since it would not lead to Allied control of Swedish ore fields—but gradually they, too, came to share Churchill’s position.17 Once he realised this, Churchill changed his emphasis. He did not begin to emphasise the Winter War because he regarded the related ‘larger plan’ as in any way strategically better than the ‘smaller plan’, but rather because he recognised that the Winter War afforded a more powerful argument with which to convince the British, Swedish and the Norwegian governments. It was the collaboration between Churchill and the French that moved Winter War-related planning forward in the latter part of 1939. It is therefore no coincidence that Churchill was the first British minister to propose large-scale military assistance to Finland, or that he made this proposal on the same day that he learned of increased French interest in such assistance. On the day in question, the French government suggested that a joint Allied missive be delivered to Sweden and Norway in which the Allies would inform these two countries of their intention of sending military assistance (and possibly troops) to Finland, and of their undertaking to Sweden and Norway if such assistance were to prompt a German attack on them. Churchill gave this proposition his immediate support, and he demanded immediately that planning efforts be redoubled for an intervention in the northern ore field which could also cover Finland. He stressed that such an intervention was a necessity, and that it had to start with or without Swedish and Norwegian acquiescence—indeed ‘at all costs’.18 Churchill’s demand was the first turning-point in the British engagement in the Winter War, since it prompted the Cabinet sub-committee to which Churchill made the demand to endorse his plan for the full Cabinet’s consideration. In late 1939, the Admiralty and the War Office began to draft detailed plans for two new operations, Operations Avonmouth and Stratford. These two operations were based more on French suggestions than on Churchill’s own original ideas, but they conformed to parts of Churchill’s existing plans. Operation Avonmouth intended to use two divisions to take over the Norwegian port of Narvik, and from that port to proceed to the Gällivare ore fields in neighbouring Sweden and eventually to the port of Luleå, which was a primary point of embarkation for the ore shipments to Germany. This port would be

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destroyed, much as Churchill had proposed in his plans for Operation Lumps. From Luleå, troops would eventually be sent to assist the Finns in their fight against the Soviet invader. Operation Stratford, on the other hand, would have captured the Norwegian cities of Trondheim, Stavanger and possibly Bergen, securing the Allied flank from the Germans and providing another bridgehead whence the Allies could later move towards Southern Sweden.19 Together with Operations Catherine and Wilfred—and Churchill still wanted both to proceed as well20—all this Allied military activity in the north would, it was hoped, confuse German plans, force Germany to concentrate her forces in the north, and eventually overwhelm it. The British government gave these plans its general approval in late December 1939, when it decided to follow Churchill’s advice and put pressure on Sweden and Norway first to assist Finland, then to accept security guarantees from the Allies, and finally to welcome Allied forces onto their soil. Soon after this early general acceptance, however, the War Cabinet changed its mind and repeatedly told Churchill not to proceed with practical arrangements. On the one hand the War Cabinet was afraid that the ‘smaller plan’ (mining of Norwegian waters, on which Churchill still insisted) would needlessly complicate things and turn Sweden and Norway against the Allies, and on the other hand it simply wanted to delay, hoping that the Allied materiel assistance to Finland would itself be enough to convince the Scandinavians. The War Cabinet therefore saw no reason to hurry things. Much to Churchill’s chagrin, the Foreign Office and the general staff also began to make their reservations known regarding the hastily drafted plans. Among the general staff, no one thought these plans more unrealistic than the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside—who should have known, since he had commanded the British troops in the Kotlas-Viatka operations in 1919 and was more familiar than most with the conditions in the Arctic north. The Foreign Office feared diplomatic problems and therefore wanted to delay, and Prime Minister Chamberlain himself refused to give his final go-ahead until he had, as he put it, ‘persuaded’ Sweden and Norway.21 Churchill and Sir Samuel Hoare, the veteran of the 1919 manoeuvring for a St Petersburg operation who now served as Lord Privy Seal, tried hard to convince the sceptics. Hoare, a former appeaser, made use of his close relations with Chamberlain to demand that considerable aid be sent swiftly to Finland, even if Britain’s own defences were thereby temporarily compromised. Churchill, for his part, used the moral and anticommunist argument, and repeatedly reminded the War Cabinet of how desperate the Finnish situation was and how urgent it was to help the Finns. He even hoped that the Cabinet send Hoare to Sweden to impress upon the Swedes that ‘the destruction of Finland was being consummated before their very eyes’ all because of the Swedish attitude, and that after they had dealt with Finland the Soviets would no doubt attack Sweden.22

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Churchill and Hoare were unable, however, sufficiently to pool their strength. Their brief collaboration in late 1939 and early 1940 differed significantly from their much more concerted collaboration of 1919, and this was because their paths had diverged almost completely since that time and mutual distrust and loathing had supplanted an earlier anticommunist fellowship. In the 1930s Hoare had become a leading appeaser and one of the architects of the Indian independence project, and Churchill had come to detest him so much that at one point he had accused Hoare of lying to Parliament and had actually begun a process for having him removed from office.23 Apart from these two mutually distrustful men there were no convinced supporters of Churchill’s projected northern operations in the Cabinet, and given further that the minister in charge of persuading the Swedes and the Norwegians was Lord Halifax, a phlegmatic appeaser who did not want to antagonise the neutrals (even if privately he shared Churchill’s broad strategic estimate), it was a foregone conclusion that Churchill’s plans would not proceed. By early 1940, all the operations that he envisaged for Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic Sea were in danger because the British government did not dare act against the wishes of the northern neutrals. British and French leaders did not reach agreement until late December 1939 on their projected first missive to Sweden and Norway. As the missive came to stand, it broached neither the military operations which had in principle been decided upon, nor the Allied intention of assisting Finland with war equipment (and, possibly, troops). It only suggested that Sweden and Norway redouble their own aid to Finland, and promised that the Allies would consider what measures they could take if such a redoubling of aid turned Germany against these two countries. In a further missive in early January 1940, they simply stated that they reserved the right to act in whatever ways they deemed necessary in northern waters. Plans for Allied intervention in Finland were still not mentioned. However, by this time Sweden and Norway had learned from the Finnish government of such plans, and they therefore reacted unfavourably to both notes. The British Cabinet and Foreign Office saw no other option but to continue the apparently futile diplomatic pressure. They could only hope for a change of attitude on the part of Sweden and Norway.24 Everything depended on Sweden and Norway. Great Britain and France had given a right of veto to these two neutral countries regarding aid to Finland, as well as on Churchill’s other planned operations. No progress was made in early 1940 on getting explicit approval or even tacit acceptance from either country, and Churchill was becoming frustrated with their vacillation, lack of courage, and strict interpretation of international law regarding neutral rights. Ministerial colleagues noticed that the First Lord of the Admiralty arrived angry at every Cabinet meeting, and that he left at least as angry. Churchill kept insisting that Sweden and Norway be sent a categorical missive demanding that they assist Finland more and allow the laying of a minefield in Norwegian waters. He also

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insisted that Allied troops would land in Scandinavia and move towards Finland whether Sweden or Norway accepted it or not.25 In January 1940—almost two months after the beginning of the Winter War and some six months after Operation Catherine had first been drafted—not one of the northern operations that Churchill regarded as being critical for British success in the war had started. As a matter of fact, Britain had engaged Germany in no offensive. action whatsoever, anywhere. Churchill was acutely concerned about the effects that such inaction had on morale. He wanted swift, offensive action, and saw northern operations, legitimated under the cover of helping Finland, as easily implementable as well as beneficial. His preference for such operations predated the Winter War and was ultimately unrelated to it. Events in Finland mattered as a means of persuading sceptics and obstructionists to support his offensive plans. As he assessed the situation in late 1939 and early 1940, Churchill concluded that the only way to make the sceptics and the obstructionists back his plans was for him to highlight the anticommunist nature of the Winter War and publicly to emphasise the moral imperatives involved in that anticommunist fight. Churchill started this public rhetorical persuasion in early 1940, some three months after the beginning of the Winter War. The light of freedom in the frozen North (January–March 1940) In early 1940 Churchill engaged in a prolonged effort to build public opinion in support of the northern operations that he envisioned. As in 1919, Churchill needed to use anticommunist arguments in this effort—arguments that still retained a moral appeal in a class all of their own. In Britain, the United States and large parts of Europe, the Winter War had given a new lease of life both to a latent Russophobia and to anticommunism, and it had even divided the hitherto almost universally pro-Soviet Anglophone left. Churchill was well aware of the moral and ideological resources in the body politic which he could draw upon, enliven and tie to his purposes. The appeal to the spontaneous anti-Soviet feeling of the moment was not, of course, merely an expedient. It was also a continuation of Churchill’s long-standing anticommunist effort. The events in Finland provided him with an opportunity to re-engage that rhetorical, discursive field about the evils of Soviet communism upon which anticommunists like him had had to operate during the post-1919 absence of other means of anticommunist action. Churchill the anticommunist could not let the opportunity pass once again to stoke the fires of moral indignation against communism, since he still regarded the communist system as diametrically opposed to Western democracy in military, economic and moral senses. Wholly apart from the broader promptings of expediency, Churchill regarded it as his duty to remind people of this.

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As a matter of fact, during the first seven months of the Second World War (the so called ‘Phoney War’) and up to the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Churchill’s old anticommunism went through a renaissance of sorts. This renaissance began before the Winter War, but was significantly strengthened through the force of that war’s events. As much as he respected the pragmatism of the Soviet Red Army, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Churchill continued forcefully to attack communist practice and ideology. Apart from still associating fascism, Nazism and communism, he actually stated at one point that he was glad of the Soviet-Nazi alliance since it showed to all the world how morally corrupt both forms of totalitarianism really were. Even before the Winter War, Churchill stressed that remembering that fact was conducive to victory by the West, since it helped make the West more certain of the moral justification and superiority of its cause.26 Whilst Churchill was offering the British government his Stratford, Avonmouth and Wilfred plans, he continued to accuse the Soviets of crimes, barbarism, aggressiveness and untrustworthiness typical to communists. This hostile attitude was in no way tempered by the Soviet decision to accept German munitions, or the suspicions that British observers had about a Soviet willingness to provide the Germans with ice-breakers so that Germany could resume iron ore shipments in the Baltic Sea. Nor was Churchill eased by intelligence reports that reached him in late 1939 about a joint Nazi-Soviet plan to start a Scandinavian offensive.27 Geostrategically he may still have hoped that the forever unpredictable Soviets would maintain an eastern front in Poland and in Finland, and would thus keep the Germans guessing as to their ultimate objectives, but ideologically he was tormented by the thought that the two forms of totalitarianism would in fact grow ever closer to each other. His views on the nature of communism made Churchill constantly concerned about just such close Nazi-Soviet cooperation, and even if he did not make this concern his guide to policy, he did remain as convinced an anticommunist as ever. In early 1940, Churchill also decided to employ his anticommunist arguments in the service of his immediate, non-anticommunist objective. He wanted to generate both on the home front (among all the Allies) and in Sweden and Norway (among the obstructions to his planned operations) such an overwhelming fear and loathing of Soviet intentions as would leave the two Northern countries no self-respecting option but to renounce their neutrality. If Sweden and Norway could not be persuaded of the merits of his plans in other ways, Churchill intended to use fear and shame as encouragement. It should not be ignored that at this time Italy had not yet officially declared war against Britain or France. Undoubtedly Churchill continued to hope that Italy might still be persuaded to join the Allies—and what better argument to use on Mussolini than the anticommunist one? The effort to employ moral pressure began with Churchill’s radio address on 20 January 1940. He gave this address at the critical moment when the Allies

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were waiting for Scandinavian replies to their latest, third missive. This had asked Sweden and Norway to allow war equipment and troops to pass through their territory to Finland, and Churchill decided to do everything in his power to bring things to a head before these two countries sent their responses to the request. In his January address Churchill therefore surveyed the war situation as a whole, but concentrated especially on the recent activities of the neutral states. He chose to follow the advice that he had given to the British government during the League of Nations special session on the Winter War and to equate the Finns’ anticommunist fight with the Western Allies’ anti-Nazi fight, then to compare this with the alleged selfishness and indecisiveness of the neutrals. When speaking of Finland, Churchill emphasised how: Only Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril—Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of the nation. How it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war. We cannot tell what the fate of Finland will be, but no more mournful spectacle could be presented to what is left of civilized mankind than that this splendid Northern race should be at last worn down and recided to servitude worse than death by the dull brutish force of overwhelming numbers. If the light of freedom which still burns so brightly in the frozen North should be finally quenched, it might well herald a return to the Dark Ages, when every vestige of human progress during two thousand years would be engulfed.28 Privately, Churchill concluded that ‘these dirty rotten Bolsheviks’ were just as bad as the Nazis. Soon after uttering these words, he elaborated in another address on how it had been the actions of the ‘heroic Finns’ that had re-imprinted that fact on his mind. The Finns had shown that ‘the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships’ were after all morally and materially rotten; that all concentration of power and disallowal of constructive criticism could lead to was a basic impotence for the tasks of war and peace alike. Hitler and Stalin may have been ‘very fierce and powerful’, Churchill averred, but because they had suppressed all that free inquiry and effort which in fact led to progress, ‘their ears are deaf; their fingers are numb; they cannot feel their feet as they move forward in the fog and darkness’. Therefore Churchill emphasised that the Finnish fight inspired all peoples who believed in a free, democratic, parliamentary system, and that it inspired a fight against both forms of totalitarianism.29

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There can be no doubt that Churchill profoundly believed in this assessment of the nature of Soviet communism. The moral argument about the superiority of the West and the hellishness of totalitarianism had always been an essential part of his case against communism, and in the context of the Winter War he gave this argument one of its most eloquent expressions yet. That he used Finland in particular as an example fitted in, of course, with his much earlier designation of Finland as an exemplary ‘radical democracy’ which in a particularly cogent way exposed the evils and failures of communism. Before the war he had predicted that these kinds of countries would be the very ones that the Soviets would try to efface from the face of the earth.30 The equating of communism, fascism and Nazism in which Churchill engaged in the 1930s had been part of the same discourse, a discourse where the third, liberal democratic option had always followed denunciations of the two extremes. In that earlier discourse, as in his characterisation of the Winter War’s moral and ideological meaning, Churchill had always tried to emphasise how the Western democracies—the more anti-socialist the better—could alone provide real social stability, based on respect for individual rights and on free economic activity, and resulting in material and spiritual well-being. Only the democracies could protect the individual from the dangers of unfettered capitalist competition, since they were the only ones who recognised the inherent rights of the individual. Given all this, Churchill did not side with Finland only because he opposed a foreign invasion of the country. His argument of 20 January was also an argument against totalitarianism and for a reformist democratic country and ideology. By reminding Sweden and Norway of the juxtaposition between totalitarianism and reformist democracy, and by depicting their eastern neighbour as the exemplar of the latter, Churchill implicitly placed all those who opposed his plans in the opposing camp—the camp of totalitarianism’s stooges. In criticising Sweden and Norway, Churchill let it be understood that these two countries had in some ways betrayed the ideals of progressive and democratic nations when they had refused in any major way to help their democratic neighbour. It is especially important to note that Churchill’s praise of Finland on 20 January immediately followed his criticism of the northern neutrals, after which severe criticism of the neutrals continued. He lauded Finland as a clear opponent both to the Soviet Union and to Nazism in a moral sense, and as quite the opposite of the northern neutrals in an immediate, practical sense. Churchill directly asked the neutrals to ‘do their duty’ in accordance with their undertaking to the League of Nations always to act together ‘against aggression and wrong’. He did not specifically mention the Oslo Declaration, but it was this declaration that was in his mind. Moreover, Churchill spoke of Nazism and communism, not of fascism, and seemed to be addressing his appeals to Italy as well. Above all, Churchill stressed his incomprehension of the fact that even at

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this late stage a number of small neutral states dared to stay away from the Allied effort to pacify Europe, when all indicators should have told them that the overall situation was becoming ever more dire and that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism threatened everyone alike. It seemed to him, therefore, that the Swedes and the Norwegians wanted only to ‘bow humbly and in fear to German threats’—a cowardly and desperate act whereby ‘each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last’.31 Churchill emphasised that the refusal of the neutrals to join the battle could well mean that Britain, France and Finland, the three countries fighting, would in the end lose, and that the world would soon be divided between ‘opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism’. He implied that Sweden and Norway did not fully comprehend what was at stake, or how profoundly similar Nazism and communism actually were. In Churchill’s opinion, Sweden and Norway were therefore betraying the traditions of Western civilisation when they refused to assist him in his attempt to help Finland: they were endangering the ‘moral theme’ which had helped ‘the race of man’ to rise ‘above the apes…and extirpated the dragons and the monsters’.32 The rhetoric was typically extreme and Churchillian, but so was the judgement that it contained. Churchill’s criticism of the small neutral countries raised a storm of protest in Norway, Sweden and other neutral countries. Somewhat surprisingly, Churchill’s address was seen as an attempt to force the neutrals to join the ‘German-French-English struggle for power and interests’, as one Swedish newspaper put it, and not as a call to an anticommunist struggle. Even in the Finnish press Churchill’s address tended to be disconnected from its actual context and argumentative intent, and few Finnish commentators saw it as relating to the Winter War. Finnish comment also stressed that Churchill was not a sufficiently high-level minister for his utterances to have a direct impact on British policy. Not all leading Finnish newspapers even mentioned that Churchill had praised Finland by name.33 The British Foreign Office thought that reaction to Churchill’s address had complicated rather than helped the effort to get Scandinavian approval for the Narvik-Gällivare plans. It is hard to conceive what other effect the address could have had, but it is clear that Churchill honestly did believe that his moral arguments could be persuasive. This belief was typical of that emotional naivety which Churchill’s anticommunist passion sometimes brought to the fore. The much more hard-headed Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who undoubtedly would have foreseen the neutrals’ reaction had he known what Churchill planned to say, insisted that henceforth Churchill was have his public statements vetted by the Foreign Office, and in any case was not to speak his mind so openly again. Churchill promised to do this, but when he made the promise he also stressed that his strategic and moral predictions were still unassailable. In a press conference arranged for Scandinavian journalists, ostensibly to assuage

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their fears, Churchill still refused to recant any core aspect of his January address.34 Churchill, in other words, did not care for diplomacy any more in 1940 than he had in 1919. He concentrated on the work at hand in his own department, but he allowed his own anticommunist passions to interfere in ways that to less anticommunist men might have seemed counterproductive. In several of his early 1940 addresses he continued to offer moral criticism of the neutrals, and in one address he even directly tackled what he called his ‘great surprise’ at the Scandinavian reaction when he had just tried ‘telling them what is their duty’. He was surprised that the neutrals who criticised his speeches had never yet criticised Germany, even though it was Germany that violated all known rules of international intercourse and was constantly sinking neutral merchant vessels.35 About a month after his ‘Light of Freedom’ address, Churchill again suggested to the War Cabinet that Norway and Sweden be pressurised, using ‘the policy of moral counter-attack’, to allow transit of troops to Finland and to let the Allies have their ore fields. He thought he had found yet another suitable argument in February, when news began to reach London of arms shipments from Germany to the Soviet Union. These shipments had been moved through Norwegian territorial waters, and they were, Churchill surmised, intended for the use of the Red Army in the Winter War. Yet Norway had not tried to stop the shipments. Such was his indignation and concern that soon afterwards Churchill was prompted to suggest yet another operation in aid of Finland, one that would be entirely unrelated to the Narvik-Gällivare plans. This operation would have laid a minefield off the coast of the port of Petsamo, then controlled by the Soviets. Churchill hoped that such a minefield would stop the German arms shipments,36 but the British government proved unwilling to approve this plan. In summary, then, in early 1940 Churchill tried to shame the neutrals and place them in a moral dilemma by painting a graphic picture of Finnish sacrifices and suffering, and by comparing this picture with the behaviour of the neutrals. By starkly differentiating between free and totalitarian states he hoped to increase moral pressure. In so doing, he apparently forgot the earlier criticism he had directed at Finland—not just when the Grand Alliance had floundered, but earlier on, when the Oslo Declaration had been given. Before the Winter War, Churchill had criticised Finland no less than Sweden and Norway for making wrong decisions. Even as late as December 1939, he had referred to Finland as a pro-German state not unlike Sweden and Norway.37 In the rhetoric that he employed less than a month later, no such criticism of Finland remained. This was no doubt partly sincere—prompted by the impression that Finland’s defensive fight had made on Churchill—but a more important reason for the absence of such criticism was that it would have needlessly weakened Churchill’s primary argument. He did have plenty to criticise in past Finnish

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actions—actions which he thought, at least in part, to have brought the Winter War upon Finland—but in a situation where the war’s end result and the preservation of Western freedom were at stake, it was expedient to use moral denunciation selectively and to assail just Sweden and Norway. It is noteworthy also that in none of his early 1940 addresses did Churchill call directly upon the northern neutrals to assist Finland. He did not make that appeal in any other public statements, either. In the War Cabinet he had indeed made the appeal, and made it repeatedly, and he still insisted that a missive be sent to Sweden and Norway which contained such an appeal. However, publicly he only hinted that Sweden and Norway should provide aid, and did not state this explicitly. Doing this might have had unforeseen consequences, and Churchill wanted to avoid these. In other words, Churchill’s context may well have been anticommunist and the Finnish Winter War may well have been to him a moral question, but when he tried to persuade Sweden and Norway to change their policies, his primary promptings all related to the war against Nazi Germany. He did not assess the Winter War in the same way as those Finns who were actually in the midst of it, but rather placed it within a broader geostrategic constellation. At that time this constellation included dimensions that were more important to Churchill than was the mere fate of Finland—more important even than anticommunism. The Winter War had indirect importance as an event through which he could present a broader anti-German case and a secondary anticommunist case that was unrelated to the war. In the most immediate sense, Churchill’s highlighting of the Winter War as an anticommunist struggle served the purpose of pressurising the British, the Swedish and the Norwegian governments to accede to Churchill’s war plans—which were not anticommunist at all. Churchill and aid to Finland (December 1939–March 1940) Finnish observers did not always understand Churchill’s geostrategic or long-term thinking. This lack of understanding was exposed in the comments of the Finnish Ambassador to London, G.A.Gripenberg, on Churchill’s ‘Light of Freedom’ address. Gripenberg met Churchill shortly afterwards, and was sorely disappointed. He concluded that Churchill was, after all, much less interested in the Finnish situation than the Ambassador had assumed on the basis of the address. Churchill had offered no encouraging words—not on the volunteer army that the Finns hoped to get from Britain, or on the Finnish request for British bombing of Soviet positions in the Petsamo region, or on the supply of materiel, or even on diplomatic activities. According to Gripenberg, Churchill was full of reservations and doubts on nearly every proposed plan for helping Finland, and had no clear position in favour of any. He never again discussed

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with Gripenberg the matter of helping Finland, and Gripenberg concluded that Churchill had either forgotten or abandoned Finland’s cause.38 The head of the Finnish Foreign Ministry’s political department, Aarno Pakaslahti, also had a low opinion of Churchill. He was so convinced that Churchill was actually the leader of those who opposed assistance to Finland that he decided to take measures in an attempt to change Churchill’s presumed stance. Pakaslahti began a (completely pointless) effort at persuasion, which was directed at Churchill from the Finnish Embassies in London and Washington, DC.39 Assisting Finland was, of course, a secondary concern for Churchill, and the use of the Winter War as a means to get new allies and new raw materials was primary. This did not, however, mean that Churchill was not also interested in assisting Finland’s defensive struggle. As a matter of fact, after his 20 January radio address, he continued both to plan for the Narvik-Gällivare operations and to pressure the northern neutrals, as well as to encourage the British and French governments to assist Finland directly. Despite his primary concerns, which were unrelated to Finland as such, he also believed in the necessity of assisting Finland. He believed in this as a matter of principle, not just expediency. As befit a champion of the League of Nations collective security system, in War Cabinet discussions Churchill repeatedly stressed that for purely legal reasons it was Britain’s duty to assist Finland.40 Legalism, of course, was never typical of Churchill, and whenever he used it as an argument in the context of the Winter War the sub-text of anticommunism must be recognised—a subtext that even the requirements of the anti-German war effort could not entirely efface. Therefore, Churchill was willing to take certain calculated, limited risks about a possible war with the Soviet Union, geopolitically dangerous as such a war would be, if that was the price to be paid for helping Finland fight off the communists. Churchill was ready to do this not least because he still believed that Soviet communism was a danger, a form of totalitarianism and a menace to the historical continuity of the West. Feeling this way, Churchill actually took part in that spontaneous and popular aid-to-Finland movement which emerged in Great Britain (and elsewhere in the West) soon after the Winter War had begun. This movement began to be further organised and coordinated at about the time of Churchill’s ‘Light of Freedom’ address. Of course Churchill could not take a central role in the popular movement, given that he was a minister of the Crown whose duties related to one of the most complex and time-consuming aspects of the British war effort, the naval war. It did not suit Churchill publicly to emphasise his desire to help the Finns too much, since such openness might have jeopardised other operations. Nor could he energetically or without reservation champion the transfer of war equipment to Finland, given that the British navy and army were themselves still poorly equipped and under very heavy strain. In 1940 Churchill was actually, for a while, the head of a special Cabinet committee which sought

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for ways to improve the British munitions situation.41 Yet despite all this, at several important moments it was Churchill who intervened decisively to assure that Finland did get promises of materiel assistance. He was also in touch with the private organisations, mostly led by his old friends from the Arms and the Covenant movement or from earlier anticommunist fights, who were trying to organise volunteer armies for Finland. Aid to Finland began in a spontaneous popular movement which at first had no linkage to official British policy. Its beginnings were in an open letter sent to The Times by General Sir George Macdonough, the chairman of the Anglo-Finnish Society, in which the General appealed for private donations. Macdonough had been the Director of Intelligence at Churchill’s War Office in 1919, and one of those men who had drafted the abortive St Petersburg plans twenty years earlier. Like Churchill he had retained his pronounced anticommunism, and in 1939 he argued its case so forcefully that a total of £300000 of private donations was received in a short period. These donations were handed over to a special Finland Fund, and were used to purchase medical and military supplies. The supplies were flown to Finland in February 1940. As the main coordinator of the aid, the Finland Fund was officially headed by the Finnish Ambassador, G.A.Gripenberg, but its creation came about owing to a suggestion by Lord Phillimore, an elderly parliamentarian who in 1919 had written the British draft for the Covenant of the League of Nations and had later been a key champion of the League of Nations. Phillimore had also been a close associate of Churchill’s as the president of the League of Nations Union, which had been one of the main backers of the Arms and the Covenant campaign. The Finland Fund made use of the many contacts of men like Phillimore to set up local chapters in Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford.42 Another official aid organisation, the Finnish Aid Bureau, was created slightly later. In addition to Macdonough and Phillimore, central in its creation were the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery (Churchill’s old schoolmate, later critic, and then a close Conservative ally in antiappeasement campaigns) and Lord Davies (Churchill’s supporter, admirer and collaborator from the AntiNazi Council, who regarded Churchill as the only conceivable ‘saviour of Europe’). The Conservative MP Harold Macmillan was also active in this organisation. He had been a leading antiappeaser, and before that had served under Churchill when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill had tried to continue radical social reform legislation in the 1920s. Before he joined the Finnish Aid Bureau Macmillan had consulted Churchill, who had encouraged him to do everything that he could to help the ‘honourable’ and ‘desirable’ cause of aid to Finland. From outside, the organisation was also powerfully supported by Sir Walter Citrine, the head of the Trades Union Council—who, together with Churchill, had been the main organiser of the Arms and the Covenant campaign—and by Sir Samuel Hoare, the Lord Privy Seal, who in

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1919 had been a major supporter of the St Petersburg plan and a conduit between Churchill and the Finns.43 Thus, Churchill’s close colleagues and supporters occupied the commanding positions in the effort to aid Finland. Apart from Hoare, all the leaders of the two assistance organisations were close allies of Churchill, and even Hoare had once been such. These men repeatedly turned to Churchill and asked him to use his powers of persuasion to convince a reticent War Cabinet of the need to aid Finland significantly. Backed by Churchill, they began in early 1940 to plan a volunteer army and further shipping of war materiel, whilst the Finnish Fund continued to solicit donations for these purposes and Churchill kept up his rhetoric of moral pressure. One of the aid organisations’ activities was the trip that some of the Finnish Aid Bureau’s leaders made to Finland in February 1940. Churchill’s centrality to their efforts at this time was attested to by the fact that Harold Macmillan, who went on the trip, was in contact with Churchill even while in Finland. After having met Finnish leaders and sensed their growing despair, Macmillan wrote to Churchill, told him about the worsening situation, demanded ‘urgent action’ and hoped that Churchill would ‘do your best’ to turn the War Cabinet around.44 The only thing odd about this missive was that Macmillan approached a minister who was not in charge of any related matters, and who had no power to make decisions on them. However, Macmillan knew that Churchill had long been a friend of Finland and an anticommunist whose interest in the Winter War was on a scale entirely different from that of other ministers. Macmillan was not at the time of his writing aware of the Narvik-Gällivare plans, but he assumed, correctly, that Churchill would put pressure on the Prime Minister so that more aid would be forthcoming for Finland. In early 1940, Churchill played a key role in efforts to move from mere humanitarian assistance to official and organised military aid, and to the creation of a volunteer army. Churchill was the minister who, on 22 December 1939 had led the War Cabinet into its first detailed discussion on the Winter War. He was the man who had proposed that pressure be applied on Sweden and Norway to encourage them to send volunteer armies to Finland, and he was the man who had first broached the possibility of British military assistance. In the relevant War Cabinet meeting, it had been decided that a survey of available resources and means of assistance would begin.45 Throughout December and January Churchill continued to put pressure on the War Cabinet, stressing that his sources told him how the Finns had ammunition left for only one more month of fighting, and how imperative it was to speed up British aid. It must be assumed that Churchill expected sizable materiel assistance to start flowing rapidly, since when he gave his orders to Lord Cork and Orrery for the new Catherine Plan of 1940 he predicated his instructions on the continued independence of Finland and on a Finnish willingness to provide British military bases in return for aid.46

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Churchill also decided to forward to Finland some of the aircraft of his naval air squadron. He proposed that some of the heavy air-defence guns, which were then protecting British cities against an expected German bombardment, be sent to Finland. This kind of shipment would have required a major change in the rules governing the British military establishment, and some very real risk to Britain, but Churchill still thought it necessary.47 Moreover, on the day of his ‘Light of Freedom’ address Churchill implored Prime Minister Chamberlain to allow the sending to Finland not only of Royal Air Force planes but also pilots. No amount of materiel assistance could, he stressed, equal the moral impact of actual British soldiers going over to help Finland. This was also the opinion of the man in the House of Commons who tried to push the plan through—General Alfred Knox MP, who in 1919 had been Churchill’s special representative at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak and who still regarded the anticommunist fight as his special vocation. The plan to send British fighter pilots to Finland was a daring one, given that both Knox and Churchill were well aware of the deficiencies in the British air forces and defences—deficiencies that Churchill had already begun to address in his capacity as the head of the special Cabinet committee on this matter.48 Helping Finland in this way did not of course make Churchill’s home-defence task any easier. Finally, in a gesture typical of his quixotic magnanimity, Churchill decided to donate to the Finnish army his own pair of skis.49 In addition to all of this, in December 1939 Churchill participated in the decision to send a special military delegation to meet with Field Marshal Mannerheim, his old friend, who once again commanded the Finnish army. This delegation was supposed to gather detailed information regarding the military needs of the Finnish army. Churchill again played a key role once the head of the delegation, Brigadier Christopher Ling, had submitted Mannerheim’s requests to the British government and the War Cabinet began to discuss further action. It was Churchill who persuaded the Cabinet to send Ling to Finland for a second time, to inform the Finns of the assistance that was to come and to advise them of the Narvik-Gällivare plans. Most of the Cabinet would not have wished to divulge operational details of planned operations because of fears that the Finns would leak out these details, but Churchill trusted Mannerheim and wanted to encourage the Finns in this way. At the same time, Churchill suggested that Great Britain immediately send relatively small troop contingents directly to Finland.50 Before the Ling delegation went to Finland, the British government had already decided to sell Finland twenty old Gloster Gladiator fighter aircraft, and to donate a further ten. It also donated 40 field ambulances and sold some thousands of field grenades and landmines. The government of South Africa donated 88 old Gauntlet aircraft. Further similar assistance was planned in early 1940 by a special War Office committee with which Ambassador Gripenberg was in contact. However, it was only after Brigadier Ling’s trip that willingness

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to further any significant materiel aid became noticeable. The War Cabinet then decided to speed up what had thus far been very tardy and inefficient transfer of such materiel. Further more, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Ironside, took it upon himself to persuade the Americans to send some of their surplus war materials to Finland. Before long, the US government granted a loan of £30 million for Finnish purchases of war materiel—purchases that were made by intermediaries so as to circumvent American neutrality laws.51 The search for volunteers also began to bear fruit in early 1940. This part of the aid effort belonged to the Finland Aid Bureau, and especially to Leo Amery. Churchill did not directly participate, but he did attend those War Cabinet meetings where the general framework of the volunteer army was set, and he was active in the sub-committee on the recommendations of which the War Cabinet made its decisions. Before long the recruiters had some 500 volunteers reporting for service in Finland, and the War Cabinet decided to use these 500 as the core of a new British Volunteer Contingent which was to arrive in Finland in March 1940. Prime Minister Chamberlain had long resisted the creation of any such a contingent, but his mind was finally changed in January 1940, after Churchill, the French Prime Minister and others had put pressure on him. The Volunteer Contingent was officially independent but secretly controlled by the British authorities—a secret that did not remain one for long, as pro-Soviet Members of Parliament exposed the facts.52 After the decision had been made regarding its creation, the efforts began under Ambassador Gripenberg and Harold Gibson, a young War Office official, to find private funding for the contingent. Central in this were Lord Nuffield, a wealthy and powerful industrialist, and Max Beaverbrook, the newspaper publisher, key Conservative strategist, and Churchill’s close friend and sometime political supporter. Beaverbrook promised personally to pay the transport expenses of the first 500 volunteers. The whole outfit was supposed to be commanded by General Kermit Roosevelt, the son of the former US President Theodore Roosevelt, who even had time to make an oath of allegiance to the Finnish flag before the volunteers were sent on their way.53 It was also a part of Churchill’s plans to send additional, regular troops from Britain and France. In early 1940 he worked for this end, too. Initially reluctant, Churchill had opposed a French proposal to this effect in late January 1940 because the British military staff had advised against it. Military advisers had not then regarded the plan as feasible or desirable from a military point of view, and Churchill had respected this advice.54 However, he quickly changed his position. Churchill took part in the key Anglo-French meeting of 5 February 1940, which decided to send a joint intervention force to Finland. Churchill was not a decisive figure at this Paris meeting, but he had no need to be, since the leaders of Britain and France had already accepted the idea. Those present at the meeting agreed that a Finnish defeat would be a grave loss to the Allies, and that swift action by the Allies was required to save Finland. Therefore the

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leaders of Britain and France decided to give their final approval to those operative details which Churchill had prepared for his Avonmouth and Stratford operations (by this time he had abandoned Catherine for the time being), and they decided to demand that Sweden and Norway grant right of passage for this intervention army, originally intended for the northern ore fields but now destined for Finland instead. It was also decided that Finland would be asked, by 1 March, to provide an official invitation for this intervention army to come onto their soil. This invitation, it was hoped, would be sufficient to turn Sweden and Norway around. The procedure was close to what Churchill wanted. He stressed, however, that now that the final decision had been made, it was crucial to keep it secret and to draw the Soviets’ and the Nazis’ attention to the Wilfred cover story lest the larger plan be exposed. The operations decided upon were set to begin on 20 March 1940.55 Churchill himself did not actually believe that any amount of diplomatic persuasion could change the position of Sweden and Norway. This attempt at persuasion was supposed to continue for almost two months, which was too long a time, given the dire straits of Finland. Therefore, whilst he continued to finalise the operational plans for the intervention that had been decided upon, Churchill still demanded that Britain send to Finland separate, smaller troop contingents ‘as soon as possible’. Although, such a small contingent may not have been able to prevent a Finnish defeat, Churchill regarded the prospect of an Allied presence on Finnish soil as so important that no time should be wasted. He argued that once even the smallest number of troops arrived in Finland, the Allies would already be in such a strong military position in the north that further operations in Gällivare could only be made easier. If Finland did lose and Allied troops had to leave, and if at that time German ore shipments from Sweden and Norway still continued, the withdrawing Allied troops could be used to take over the ore fields.56 Thus, Churchill’s own preferences differed somewhat from the official, agreed policy of the Allies. He had begun to stress the Winter War in his effort to convert sceptics to his Narvik-Gällivare operations and to persuade Sweden and Norway to join the Allies. From January 1940 he had tried to use moral pressure to ignite this series of events, but at the same time he had also begun to demand that the Finnish anticommunist fight be assisted by Britain and that Allied intervention troops be sent to Finland. Churchill wanted to send these troops either with Swedish and Norwegian cooperation and through these two countries’ territory—in accordance with the ‘larger plan’—or in some other way, if the ‘larger plan’ was delayed too much. By early 1940, Churchill was interested not only in the northern ore fields but also in assisting the Finnish struggle against the Soviet communist invader.

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Towards an armistice (March–April 1940) The arrival of British and French troops in Finland remained, however, entirely contingent upon the attitudes of Sweden and Norway. Intervention troops could be transported to Finland only via these two countries. Churchill himself, had he had his way, would have immediately sent troops to Finland, even in the face of Swedish and Norwegian resistance. However, Churchill was not the one who made the decision. British and French leaders did not want to antagonise the neutrals, and they proved optimistic in assuming that mere diplomatic and moral pressure would remove the obstacle. Although one of many factors conspiring against an Allied intervention in the Winter War, it was in fact the Swedish and Norwegian resistance that sealed the project’s fate. The government of Sweden had already to some degree assisted Finland, and Sweden and Norway alike allowed British military aircraft and other materials to pass through their territory. Volunteers had also reached Finland through these countries, and some of the volunteers were Swedish. However, letting Allied troops regularly to pass through their territory was an entirely different matter. The ghost of the Oslo Declaration hovered in the background when Sweden and Norway finally definitely refused to risk themselves being drawn into the war that passage of Allied troops through their territory would have entailed. The British and French governments were unwilling to proceed without the neutrals’ agreement, and, although Britain told Finland in the second week of March 1940 that troops could be arriving even without Swedish and Norwegian agreement, the Allies never did proceed on this basis. They were frightened off by a Norwegian announcement that resistance would be offered to all who tried to enter Norway, and by a Swedish demarché to Britain and Finland which stressed that no right of transit would ever be granted to Allied troops, and that even the limited Swedish assistance that Finland had been receiving would be cut if Finland did not accept the recent Soviet proposals for peace negotiations. Sweden hoped to stay out of the war, to retain friendly relations with Germany, and to mediate in forging a negotiated peace between Finland and the Soviet Union. British plans threatened each of the three planks of the settled Swedish policy.57 Churchill, by contrast, remained adamant that Swedish and Norwegian attitudes should not shape Allied policy. He was willing to proceed with the Finnish intervention in its intended timetable, regardless of all possible resistance by Finland’s neighbours, even by using force against these neighbours. He insisted that the Anglo-French intervention army simply be taken to the coast of Norway, and demand a right of passage to Finland. This army should be so overwhelmingly strong, and supported by the British Navy, that it could take casualties if the Swedes and the Norwegians started to repel it. It would have to overcome any such counter-attacks and proceed to Finland forthwith. Indeed, Churchill insisted that the Anglo-French army should proceed to Finland even if Finland did not request its help. At the same time, Churchill

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still wanted the Wilfred minefield to be laid in Norwegian waters, and Germany thus encouraged to attack Norway. This would in all likelihood have arraigned Norway on the Allied side, he thought, and such an achievement would have been good all around.58 However, much to Churchill’s chagrin, in late February the War Cabinet decided not to proceed with the ‘smaller plan’ of the Wilfred minefield. Prime Minister Chamberlain now opposed this ‘smaller plan’ because he thought it would jeopardise the ‘larger plan’, which to him was aid to Finland, not Narvik-Gällivare. Churchill disagreed, of course, and was prompted by this to demand, even more strongly, an immediate intervention in Finland. If the Allies did not immediately enter Finland and support her war efforts with considerable contingents of troops, Churchill feared that Germany might attack the Finnish flank and end up dividing the country with the Soviets. Such a development would have been a ‘heavy reversal’ for Great Britain, since it would have transferred the whole Baltic Sea region into German hands and negated all Allied influence in the north. If this happened, Finland could not provide those naval and military bases which Churchill’s Operation Catherine required.59 Churchill repeated these arguments ad nauseam, and on 1 March he finally succeeded in getting War Cabinet approval for a final, fourth missive to Sweden and Norway. This let these two countries know that preparations for the Anglo-French intervention in Finland had proceeded swiftly and that the moment was soon at hand when another missive would be sent, demanding the right of passage. The War Cabinet was now, in principle, ready to order troops to Finland even against Swedish and Norwegian wishes.60 Yet at the same time the situation in Finland deteriorated. In the absence of more Western aid, in early March 1940 Finland found itself in a situation where Ambassador Gripenberg had to tell the British that the war materials already promised might no longer make a difference even if they arrived in Finland in time.61 Mannerheim, angry at all the delays, asked General Ling whether the Allies were ‘at all serious’, and demanded that at least 30 heavy bombers be made available to Finland immediately. He also wanted the 50000 promised Allied troops to arrive within a month. Although by now he knew the intended scope and timetable of Churchill’s plan, Mannerheim wanted changes in these, too, regarding them as unrealistic and/or insufficient. Ambassador Gripenberg was ordered quickly to ask for the further aid that Mannerheim was demanding, yet the Finnish government was still not ready to make the official request for an Anglo-French intervention that was required as a trigger for the whole process to engage. In fact, Finnish leaders remained very sceptical about the actual arrival of any of the promised aid or troops, as well as about its sufficiency. There was a small section in the Finnish government, led by Minister of Defence Juho Niukkanen, which consistently supported the idea of continuing the fight with Western aid, but this section was too small and not strong enough to sway the rest of the government.62

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Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner, in particular, doubted the motives of the British and the French. He suspected that the real intention behind Allied offers of help was to make Finland a tool and proxy of their war against Germany. Finnish leaders continued to press Britain for speedier delivery of munitions, and to demand that Sweden allow such munitions to be transported through its territory. At the same time, they hoped that the Swedes could be persuaded to intervene militarily. Tentative peace negotiations with the Soviets were also maintained. However, it was Tanner’s prioritisation of these three options that was actually accepted by the government: the first priority of the Finns was to induce Swedish materiel assistance sufficient to keep the Finnish armies going, but only for as long as was needed to make an acceptable peace with the Soviets. British and French assistance may be asked only if these other options failed. In January and February Tanner talked about these priorities to Swedish diplomats, and in the course of these talks he even made the egregious error of divulging some of the details of the planned Allied operations, thus jeopardising all of Churchill’s plan.63 Churchill, of course, was not aware that Finnish leaders were tending towards options other than his own. He had, however, started to suspect that Finland never would make that official appeal for help that the Allies had asked for. He thought that Finnish leaders were deliberately withholding such an appeal because they feared that it would cost them the loss of all materiel assistance from Sweden. If Britain were forced to undertake the intervention without such an official appeal, Churchill feared that Germany would see that the intervention was a cover-up for an attempt to achieve control of the Gällivare ore fields. This, however, was a minor danger, and Churchill was consistently of the opinion that the resistance of Sweden and Norway should not matter, nor should the official preferences of Finland, but that intervention troops should be sent to Finland—now.64 However, Churchill’s almost daily demands did not have the desired effect. In mid-March 1940, Finland decided to sign an armistice with the Soviets. Responsibility for this decision lay with Field Marshal Mannerheim, who provided the Finnish government with the military argument. Finland never did send the official appeal that Churchill had hoped to receive, but had ceased to expect after February 1940. The Allies did not have time to begin the planned intervention in Finland that was not dependent on the official appeal, and for which the troops were ready and waiting. The entire plan had to be abandoned, and troops designated for it were sent elsewhere. The War Cabinet decided to discontinue all munitions shipments to Finland.65 Churchill was dejected. He had no doubt but that what had happened to Finland was a grave disaster which benefited Nazi Germany alone. ‘There never was any chance of giving effective aid to Finland’, he did, however, admit in retrospect.66

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Yet even though the ending of the Winter War removed the official pretext for the Narvik-Gällivare operations, Churchill still tried to obtain approval to proceed with these operations. Immediately after the Finnish armistice, he emphasised that through the Nazi-Soviet Pact the Soviet Union had in fact allied itself with Germany, and that therefore all expansion of Soviet influence meant ‘an act of potential aggression’ towards Britain. Therefore it remained crucially important that the northern ore fields and all of Scandinavia be placed under British control. Churchill was especially worried about that part of the Finnish-Soviet armistice terms which had given the Soviets the right to use the Arctic seaport of Petsamo, and to construct a new railroad on Finnish territory heading towards Sweden. These two routes would allow the Soviets easy access to the Gällivare ore fields, and as long as Finland was powerless to resist and the Soviets remained aligned with Nazi Germany, this amounted to ‘a most dangerous situation’. Even though the ‘cover’ story of the Winter War had now been lost—and maybe this was a good thing, Churchill now thought, since the Finnish fighting did not directly contribute to a German defeat—it was still necessary to prevent all possible Soviet advances towards the Atlantic. Therefore it remained incumbent on the Allies to use the anticommunist card to frighten Sweden and Norway, and to offer them Allied assistance in their defence against the Soviets, even if the actual Allied goal was the control of the ore fields. It was therefore necessary, stressed Churchill, to proceed with the relevant original plans, and to do this immediately and with the troops that had been provided for service in Finland. Were Finland attacked again, these troops might then also be used there.67 Churchill did, however, support the cessation of material aid to Finland, and hoped that Finland would return the warplanes it had already received. There simply remained no reason to provide Finland with British arms, since, at least for now, Finland was useless in all efforts to secure Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region from the Germans and the Soviets. It had lost its strategically important ports and was practically disarmed, so it could not help Britain even if it wanted to.68 The only effective form of aid to Finland was now the kind in which Churchill had always believed: the removal of German and Soviet influence in Scandinavia, preferably so that the Soviets could at the same time be persuaded to turn against Germany and align with the Western Allies. Finland, too, could benefit from any such a change before long. Therefore, Churchill continued to prepare for Operations Avonmouth, Stratford and Wilfred. In addition, he suggested one more operation on Swedish soil, the destruction of ships in the northern port of Luleå and the laying of a minefield in the seas off that port. Allied bombers would lay this minefield, and it would significantly hinder further German shipments of ore from Gällivare. Churchill also proposed similar operations in the oilfields in Baku, on the Black Sea and on the Caspian Sea. He also wished to block the southern Swedish port of Öxelosund with torpedoed ships. He hoped to keep

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Operation Catherine as a further option, since he thought it possible that in 1941 Finland, Sweden and Norway would somehow be coaxed after all to join the war on the Allied side. Finally, Churchill still thought that if all these measures—some of them directed against the Soviets—were implemented, Britain might be able to control the Baltic Sea. This, in turn, would have so impressed the Soviets that they would have joined the Allies.69 Some of these plans were clearly directed against the Soviets and not against Germany as such, but in the period immediately following the fall of Finland Churchill was more willing than ever to risk a war with the Soviet Union, since he was convinced that the Soviet victory in Finland helped the German cause. He still continued to employ the moral anticommunist argument against Sweden and Norway, and he denounced as inhuman and unacceptable these two countries’ continued delivery of raw materials to Nazi Germany. The entire World War could have been prevented, Churchill averred in late March, had the neutrals’ attitude been different to begin with. Their present attitude made the war longer and more bloody.70 Churchill’s strategic vision was in the end vindicated when, in April 1940, Nazi Germany launched an attack on Norway, for precisely the same reason that Churchill had been interested in the country—that is, in order to assure delivery of raw materials. British troops arrived in Norway on the same day that the Germans attacked, but now the British effort was a desperate last attempt to get the northern ore fields before the Germans did. A great deal of time had been lost, and with it had vanished the means of victory. Churchill’s Norwegian campaign ended in a major and embarrassing defeat. It might have been possible to prevent this defeat had Churchill’s plans been implemented earlier, but by the spring of 1940 it was too late to help either Finland or Norway. Churchill left the northern operations as a dejected man who complained to Prime Minister Chamberlain that a ‘major disaster’ had befallen Britain when, out of its own indecision, it had lost the keys to success in Norway, Sweden and Finland.71 Churchill had lost once again. He had had to settle for something far removed from the carefully planned, geostrategically and ideologically weighted set of operations that he had envisioned, and a major defeat was the result. The reasons for the defeat were largely the same as those in the St Petersburg plan of 1919 and in 1939, when he had tried to build the Grand Alliance. That is, Churchill had partly neglected, partly misdirected and partly found impossible the building of such domestic and international support that would have been necessary for operations of the magnitude that he envisioned. He had possessed a clear, grand and internally conflicted plan for dramatic operations intended to weaken Germany and at the same time to assist the Finnish anticommunist struggle. The French government had supported this plan more or less consistently, and at times Churchill had actually modified some of its details to suit French preferences so that he would get stronger support from them. However, the British government approached the 1939–1940 situation in as

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careful and diplomatic a manner as a different British government had approached the 1919 situation, and given those circumstances it simply was not possible to unleash dramatic or radical operations. Even though Churchill did eventually manage to prompt a partial reassessment of the approach from the British government, there still remained the Swedish and Norwegian factors, and the Chamberlain government refused to antagonise these two countries in the middle of a World War. Even the Finnish leadership itself remained throughout very sceptical about British and French motives and intentions, and these two countries therefore did not even have the support from the intended beneficiary of their planned operations that could have tipped the scales among domestic and Scandinavian sceptics. Undoubtedly Churchill had neglected to keep Finnish leaders in his confidence, and this cost dearly. Yet Churchill’s part of the blame was slight. This was recognised immediately after the failure of the short Norwegian campaign, when Prime Minister Chamberlain was forced to resign and Churchill, who after all had been in charge of the failed operation, took his place as Prime Minister. British opinion did not blame the abortion of the Finnish intervention and of the NarvikGällivare project on Churchill, but rather on the lack of courage of others, which had led to their refusal to proceed with Churchill’s bolder approach in time.72 Churchill had, of course, been one of the very few Cabinet members who had had the courage to launch major military operations, and everyone knew this. His becoming Prime Minister was thus also a retrospective vote of confidence in what he had wanted to do for Finland. Interpretations and assessments In Finland, Churchill’s role in the Winter War was never properly understood and he never did receive the appropriate commendation. His later claim that he ‘sympathised ardently with the Finns and supported all proposals for their aid’73 was never accepted as truthful. Instead, Finnish historians relied on the unfounded statements of Ambassador Gripenberg regarding Churchill’s alleged lack of interest in helping Finland after the ‘Light of Freedom’ address. Taking their cue from that, Finnish historians wrote about Churchill’s ‘purely anti-German intervention plan’ as the real cause for the non-arrival in Finland of substantial Allied aid, and of Churchill’s high-handedness as the reason why Sweden and Norway were estranged from the Winter War. It would, however, be incorrect to portray Churchill as someone activated solely by ‘British national interest’, or as someone who cynically used the Winter War only as an ‘excuse’ for his own operations—operations that were never intended to help Finland. Especially wrong has been Finnish historiography in its almost consensual depiction of Churchill as a leading opponent of Finnish aid, for whom helping Finland was always ‘a matter of minor importance’.74

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Yet the conclusions of some British historians are equally questionable. Some interpreters have seen Churchill’s Winter War-related activities as proof that he had forgotten the interests of his own country, and had fallen into a state of almost complete lack of realism. It has even been suggested that Churchill was so passionately interested in pursuing an anticommunist war in the middle of an anti-Nazi war that his real priorities were shown, after all, to have lain with anticommunism and not with uncompromising resistance to Hitler’s Germany. Of course, it is as inappropriate to characterise Churchill’s activities in the Winter War, as one British historian has done, as ‘so surrealistic that it defies rational analysis’, because, supposedly, his activity was directed against the Soviets and because he tried to establish a second front entirely unrelated to the anti-Nazi fight.75 This surely would have been surreal, but of course Churchill never engaged in any such an effort. Even a cursory perusal of the available materials will show that he never regarded the Narvik-Gällivare operations as being directed against the Soviet Union, and that he never intended to transform the Winter War into a major international campaign for the destruction of communism. However, neither was Churchill’s activity directed only against Germany. It was directed against Germany and the Soviet Union alike, and he hoped to assist in the Finnish anticommunist struggle and in cleaving the northern regions of Europe from Germany. As a matter of fact, Churchill’s role in the Winter War is rather easily characterised. He directed the preparation of those Baltic Sea and Scandinavian war plans which were originally aimed solely against Germany, and where Finland had been seen as an ally and provider of military bases in an anti-German fight. Gradually Churchill had reworked these original plans to also cover assisting the Finns in their separate anticommunist struggle. His goals were primarily anti-German, and he used anticommunist arguments in order to tap into the moral revulsion which the Soviets’ attack on Finland had generated in the West—a revulsion which he hoped to tie to his original anti-German purposes. Churchill received strong support from some ministers, like Sir Samuel Hoare, who were at least as interested in anticommunism as in anti-Nazism, and who conducted their own separate drives for an anticommunist campaign. The final Allied decision on intervention in the Winter War centred on a plan that combined Churchill’s and the French government’s somewhat different but compatible intentions and goals. The role of the French was undoubtedly more important in the reaching of that decision than was Churchill’s, but the importance of the long preparation and persuasion in which Churchill had been engaged before the final intervention decisions were made must not be underestimated. Churchill’s thinking on the Winter War, on the other hand, is not easily characterised. Throughout the Winter War, Churchill struggled with the mutually conflictual impulses to fight Nazism and to fight communism. For someone like him, for so long a passionate anticommunist, it was not easy to

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find the proper balance between these two impulses. His eventual conclusions must be seen as contextual assessments on priorities and hierarchies of threat, based on an equation of Nazism and communism as the two forms of totalitarianism, but also on the assumption that in 1939–1940 Nazism was the more direct threat to the Western world and the Soviet Union the more distant and more contingent threat—to the world as a whole, not to Finland. As was clear in Churchill’s immediate comments after the Winter War, all of his efforts to help Finland were in conflict with what he regarded as the primary requirements of the moment. Helping Finland, by definition, weakened Britain and the Western alliance, yet it did not provide any countervailing gains in the fight against Nazi Germany. All the aid that Finland received reached the country before any of Churchill’s projected operations in the north had been begun, and this aid was not tied to those operations. It benefited the British war effort in no way, yet Churchill wanted it to be increased. Given all this, it is in fact remarkable how hard Churchill did try to help Finland. Only Churchill’s passionate anticommunism can explain his activities. This anticommunism was not dependent on Churchill’s other simultaneous, primary geostrategical priorities. Potentially, it was in serious conflict with these priorities. Yet Churchill could not abandon his anticommunist worldview, nor could he suddenly cease to act on it. He did use the Winter War as a pretext for war measures that were actually directed against Nazi Germany, but at the same time he also tried to help in Finland’s anticommunist fight. In the interests of other causes, Churchill had to abandon Finland after Finland had abandoned the anticommunist fight and became no longer relevant either to British war-making or to Churchillian anticommunism. Finland as a state and as a symbol of Western civilisation was of secondary importance to him, and even anticommunism was to become increasingly secondary as the war against Nazi Germany continued after the Winter War’s completion, for National-Socialism was by then the most menacing threat to all that from which Churchill’s anticommunism also flowed.

5 CHURCHILL AS ALLY OF THE SOVIET UNION, ENEMY OF FINLAND, 1941–1944

On 25 June 1941, Finland re-entered the Second World War. It declared war on the Soviet Union, which had already started to bombard some key Finnish cities, and there began the so-called ‘Continuation War’, or the War of 1941–1944. Officially Finland fought this war as a ‘co-belligerent’ of Germany, fighting a separate war against Russian Bolshevism, and to reconquer the areas that had been lost in the Winter War. Finnish leaders had made a conscious decision to seek German assistance and to relaunch their own war, for after Great Britain had lost Norway and was ejected from all of Scandinavia, these leaders had concluded that only Germany could defend them against the communist threat. For a while Finnish leaders allowed themselves to believe that Finland and Germany, acting together, could finally destroy the Soviet communist regime. Things did not go that way, and by 1942 Finnish leaders began to conclude that the desired outcome was an impossibility. In the meantime they had, however, lost most of the sympathy of Great Britain and the United States, and they found it ever more difficult to maintain the fiction of a separate war, or to live with the fact that Finland had sided with a Nazi power with which it was not in ideological, moral or political agreement. Surrender to the Soviet Union came in late September 1944, but was preceded by a British declaration of war against Finland and almost three years of hostilities between these two countries. Throughout the period, Churchill the anticommunist had been the ally of the Soviet Union and the enemy of Finland, and Finnish anticommunists had been at a loss to understand his reasoning as their former friend and collaborator in anticommunist tasks. More than any other period in the Churchill-Finland relationship, the years from 1941 to 1944 exposed the radical divergence of Finnish and Churchillian anticommunisms, an indication of which had been evident in their differing approaches to the Grand Alliance schemes of 1938 and 1939. In mid-1939 Churchill had sought for an Anglo-Soviet alliance against what he regarded as the greatest threat of the moment, and, that search having proven unfruitful, he had supported Finland in its fight against the Soviet Union in late 1939 and early 1940. However, once the Soviets had, after all, joined the British in their fight against the greater Nazi threat, Churchill had had to put

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away all practical anticommunist considerations. The dynamics and difficulties of the Anglo-Soviet alliance were frequently exposed in the course of 1941–1944, for it was by no means the case that Churchill’s anticommunist beliefs had evaporated. Towards the end of the period, his anticommunism indeed went through a certain renascence. Throughout, Finland, the former anticommunist ally and present enemy, had been an uneasy reminder of the competing promptings of anticommunism and geopolitics. Compared to earlier periods, after 1941 Churchill actually paid very little attention to Finland. Until then he had been in contact with Finland either as a private citizen or as a minister in charge of some war-related department of the British government. After May 1940 he was the Prime Minister, responsible for all British war policy. For reasons of work economy alone he could no longer devote much attention to small, marginal countries like Finland. By the time Finland had re-entered the war, it had also lost all of those attributes that in earlier crises had made it relevant for Churchill’s concerns. Finland no longer retained a useful anticommunist function, since anticommunism itself was no longer useful, and Finland was of no use in the war against Nazi Germany because it fought alongside the Germans. Therefore it had ceased to be a potentially useful geostrategic ally and had become a potential enemy. Once Finnish-German collaboration became more formal and extensive, the potentiality turned into actuality. The Finnish-German co-belligerency did not, however, directly affect Britain, and it therefore did not mean that Britain needed to be particularly interested in Finland even on that account. The Soviet Union did, nevertheless, remain a key state, and everything that affected it had also to be of concern to Britain. On several levels, the Soviets’ interest in and plans for Finland therefore shed their shadow on Churchill’s activities as well. As had been the case thus far, Churchill’s policies towards Finland could not be separated from the vicissitudes of his anticommunism and his relations with the Soviet Union. To make sense of these changes of circumstance, the period from the Finnish-Soviet armistice to the war of 1941–1944 and to the peace settlement following the war must be broken down into three distinct sub-periods, all of which were formed by changes in Churchill’s relations with the Soviets. If viewed from Churchill’s perspective, Finland played a distinctly different role in each of these three periods. From the ending of the Winter War to the beginning of Operation Barbarossa—from March 1940 to June 1941—Churchill led a country that fought against Germany practically alone, and which had totally to concentrate on the theatres of action in which it had direct battle contact with Germany. During this period British resources were dwindling fast, even if they were to an extent replenished through the lend-lease aid that was received from the United States. The Soviet Union did not in this time help Britain in any way at all, nor did Churchill expect help from it. All the energy that Churchill had left from the immediate demands of war-making he used in cultivating closer

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contacts with the United States so that he could maximise aid received from that quarter. Churchill continued this cultivation of Anglo-American relations in the second period—from June 1941 to early December 1941—that is, in the period during which Britain and the Soviet Union were co-belligerents but the United States still remained outside the war. The Soviet Union did not fare well in the battles of this period, and Churchill could justifiably fear that it might collapse soon. At this time Churchill had to make various concessions to the Soviets just to keep it in the war. The third period began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which of course led the United States to join the war. This event brought a major ally to Churchill’s side—an ally that he had desperately hoped for, not least to contain and moderate Soviet demands and priorities, and with which it was possible to begin for the first time crucial offensive operations in Western Europe. The third period also witnessed a growing spate of postwar planning by the three Allies. In each of the three periods, Churchill’s Finnish policies were dictated by the demands of geostrategy that the World War implied. His room for manoeuvre was limited not just by the situation at the battle fronts at various times, but also by the availability of Allied assistance to key British projects. A range of domestic problems and complications further impacted on Churchill’s position. His primary and overwhelming need was to keep the Soviet Union as a full-time and active war power and to assure its friendliness towards Britain for the postwar period. This priority made all anticommunist considerations subservient to the immediate demands of war-making, and to the persistent hope that after the war it would be possible to construct a new and sustainable world order where international communism would no longer pose a threat. Churchill regarded wartime cooperation as a potential lever in thus moderating communism, not least because he had no other choice. This also meant that Churchill had to acquiesce to most wartime demands that the Soviet leadership made regarding Finland. However, in the latter stages of the war Churchill again began to suspect that Soviet aims had not, after all, changed. He never entirely lost his optimism regarding the continuance and further elaboration of the wartime alliance, but by 1944 he nevertheless thought it prudent to undertake various measures for the containment of the Soviet Union. As it happened, the beaten and passive state of Finland benefited from these resurrected anticommunist fears of Churchill’s. The way in which Churchill dealt with Finland at that time was exceptional, and could be explained only through Churchillian anticommunism. Finland’s journey from friend to foe and then from foe back to potential friend was a journey conditioned by many swiftly moving series of events on which Finland itself could have very little impact, but which nevertheless centrally shaped the country’s future. When looking at Churchill’s thoughts and actions relating to Finland in this period, it is important to keep in mind above all that Churchill’s priorities were very different in 1941–1944 from those in, say, 1919. Churchill did spend a small

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amount of time considering Finnish affairs, but in no way was his attention riveted on the country in the way it had been in 1919, or even during the Winter War. Finland came to Churchill’s mind now not as a self-contained matter, but as an aspect of some broader geopolitical consideration or project. Whatever is said about the details of his involvement with Finland in 1941–1944 must be placed in this context. Churchill and Finland in the period of the interim peace (March 1940–July 1941) During the Fenno-Soviet interim peace between the Winter War and the War of 1941–1944, Churchill paid very little attention to Finland. In the summer of 1940, Great Britain was fighting for its survival, France having fallen and most of continental Europe having been conquered by the Nazis. Churchill had become Prime Minister, and at that moment of great crisis he could not pay attention to marginal Northern European affairs which did not impact on the British struggle. He did not expect the Germans to attack the Soviet Union, and for that reason, too, the Finnish region seemed unimportant, especially so after the debacle in Norway and the cessation of British military action in the northern European theatre. After the Battle of Britain, Churchill’s attention was fixed on the one hand on efforts to gain victories in the sole promising theatre of operations, North Africa, and on the other hand on continuing efforts at tempting the United States either to join the war or to increase monetary and material assistance to Britain.1 Finland had practically no significance when compared with the events on these other fronts. Churchill’s search for Soviet collaboration was also latent during most of this period, and Finland was thus not drawn to Churchill’s attention on this account either. Churchill was indignant at the palpably closer cooperation that had begun between the Nazis and the Soviets, and at the manifest unconcern of the Soviets at the unfolding suffering of the rest of Europe and especially of the British in their single-handed struggle to keep the Nazis from conquering the British Isles. The memory of the Winter War also mattered. Churchill continued, therefore, to make anticommunist statements, and showed no discernible interest in forging links with the Soviets. After the fall of France the need for an eastern front, however, became once again primary, and at this point—a year before the Nazi assault on Russia—Churchill did approach the Soviets with a proposal for military consultations, but the other side continued to profess disinterest and nothing was achieved. Thereafter Churchill engaged in intermittent wooing of the Soviets, but managed to raise no interest until the Germans unleashed their Operation Barbarossa. No real results flowed even from the Anglo-Soviet trade talks, which Churchill delegated to Sir Stafford Cripps, a known pro-Soviet socialist politician. Since neither Churchill nor his military staff believed that the Germans would attack the Soviet Union unless the Battle of Britain had first

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been won by the Germans, it was understandable that Churchill did not expect the Soviets to be interested in any closer links to the Western Allies.2 In 1941, for once, Churchill’s relations with Finland were not therefore complicated by the Soviet Union. In the absence of a working eastern front, Britain was nevertheless forced to take certain actions in the north of Europe which inevitably hurt Finland. The need to take these measures against the Nazis grew when the Battle of Britain began, in the spring of 1941, to change to an aggressive naval war that dangerously threatened the British supply of raw materials and American materiel aid. One of the series of British countermeasures was an attempt to enhance the naval blockade of Germany, which damaged Finnish trade and even led to the sinking of one Finnish ship that was accused of carrying ore to Germany. During these critical months, when Finland still felt under threat from the Soviets, no further military assistance was sent to Finland and even the bombers which had originally been listed for delivery were now kept for the defence of the British Isles. In Finland these decisions caused understandable consternation, but in view of Britain’s own position they are quite understandable, given that the promised bombers made up a not insignificant part of the Royal Air Force’s operative strength. The Finnish and British military intelligence services, on the other hand, continued their mutual cooperation and exchange of information on Soviet actions, and Churchill himself hoped that this, and a planned Anglo-Finnish trade agreement, would keep Finland on the side of the Allies. The attempt was made, furthermore, to encourage the idea of a Scandinavian military pact. Churchill’s means of influencing Finnish policies were, however, practically non-existent after the Norwegian fiasco had removed the British from Scandinavia, and in early 1941 he admitted that Finland did not belong ‘essentially to our sphere of influence’. The most that he could hope was that it did not begin a new war of its own.3 Throughout the armistice period Finland did, however, steadily move closer to Germany and towards such a new war with the Soviet Union that complicated an already complex situation and which Churchill hoped to avoid. Not even Churchill’s victory in the Battle of Britain convinced leading Finnish politicians of Germany’s eventual defeat in the war. On the contrary, Field Marshal Mannerheim thought that the fall of France was a more important predictor of future trajectories, and he concluded that it would be inexpedient to rely on a final British victory. Germany alone could help Finland; that was the implication. The new Finnish President, Risto Ryti, typified the dominant Finnish viewpoint when he told German diplomats that Churchill was in the grips of a ‘war psychosis’ which clouded his realistic appreciation of the war situation. According to Ryti, Churchill was ‘crazy’ if he did not realise that Britain was inevitably to lose pre-eminence when, after the war, a German-led ‘New Europe’ and an assertive United States would dictate the course of events. Churchill’s struggle against such an apparently inevitable future was forlorn, Ryti

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averred. An anticommunist, he also thought that only Germany could destroy the Soviet regime and thus secure the future for all anticommunist bourgeois nations, such as Finland.4 Far from respecting the wishes of Great Britain or its own obligations as a neutral under international law, Finland decided in September 1940 to allow German troops to transit through Finnish territory to the areas in northern Norway that Germany had conquered. These were just those areas through which British and French aid to Finland was supposed to have come during the Winter War—areas that Churchill regarded as strategically important. Finland even went so far in its acquiescence to German desires as to offer some of its own merchant navy to convey German troops to Norway. This was an infraction of the international law for neutrals, and Britain swiftly mounted a protest. The protest was followed by a series of countermeasures, further protests and negotiations, and in the end Finland offered to let British observers into the country to monitor the Germans’ movements. When this concession was, however, followed by a Finnish-German trade agreement in March 1941, the creation of a special Finnish SS battalion in the German army, and finally by Finnish-German military consultations in May 1941, the concession lost its meaning and worth. German troops then entered Finland and began to advance towards the Soviet front and towards the Arctic seaport of Petsamo, and Britain was forced to end all trade with Finland and to place the country under a tight naval blockade. Foreign Secretary Eden did still stress that no other countermeasures were likely if Finland did not directly or officially ally itself with Germany, and if no Finnish offensive were launched against the Soviet Union.5 Churchill did not think it expedient to go beyond such limited countermeasures, since he (and initially Eden, as well) thought it useful to maintain a presence in Finland. As long as Finland did not actually fight with Germany, Churchill thought it best to keep British diplomatic representatives in the country—even significantly to increase their numbers. Always well versed in recent intelligence, Churchill appreciated the value of British diplomats and intelligence officers staying in a country where Germany was very active. Field Marshal Mannerheim did not object—on the contrary, he not only allowed the expanded British intelligence opera tion to continue in Finland but even let the British military attaché travel to northern Finland to observe at close hand what the Germans were doing there. German pressure, however, forced Finland to eject the British representatives in the summer of 1941. This divested Churchill of the only real reason that he had for treating Finland as a special case among those small nations that were aligned with Germany. When soon afterwards the Finnish army did join the Germans in actual warfare—by re-crossing the Finnish-Soviet border in August 1941 and starting the War of 1941–1944— Finland had lost all right to special consideration. This was particularly so because some of the German troops that were in Finland at the time began

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simultaneously to advance towards the ports of Archangel and Murmansk in the north. These two ports were, of course, crucial for the British supply of war materials to the Soviet Union. Within a few weeks, Churchill deemed it necessary to order bombing sorties on the northern Finnish ports of Petsamo and Kirkkoniemi. The Finnish reaction was ‘for the time being’ to break diplomatic relations with Great Britain.6 Road to the British declaration of war (July–December 1941) Before Finland had joined the German attack eastwards, the Soviet Union had already joined Great Britain. It was a foregone conclusion that Finland’s position vis-à-vis Britain was from then on to remain a most problematic one. British co-belligerency with the Soviets demanded a certain appeasing or mollifying of the Soviet leadership and, given Finland’s geographical position and past difficulties with the Soviets, this meant that Finland became a pawn in Anglo-Soviet negotiations. After a manner, of course, Churchill had to welcome the German-Finnish war on the Soviet Union, since it finally made possible the Grand Alliance that he had always considered to be so important. However, as far as Finland was concerned—and all due to its own decisions—it was now an enemy of the Alliance, not an integral part as envisioned in 1938–1939. To Churchill this did not matter, of course. Churchill relished the emergence of a real eastern front, and announced immediately that, even though he still regarded communism, fascism and Nazism as analogous and remained a convinced anticommunist, the past must now be forgotten and the hand of the communist ally eagerly grasped so that the joint enemy could be defeated as soon as possible. Immediately, Churchill promised all possible technical, economic and materiel assistance to the Soviets. He did not actually believe that the Soviets would last in the war for long, and hence did not carefully consider the long-term implications of this assistance and alliance, but in the then-current situation he was more than eager to receive all available help from the East, even if this required that Britain further deplete its arsenal to keep the East a going concern. Cooperation with the Soviets also helped to buttress Churchill’s still insecure standing in his own Cabinet, where, for different reasons, some pro-Soviet ministers from the Labour Party (and Anthony Eden) and the right wing of the Conservative Party still threatened to bolt. For all these reasons, Churchill ignored his anticommunist convictions and promised that he would support the Soviet Union unflinchingly. As is well known, he stated that he would give a statement sympathetic to the Devil if Hitler attacked Hell.7 As a matter of fact, Churchill needed the Soviet Union at least as much as the Soviet Union needed him—probably more. From June to December 1941 the Soviet Union was Britain’s only ally, and Britain had been fighting alone for a

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considerable amount of time. Although not yet near to collapse, the situation was nevertheless very serious indeed. An eastern front, even if short-lived, was of prime importance to British survival, since it made it more difficult for Germany to launch an expected invasion of Britain or (almost equally feared) to conquer Egypt. Churchill’s position was, however, complicated by the fact that, owing to the same British weakness that made the Soviets so appealing, he had very limited resources available in terms of the materiel assistance that he had promised the Soviets. Churchill was, of course, unable to provide a western or northern front, which is what the Soviets really wanted. All that he could do was deliver some of the war materiel that Britain received from the United States, and transport this material to the Soviet Union on the highly treacherous seas of the Arctic Sea. The Arctic route, of course, was threatened not only by the Germans in Norway but also by the Finnish-German operations in the north of Finland close to the points of delivery, Archangel and Murmansk. All this made Churchill’s task more difficult, but he was determined to assure the prompt delivery of as much aid as possible. It was essential to do so, he thought, since it was the only means to ‘hold our influence over Stalin and keep Russia in the war’.8 However, Churchill could not consistently deliver even on this sole means of satisfying the Soviets. In the spring and summer of 1941, and then again in 1943, the aid shipments had to be suspended because the German navy had redoubled its activities in the north and had managed to sink a large part of the British fleet that was engaged in the supply effort. All of this underlined the British weakness and dependence on the Soviets staying in the war. This leads back to Finland. British materiel shipments to the Soviet Union had constant problems and delays. To open a second front in Europe was a sheer impossibility. Finland threatened supply routes to the Soviets, and was engaged in ground assaults in the neighbourhood of Leningrad as well. One of the few ways remaining for Churchill to satisfy the Soviet leadership and to keep it committed to the war was to treat Finland in ways that the Soviets liked. In his state of weakness, Churchill drifted ever further upon this road. Churchill did not think that British actions had contributed to Finland’s decision to join Germany. Finland had made its decision freely, and its decision released Britain from all past obligations. In Churchill’s view, therefore, there was absolutely no reason at all to take into consideration Finnish wishes—on the contrary, Finland was expendable. That Churchill nevertheless did not want to throw Finland to the Soviet lions was because of reasons external to Finland itself. Churchill was very much annoyed by Finland’s ‘obnoxious and aggressive attitude’. ‘One cannot be on two sides at once!’, he stressed to his officials once he learned of the Finnish decision to attack with the Germans, and about the appended claim of Finland not being Germany’s ally. The least we ask of them is that they should lie down and keep quiet’, he added. Churchill ordered the Foreign Office immediately to impound all Finnish ships in British ports, and all other Finnish ships that could be found, and he insisted that the Finns be

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subjected to ‘every inconvenience in our power’. Churchill did not feel that a declaration of war was required, but he did aver that Finland should have ‘much the same treatment as if they were at war’.9 He also began to consider military retaliation on Finnish soil, and ordered military planners to prepare for a possible British invasion of Finland through northern Norway. This putative invasion, which resembled Operation Avonmouth but reversed its meaning, was a Soviet demand. Churchill himself did not think it necessary or strategically useful, but the very fact that he considered it at all spoke volumes regarding his state of mind. On the other hand, Churchill did not deem it appropriate to intern all Finns then resident in Britain. This was a major exception to an otherwise very strict policy on the internment or expulsion of enemy nationals.10 Understandably, the Soviet Union was not satisfied with these very limited British measures against Finland. Immediately after the outbreak of the War of 1941–1944, it began to pressurise Britain to declare war on Finland. At first Stalin envisioned forcing the Finns into a separate peace, and said he was willing even to make concessions for this end, but Churchill always thought that a British declaration of war was what Stalin really expected. He also knew that the Soviets’ pressure on this matter was part of a much broader effort. The fact is that when Stalin began to pressurise Churchill on the Finnish declaration of war, he issued a long list of other, entirely unrelated, demands for concessions and services on other battlefronts. Stalin’s demanded permission to occupy areas in Iran that were in immediate proximity to India. In Poland, he wanted a bigger say now and for the postwar period. He demanded that Churchill open a second front immediately so that pressure on the Soviet front would be eased—and conversely, so that Britain would be tied down in a costly and prolonged campaign while the Soviets could pick and choose. Furthermore, Stalin insisted that British materiel and humanitarian assistance be greatly increased, regardless, it seemed, of the effect on Britain’s struggling war machine. He insisted on a formal treaty of alliance which would have guaranteed the Soviet Union the borders of 1941—that is, would have incorporated into the Soviet Union the Baltic countries and parts of Finland and Romania. Throughout 1941, but especially in the last four months of the year, it was understood in Britain that Stalin’s implicit threat was to make a separate peace with Germany if these demands were not met.11 Hardened observer of Soviet tactics that he was, Churchill knew exactly what all this meant. He was seriously concerned about the possibility of a Soviet separate peace, and he thought that Stalin might conclude one at any moment if his demands were not met. As an anticommunist Churchill was loath to accede to Soviet demands, and he tried to delay a response to Stalin for as long as he could, but he could not do that forever. Far from acquiescing, Churchill actually decided to act against the Soviets by banning the playing of the Soviet national anthem in public or on British radio—a unique and telling decision, given that the national anthems of all other Allies were played on the radio every evening.

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He launched an official propaganda campaign as well, one that was designed to weaken popular sympathies towards the Soviet communist ally. Communists, as far as Churchill saw it, were still ‘barbarians’, still untrustworthy and still playing games. ‘They brought their own fate upon themselves when by their Pact with Ribbentrop they let Hitler loose on Poland and so started the war’, he told Sir Stafford Cripps in October 1941, so it was ‘impertinent’ for them now to make all these new demands. If Soviet leaders thought that Britain was hoping only to get new national and imperial benefits out of the war, as they implied, Churchill wanted to assure them that such a premonition was the result of ‘guilt and self-reproach in their own heart’. And even if Britain was primarily interested in securing its interests in Iran, India and Northern Africa, inquired Churchill of the Soviet Ambassador, who was the Soviet Union to complain about it, when it had signed a treaty with Hitler for similar reasons?12 Just before the Winter War, or partly even during that war, Churchill would not have allowed considerations like these to affect his actions. Then, he placed Soviet cooperation so high on his list of priorities that he was willing to silence all voices of anticommunism in his head and heart. However, in 1941 his perspective on the Grand Alliance was different. It was coloured by memories of the Soviets’ actions in the Winter War, and their refusal to help in any way when Britain fought for its life in the Battle of Britain. Moreover, whilst Churchill had earlier been prompted to make concessions to the Soviets in order to tempt them into the fight against Hitler, now he needed to make concessions in order to keep the Soviets in that fight. The concessions needed for the first task were different from the concessions needed for the latter task. It might indeed turn out that before long Churchill would have to acquiesce to most of Stalin’s new demands, if that was the only way to prevent a separate peace, but Churchill was not about to give in easily or at any time soon. As distasteful as the Finnish decision to join the German camp was, Churchill did not want to make concessions here, either. What was at issue was more a question of principle than a desire to help Finland—the principle of standing by democracies and the quid pro quo principle of alliance dynamics, both of which rebelled against the Soviet demands. In addition, Churchill actually understood the military rationale for what Finland was doing. As someone who in 1919 had versed himself in the geopolitical significance of areas adjacent to Finland, Churchill knew well how strategically important it was for Finland to retake and retain the Eastern Karelia territory that had been lost after the Winter War.13 Unwillingness to declare war and the need to make concessions to the Soviets prompted Churchill (and the United States government) to try diplomatic pressure first. From August 1941, British and American diplo mats tried through various channels to prompt Finland into ceasing offensive operations. At first they offered Western security guarantees for pre-Winter War borders, an ending of the naval blockade, and loans for purchases of food and raw materials—a clear and unusual inducement to leave the war, which would have made Finland

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a very special case among all those participating in the war. Then Churchill considered—and proposed to the Soviets—that Britain, the United States and the Soviets issue a joint declaration guaranteeing Finnish independence, or, failing the participation of the neutral United States, that Britain and the Soviets issue such a declaration. As the months passed and Finland remained adamant, British and American persuasion became an ever more shrill series of threats and warnings with which Churchill hoped to convince Finnish leaders that they had to cease their operations if they wanted to avoid being drawn into a war with Britain. This more demanding attitude caused much bitterness, consternation and disappointment in Finland, where no real effort was made to look at the whole issue from anything but an insular Finnish perspective.14 In early September, Stalin stopped offering concessions and demanded point-blank that war be declared on Finland immediately. After some deliberate delay, Churchill told Stalin that he was willing to declare war. However, even as he assured Stalin of his willingness, Churchill proposed a range of objections and counter-arguments. Writing to Stalin in November 1941, he expressed doubt regarding the helpfulness of a war declaration, and stressed how Finland was already blockaded and could not in any major way interfere with Allied operations. Furthermore, Churchill doubted whether a war declaration would be ‘of any use’ or ‘prudent’, considering how many friends Finland had in the United States. He still thought it possible that Finland would join the Allies of her own volition, and that this might be imminent, since the Germans were likely soon to start losing battles and the Finns were likely to draw the right conclusions. Such incomplete support for Soviet demands grated on Stalin, who at this stage decided to accuse the British of an attempt to divide the antiGerman alliance. Stalin reminded Churchill that Finland was one of Hitler’s ‘most ardent accomplices’, and that the Allies had to stand shoulder to shoulder against it or else the world would lose faith in their unity and determination.15 However, even this argument did not change Churchill’s mind. As late as in November 1941—almost five months after Finland had joined the German side—Churchill still thought it best to try to pressurise Finland into a negotiated peace. If Finland could not at this stage officially renege on its agreements with Nazi Germany, Churchill was ready to settle for a mere cessation of offensive action. However, if neither of these two outcomes was reached soon, Churchill would grudgingly be ready to acquiesce to Stalin’s insistent demands. The most important thing was that relations with Stalin remained ‘extremely cordial’.16 By this stage, the British War Cabinet had already made its decision to declare war on Finland. A missive had already been prepared at the Foreign Office in which Finland was asked to cease offensive action outside its borders, and to withdraw from the front. The ultimatum was to have the deadline of 5 December, by which time Finland must conform to the demands set or else face war. Soon after the decision on this ultimatum had been made the War Cabinet

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had second thoughts, but it returned to its original position in late November, when public opinion was beginning clearly to turn against Finland, and when even the government of Australia began to demand a declaration of war.17 Yet Churchill himself did not want to bow down even to this pressure. He was dissatisfied with the Foreign Office’s draft ultimatum, and insisted that Foreign Secretary Eden change some of its particulars before it was sent. Churchill did not want to issue a clear ultimatum at all, but insisted instead that the missive not state categorically that a declaration of war would result if Finland did not meet the demands set. He also insisted that Finland be given more time to consider. To Eden, Churchill reiterated that a declaration of war would be both counterproductive and stupid, and that Finns were likely soon to cease hostilities against the Soviets on their own initiative. Arguing thus, Churchill managed to push back the proposed deadline. His attempt to have Eden write yet another letter to Stalin did not, however, succeed. Churchill wanted Eden once more to inquire whether the Soviets might after all change their position on the war declaration, or whether they really insisted on a British declaration of war if Finland refused to meet the demands set.18 Churchill also tried to persuade Finland into a separate peace or into a cessation of offensive action through a personal note to Field Marshal Mannerheim, a man he still greatly respected. For the first time in their respective careers the two men were now on opposite sides, but Churchill clearly believed that he retained some influence on Mannerheim and that a personal appeal would be worthwhile. The unofficial approach was originally the idea of Lord Phillimore, the head of the Winter War aid-to-Finland movement, and Churchill decided to seize on this idea at the same time that he finally agreed to the sending of the official Foreign Office missive. The Soviet Union was informed of this unusual personal appeal, and Ambassador Maisky agreed to it, provided that its contents conformed to the message set out in the official missive.19 The Soviets were not, however, consulted on the contents. Churchill decided to put in the Mannerheim letter his own hopes and plans, not the Soviets’ demands or the official Foreign Office missive’s demands. Churchill’s original draft of the message hinted, therefore, that Great Britain would not insist on Finland making a peace treaty with the Soviets, or that it hand over any territories. The only thing that Britain asked was that Finland cease offensive operations, perhaps using the difficult winter conditions as a pretext. Churchill intended also to refer directly to his friendship with Mannerheim and to the two men’s discussions at Sir Patrick Donner’s—in all, to speak as one friend spoke to another. This was not exactly the tone of the letter as eventually sent, since the Foreign Office insisted on altering some sections. However, even in the final missive and accompanying note Britain did not actually demand that Finland withdraw inside the 1939 borders, or that a peace treaty be signed with the Soviets: it would suffice if Finland simply desisted from further offensive action. Churchill told Mannerheim that he would be

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‘deeply grieved’ if Finland did not accede to such mild terms. In that case, ‘out of loyalty to our ally Russia’ Britain would be forced to declare war on Finland—a war it wanted no more than Finland did. If war could not be avoided it would start within a few days, and Churchill vowed to carry it through with all his might and energy. However, he wanted to appeal to Mannerheim so that this ‘most painful’ outcome could be avoided—not least, he said, because he did not want to see his old anticommunist friends join the Nazis in the dock of war criminals. ‘My recollections of our pleasant talks and correspondence of the last war lead me to send this purely personal and private message for your consideration’, Churchill concluded, ‘before it is too late’.20 In his reply, Mannerheim thanked Churchill for his courtesy but had to inform him that it would be impossible to halt Finnish offensives until positions had been reached which would secure the Finnish border. Mannerheim emphasised that the Finnish armed forces were fighting solely in the defence of Finland against communism, and in no way against Great Britain. He himself would in turn be ‘deeply grieved’ if because of this defensive fight Churchill thought it necessary to declare war. The whole reply was short and curt. It did not make it clear that Mannerheim was actually already very close to ordering a cessation of the offensive. As Finnish historians have long stressed, there really was no way for Mannerheim to make this crucial fact plain, since the danger was ever-present that telegrams would find their way into German hands and provoke possible countermeasures from that direction. Mannerheim thought that Finland had already become so closely tied to the German war effort, and to German economic assistance, that it could not leave the war without German approval. Also, much like President Ryti and other leading politicians, he seems still to have expected an ultimate German victory in the war, and to have come to regard Britain as a declining, somewhat insignificant power.21 Such reasoning would not, of course, have played well with Churchill, had he known about it. Yet he procrastinated about the war declaration for a considerable time after Mannerheim’s unsatisfactory reply had been received. Even after this reply, Churchill was optimistic that the official Finnish reply, still to arrive, would in some positive way differ from Mannerheim’s. Foreign Office officials had to put pressure on the Prime Minister in several telephone conversations—the last of which took place in the middle of the night just before the deadline was running out—so that Churchill would not renege on the Cabinet’s decision and would indeed declare war if no different message was forthcoming from Finland. When none was forthcoming, Churchill had no option but to respect the Cabinet decision and the assurance given to Stalin. He had to declare war. His personal disinclination was exposed, however, when he insisted that the official record include his statement that a war against Finland served no one’s interests, not Britain’s or the Soviet Union’s: ‘The sole justification for it was that it was necessary in order to satisfy the Russian government’. Furthermore, Churchill

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told Eden—who in the end persuaded him to declare war—that it was a ‘historic mistake’ for which he had to bear responsibility.22 In Finland, President Ryti, Field Marshal Mannerheim and the influential Väinö Tanner, now the Finance Minister, were all ‘deeply shocked’. They blamed Churchill, and failed to see how any Finnish actions had contributed to the turn of events. The Finnish press also bitterly attacked Churchill personally, and branded him as a tool of the Soviets who had bowed down to communism and lost all sight of ‘moral considerations’ in his pursuit of Great Power domination of the world. In other circles that knew British affairs better, such attacks did not ensue; rather, Mannerheim himself was blamed for a signal failure in his pursuit of British policy. Despite his close relations with Churchill and accustomed closeness to the West, Mannerheim had not managed to secure for Finland that anticommunist insurance which many Finns—and Mannerheim himself—still hoped to get not only from Germany but also from Britain. To retain rela tions with a Britain which was close to the Soviets, and thus possibly in a position to moderate the Soviets’ Finland policy, would have been an especial boon, but had now been lost. The head of the Conservative Party’s parliamentary group, the future Prime Minister Edwin Linkomies, represented a not insignificant section of informed Finnish opinion when he averred that Mannerheim should have accepted Churchill’s generous terms, terms that did not even require divestiture of territories conquered. Given that Mannerheim himself had stated that strategic goals had already been reached, and that offensives could (and did) soon stop, Linkomies simply could not understand why Finland had turned Churchill down.23 Mannerheim’s own comments show that he did not properly understand Churchill’s intentions. Nor did Mannerheim appreciate the very significant Soviet and other pressure under which Churchill had been labouring; the Soviet manipulation of British weakness with which Churchill had had to grapple but despite which he had tried to save Finland from a wider war. On these points Mannerheim showed a surprising lack of realism. He had thought that an anticommunist like Churchill would share his own thoughts, and, as he had told the British Ambassador earlier, he would never have expected such a man to ally with the Soviet Union. After Churchill had so allied himself, Mannerheim still did not think he would actually declare war on Finland, since such a war would be of no use to Britain and could only damage its international reputation. Therefore, Mannerheim had deemed it safe to turn Churchill down. When his theory was disproved, Mannerheim began to search for an answer in some kind of personal malevolence or dishonour in Churchill himself. Long after the Second World War, he continued to criticise Churchill for his alleged invention of false legitimations for a declaration of war. Mannerheim thought that these had only distorted the facts of the Finnish-German relationship, and retrospectively obscured the real nature of the War of 1941–1944.24

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In this critiquing of Churchill personally—which was pronounced to the end of Mannerheim’s life—Mannerheim was entirely mistaken. He simply did not understand that Churchill had resisted great pressure for a long time, and that after Churchill had received Mannerheim’s curt refusal of the offer made he simply had had no option but to declare war. By that stage, Churchill did not need any arguments to legitimise the decision; it was a fait accompli achieved by Finland alone. As a matter of fact, the Finnish politicians who criticised Churchill’s motives showed a remarkable lack of rational thinking. It could surely not be assumed that the rationalisations typical of President Ryti would cut any ice with the British—rationalisations about Finland as a ‘cobelligerent’,25 not a German ally, which in their legalism and hypocrisy were quite amazing. How was it possible realistically to assume that Great Britain would have maintained normal relations with a country that fought together with Britain’s main enemy, and which by its own operations endangered the continuance of a working eastern front, held up significant amounts of troops on its borders who otherwise could have been used to fight the Germans in Central Europe, and aided the German push towards the ports of Archangel and Murmansk—the critically important ports through which Britain supplied the Soviet Union with the implements of war? How would it have been possible not to meet Soviet demands before long, if failure to meet them left open the disastrous possibility of a Nazi-Soviet separate peace? Sooner or later Britain would have had to act against Finland, if Finland would not voluntarily desist from offensive action and from an alliance that hurt British and Allied interests. Churchill had offered an opportunity for Finns to do just that, and made it clear that it was the only and last opportunity of its kind. However, even if these basic arguments did not suggest themselves to Finnish leaders, simply by reading daily newspapers they could have discovered another reason to think that a declaration of war was inevitable unless Finland stopped fighting.26 This reason was strictly domestic, and related to Prime Minister Churchill’s weakened position in the British Cabinet. Ambassador Gripenberg, who was well versed with British politics—and a close personal friend of Mannerheim’s—later described these domestic British dynamics to representatives of the Finnish press and to Mannerheim himself, so there is no doubt that Finnish leaders had the relevant information available.27 Just at the time the Finnish war declaration was being discussed in the British War Cabinet, Churchill had fallen victim to an attempted parliamentary coup. Even though he held the portfolios both of the Prime Minister and of the Minister of Defence throughout the Second World War, Churchill was by no means an independent and free actor, and was not able to dictate British policies on his own. For a while he was not even the head of the Conservative Party, and even after he assumed that office during the war there were a great number of Conservatives in the party who were less than enthusiastic about him. Churchill led a coalition government, which contained many additional critics, and

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Parliament could in principle depose him at any time. Churchill fell victim to several attempted coups, and the most significant of these plots began in late 1941 and continued for some time after the declaration of war had been issued to Finland. This particular plot was hatched and led by some left-wing ministers, some Labour Party publicists, the still influential former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and Lord Beaverbrook (former supporter of Finland but now a pro-Soviet Minister of Munitions and owner of the powerful Daily Mail newspaper). These men were not ideological sympathisers of communism, but were not principled anticommunists like Churchill either. Rather, they believed in the new version of David Lloyd George’s 1918 principle—let the Bolsheviks be bribed into being our friends—and thought that wartime cooperation, assistance and concessions would significantly aid in the forging of a friendly and cooperative postwar Soviet Union. Since Churchill, too, tended to think so, the difference between him and the plotters was one of tactics, and degree and timing of concessions. Foreign Secretary Eden gave background support to the plotters at various points, at least to the extent that while they were hatching their plans and making their demands Eden, too, applied pressure on Churchill to accede to the Soviets’ various demands. In addition, secret intelligence information of the time showed that the Soviets had tasked the Third International with keeping left-wing pressure up by constantly emphasising the inadequacy of the support given by the bourgeois Churchill to the Soviet Red Army.28 The role of Beaverbrook, who was in charge of war production and Soviet supply, was crucial. It was highly injurious to Finland. Beaverbrook had sympathised with Stalin even during the years of the Stalinist terror, and from the mid-1930s he had been on close personal terms with the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky.29 Five days after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, Maisky contacted Beaverbrook and demanded that Beaverbrook start putting pressure on Churchill to open a second front, to increase materiel aid to the Soviets and to declare war on Finland. Later Anthony Eden had been recruited in the effort, as had been Harry Hopkins, the special representative of President Roosevelt, who then resided in London. Thus supported, Beaverbrook told Churchill in October-November 1941 that Finland lost all right to sympathetic treatment when it attacked the Soviet Union, and that a war needed to be declared on it immediately, both to satisfy and to help Britain’s real friend, the Soviet Union. Beaverbrook—and Eden—thought that Churchill’s prolonged refusal to declare war, expressed with ‘anger’, and his restraint in supplying the Soviets, had greatly deepened the Soviets’ ‘ill-feeling’ and the ‘clash of opinion’ between the allies. Churchill’s line was profoundly wrong, Beaverbrook stressed, and only a radical change of policy could save Britain from a postwar disaster.30 This was the argument that Beaverbrook repeated ad nauseam in his capacity as Minister of Munitions in late 1941, while other Conservative and Labour

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MPs began to voice in ever starker terms their dissatisfaction with Churchill’s conduct of the war. On 2 December—a few days before the declaration of war was finally issued—a number of Labour Party MPs actually came out in an open rebellion against Churchill that resembled that which had brought Chamberlain down in 1940 and seriously threatened Churchill’s position. War production, social reform—and assistance to the Soviets—were the main battle cries of the rebels.31 Differences of opinion at the highest level of British decision-making were, therefore, considerable, and Churchill was under significant political pressure, which severely restricted his room for manoeuvre. The declaration of war on Finland by no means settled the dispute between Churchill and the pro-Soviet block (Beaverbrook resigned his office and began to lead a public pro-Soviet campaign only after the declaration), but the declaration must be seen as bait thrown to the critics and plotters. It was above all a technical measure dictated by Churchill’s need to retain Soviet friendship and cooperation, and Churchill’s own power. It was not possible for Churchill to avoid it when no support was forthcoming from the United States for other action, and when he nevertheless needed to keep the Soviets fully engaged in the war. Churchill did not want war with Finland; he wanted to remove Finland from the camp of those who fought Britain’s ally, the Soviet Union, and Britain itself. He would have preferred to reach the outcome in ways that retained Soviet friendship and ensured that the Soviets remained in the war, but provided the Soviets with as little private gain as possible. Soviet and domestic demands could have been sidelined only if Finland had agreed to the terms set out in Churchill’s appeal to Mannerheim. Foreign Secretary Eden, on the other hand, did think that a declaration of war was necessary. Failure to declare war would, as he saw it, create a ‘serious standing grievance’ with the Soviets.32 Beaverbrook also believed in appeasing the Soviets, and always took it for granted that Finland should be sacrificed. However, Churchill never believed this. He thought that a dispute over Finland between Britain and the Soviets was probably less dangerous than the repercussions of a war on Finland, for he was sure that these repercussions would all be in the interests of international communism, and none in the interests of the free world. This difference of opinion was at the core of the whole dispute between Churchill and the Eden-Beaverbrook group, and it could have led to Churchill losing his office as Prime Minister had Churchill in the end not sided with his critics. Eden and Beaverbrook believed in Anglo-Soviet friendship and cooperation on principle, and therefore felt that all Soviet demands must be met. Churchill believed in the usefulness and necessity of Anglo-Soviet war cooperation, and when necessary he was ready to make concessions to assure it, but he always had his doubts about the long-term repercussions. In the end he had to accede to the many demands put on him for a declaration of war—and he had to accede simply because it was the price of keeping his own office and ensuring the Soviets remained in the war. When

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Finnish leaders turned down his compromise proposal, Churchill had no option but to declare war. Churchill’s prolonged effort to prevent a declaration of war and to persuade Finland merely to cease offensive action showed, in fact, how deeply opposed he was to declaring war. He tried consistently to do everything he possibly could to prevent such a war, since he realised that the war helped only the long-standing expansionist desires of the Soviet Union. As an anticommunist, Churchill thought indeed that war against Finland was a ‘historic mistake’. The years of apparent hostilities (December 1941–September 1944) From the Finnish Day of Independence in 1941, Britain was officially at war against Finland. This fact was not, however, of great immediate importance, since one day after the British declaration of war the whole framework of the World War changed dramatically. The Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbour, and the United States then joined the war. When he heard of this, Churchill ‘went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’, as he wrote later, certain that the tide had turned and that ultimate victory was now assured.33 He then travelled immediately to meet President Franklin D.Roosevelt, and began to construct a new war coalition with the Americans. Churchill forgot all matters relating to the small, peripheral republic of Finland. Thus began the years of apparent hostilities between Britain and Finland. The hostilities were merely apparent because Churchill did not go to war against Finland out of his own choice, and because he saw no need for actual acts of war. To declare war was the maximum he was willing to do, and he had agreed to that only grudgingly and solely for reasons unconnected to Anglo-Finnish relations—primarily because he feared a Nazi-Soviet separate peace and because he was under pressure at home. The hostilities were also merely apparent because Finnish warfare did not pose a significant threat to British interests or war-making, the focus of which had switched to regions other than the north of Europe. Militarily speaking, Finland was therefore of limited interest to Churchill during the War of 1941–1944. Finland continued to have a function as a country which could be used as a means of appeasing the Soviets, but after Pearl Harbour Britain had an American ally and no longer needed the Soviets as much as previously. Churchill assumed, anyway, that fewer concessions to the Soviets would now be required, and he intended to act on that assumption. Whenever facts did not back up this assumption, it was as a result of an American unwillingness to join Britain in containing the Soviets. In such situations Churchill had no choice but to oscillate between concessions and resistance to Soviet demands. Once again this oscillation was played out not least over Finland.

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In late 1941 Churchill tried to make sure, first of all, that the United States would employ its military forces in areas where purely British interests were best served. The American entry into the war sufficed, as far as he was concerned, to assure ultimate victory, and therefore these questions of purely British interests became more important than when resources had been limited. After the American declaration of war Churchill wanted, therefore, to assure first that the bulk of American troops would not be positioned in the Pacific but would in fact, honouring a secret pledge of the previous year, concentrate on the European theatre. Once this had been ascertained in late 1941, Churchill concentrated on guiding American political and military leaders towards the so-called ‘peripheral strategy’, whereby he wanted to direct European theatre forces less towards a planned French invasion (preferred by the Americans and the Soviets) than towards the Mediterranean and North African region. Churchill thought that such a peripheral strategy was both strategically more promising and more expedient, since the Germans were weaker in the Mediterranean than in continental Europe, and British interests were more at risk there and more easily defendable. Churchill’s experiences in the trenches of the First World War also tended to set him against any large-scale Western European offensives. As a consequence of Churchill’s insistence on this option, the new war coalition became bogged down for much of 1942 and 1943 in a long and complex debate between Churchill’s preference and that of others.34 Churchill also wanted to use the discussions over peripheral strategy to create the impression of a close Anglo-American alliance—an impression with which he could counter and deny Soviet demands. Whenever the Soviets demanded that British resources be moved to regions more central to the Soviet’s war effort, or that Soviet separate agendas be advanced in places like Finland, Churchill planned to (and often did) counter with the argument that he could not act alone, that the Americans were the powerful partner, that British and American war machines and intelligence services were dependent on each other and that the liberal democratic principles enunciated in the Atlantic Charter (in September 1941) bound Britain to follow America’s lead. To appeal to the last-mentioned was a powerful way for Churchill to highlight the essentially Wilsonian principle of the self-determination of nations—an argument which could be marshalled against all Soviet demands for annexations in places like Finland. Churchill needed, however, to use this argument with care, since there was always the danger that a strict interpretation would turn against the British Empire. Since it took some time for the Americans to be ready for full-scale war, and as American belligerency also diminished the amount of direct aid that Britain received from the United States (out of which Churchill had to supply the Soviets), Churchill could point also to the Anglo-American interdependence to account for a British inability to provide the Soviets with more war materiel. Churchill often also blamed Anglo-American bureaucratic processes for the unavailability of a second, Western front, and he adroitly used the alleged

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difficulties of transAtlantic communication to delay decision-making on such a front.35 There is every reason to suppose that had the United States joined the war a few days earlier, before the British declaration of war on Finland, Churchill would have used the same argument to prevent a war with Finland. However, the tactic did not work in the way that Churchill had hoped. This had repercussions on Finland, too. Indeed, all of Churchill’s activity in the crucial period of the Second World War—from 1942 through to 1945—must be seen in the light of the fact that no such Anglo-American common front was achieved. In its absence, Churchill had to resist Soviet demands alone—often against American wishes—and the defence of purely British interests on which he had set his mind became much more difficult. President Franklin Roosevelt turned out to be singularly unwilling to support or even to countenance the priorities that Churchill had set, let alone to finance Churchill’s projects. Instead Roosevelt began to construct his alternative to an Anglo-American common front, his preference being for Soviet-American cooperation which was directed at least as much against the British Empire as against the German and Japanese enemies. Roosevelt was guided by an anti-imperialist sentiment which waxed strong among his most important constituents. He believed in this anti-imperialism himself. According to the relevant generic argument, the World War would end in defeat for the United States if it did not also destroy, alongside Nazism and old-fashioned power politics, the British Empire. Most of Roosevelt’s and his supporters’ attention was directed at India, where they wanted to contribute to Indian independence, but they were also interested in other Southern and Southeastern Asian colonies, and had indeed campaigned prominently for their independence even before Pearl Harbour. A spate of American diplomatic missions to the region in question complemented the rhetorical campaign against the British Empire.36 Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism was clearly anti-British, and it greatly complicated Churchill’s activities. Most particularly, its impact was felt in Churchill’s policies towards the Soviet Union and Finland. Why this was so becomes understandable once the genesis and broader ideological affinities of modern anti-imperialism are recalled. As Roosevelt’s critics rightly pointed out, Rooseveltian anti-imperialism was strengthened by an affiliated, somewhat Wilsonian, sympathy towards aspects of the Bolshevik communist experiment and the Soviet collectivist system. This affinity helped to move Roosevelt away from the intimate Anglo-American co-operation that Churchill desired and towards closer ties with the Soviets. Simply put, just as President Wilson in 1919 and a large part of the American liberal left had during both World Wars, Roosevelt believed that eventually the American order of state-controlled capitalism (state capitalism, as the Marxists would have it) and the Soviet system of centrally directed planned economies would converge at a mean, and there

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would emerge a new single democratic force in the world that incorporated aspects of both systems.37 Even before the war, Roosevelt’s New Deal had been developing—as Churchill had warned—in pronouncedly collectivist and centralised directions, and during the Second World War some of its protagonists no longer felt that there remained a significant difference between it and the Soviet system. Because of this sense of similarity and affinity, it had been easy for Roosevelt in 1933 to recognise the Soviets diplomatically, and thereafter to order the Federal Bureau of Investigation to persecute anticommunists. At the same time, he had allowed federal funds to be channelled into the pro-Soviet propaganda of the Federal Theatre Project and other semi-communist programmes. Roosevelt expected, in fact, that the war would produce a new world order from which Nazism, fascism and old-fashioned imperialism would have been uprooted and where a new international organisation would also have interpreted and enforced collective security in terms of state control of industry, social security and various other guaranteed social ‘rights’. As far as he saw it, both the New Deal and a moderated form of Soviet communism served these purposes, but no British imperial value systems did. Given such an attitude, Roosevelt did not want to create needless problems between the United States and the Soviet Union, and he thought that the two countries could, through wartime collaboration, create the basis for a sustainable postwar order of compromises and cooperation, centred on themselves, which would assure peaceful coexistence and eventual convergence.38 The longer the time since the American declaration of war, the more Roosevelt began to stress the ideational and practical linkages between the United States and the Soviets, and the more he bypassed Churchill the imperialist. To this mix must be added the continuing polemics and plotting of the pro-Soviet ministers, MPs and publicists in Britain, and it soon becomes clear just how complicated and difficult Churchill’s position was, as a man who hated to make concessions to the Soviets. The year 1942 has, indeed, been characterised as the greatest ‘year of political crisis’ of Churchill’s wartime premiership, during which dissatisfaction with him peaked, often regarding his Soviet policies. This year saw Sir Stafford Cripps return to Britain from his post in Moscow, Cripps’s emergence as a major (if short-lived) champion of the anti-Churchill forces, and these forces’ successful pressurising of Churchill into many new pro-Soviet policy decisions at home and abroad, in India and in domestic social reform. Some on the political right also continued to machinate against Churchill, as did Max Beaverbrook.39 Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s Russian policies were thus in deep conflict. The conflict resulted from widely different ideological outlooks and divergent geopolitical assessments, and its consequence was that Churchill’s hand vis-à-vis the Soviets was considerably weakened. At no point did Churchill receive from Roosevelt the support that he hoped for in the defence of British

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imperial interests, and therefore he had to make concessions to the Soviets. At the time Churchill continued to tolerate concessions as a necessity to prevent a still-feared separate peace (or, conversely, once the Soviets were on the ascendant on the eastern front, to prevent the Soviets from conquering Central and Western Europe before the other Allies were on the continent). The fear of a separate Nazi-Soviet peace was especially strong throughout the period. Whenever Churchill dared to ignore this concern and try containment of the Soviets, he had to fight off American reluctance and the Soviets’ many friends at home. By definition, the effort was somewhat desperate. Immediately after Pearl Harbour, Churchill did try the tactic of appealing for an Anglo-American common front in order to prevent concessions to Soviet demands, and his attempt related to Finland. What was at issue were new Soviet demands for territorial annexations. These demands had clearly been thought up before the United States joined the war, and had been designed to make use of British weakness, but Churchill assumed that his negotiating position was now so much stronger that he could resist. According to information provided from Moscow by Foreign Secretary Eden, the Soviets were demanding a formal treaty of alliance and, as part of the treaty, British ratification of the Soviet annexation of parts of Romania and Finland, as well as acceptance of the Soviet incorporation of the Baltic States. In addition, the Soviets demanded that the British bind themselves to a postwar policy of breaking up Germany and organising spheres of influence. In this arrangement the Soviets would have been given a dominant position in Eastern Europe, and the British would have received bases in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries and France.40 In Foreign Secretary Eden’s view, the arrangement was a ‘litmus test’ of Anglo-Soviet friendship, and he strongly advised acceptance. Eden assumed that before long the Soviets would in any case conquer the territories that they were now asking for—territories to which their security needs entitled them—and that Great Britain could not possibly influence what happened in these areas. It was therefore better to assume a ‘realistic’ approach to Baltic Sea questions, to accept the facts of life and at the same time deepen Anglo-Soviet friendship. Lord Beaverbrook thought the same way, and said it was ‘impossible’ not to conform to Soviet desires. In any case, he stressed, the Baltic states were part of the ‘native soil of the Russians’ and, like Ireland to the British, a rebellious and unpleasant region that certainly should be subjected to the Soviets. Finland, on the other hand, had through its own behaviour ‘forfeited all claims to our consideration’.41 The solution advised by Churchill’s closest advisers was therefore part and parcel of the counsel of concessions and appeasement to which Churchill had just agreed on the matter of the Finnish declaration of war. However, this time Churchill refused to agree. He chose his arguments carefully, and expected them to win American support. When he turned down the Soviet proposal, Churchill appealed to the Wilsonian doctrines of the Atlantic Charter regarding the rights of small nations

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and the illegitimacy of territorial annexations. Privately he insisted that he would never accept the transfer of any sovereign state to the Soviets, and to Eden he stressed that, as Soviet annexations were ‘acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler’, Great Britain and the United States could not possibly accept them without breaking the Atlantic Charter and ‘dishonour[ing] our cause’. Specifically regarding Finland, Churchill absolutely precluded accepting any attempt to ‘subjugate or absorb’ it into the Soviet Union, or any such imposition of Soviet overlordship that amounted to the same. He did accept that, in principle, the Karelian Isthmus and some islands on the Gulf of Finland could be transferred to the Soviets, since the Soviets had a right to secure borders around Leningrad. It would, however, be impossible to make any binding decisions on such matters before a postwar peace conference, and Great Britain could not have her hands tied in advance, especially when President Roosevelt was sure to disapprove of the Soviet annexationist demands. Roosevelt, averred Churchill, could not possibly accept such an egregious violation of Wilsonianism.42 In a manner of speaking, Churchill was supported by Roosevelt. As he had expected, Roosevelt appealed to the right of national self-determination and let the Soviets know that he could not countenance an annexation of the Baltic states. However, Roosevelt also turned the argument against Churchill and he did this in a way that destroyed all that Churchill had hoped to gain from an Anglo-American partnership. When he discussed the Soviet demands with Churchill, Roosevelt mentioned the case of India, a territory with no more self-determination (he claimed) than the annexed Baltic States, southeastern parts of Finland or eastern Romania.43 Thus Roosevelt hinted that he would not come to the aid of the British Empire, whether the Empire was threatened by the Soviet Union or by someone else. If Churchill wanted to resist Soviet aggrandisement through appeals to national self-determination, he’d better give up the British Empire. Once he heard this, Churchill’s attitude regarding the Soviet demands changed quickly. Returning to Britain from his meeting with Roosevelt, he decided after all to suggest that the Allies accede to Soviet demands. Overtly, Churchill used arguments about the need to retain close and unhindered Soviet cooperation in the war, but the unexpected intertwining of the Indian, Baltic and Finnish questions was the actual primary reason for Churchill’s change of heart. It was precisely because of his dedication to India as an integral part of the British Empire that Churchill suddenly averred that a conscientious interpretation of the Atlantic Charter was not, after all, absolutely necessary in the then-critical phase of the war.44 His new interpretation was further assisted by the fact that it coincided with Sir Stafford Cripps’ emergence as a new popular challenger to his power—a challenger, moreover, who had just started his own campaign for Indian independence. Churchill saw that he was buffeted on

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all sides, at home and abroad, and that Finland and the Baltic States had to be sacrificed for the sake of the British Empire. Churchill did not get Roosevelt’s clear support for this new position, and nor did he advise the Soviets of it in any explicit terms. It was clear, nevertheless, that he had given his implicit acceptance to Soviet annexations. When the Soviet Foreign Minister, V.Molotov, arrived in Britain in May 1942 to sign the formal treaty of alliance, of which the annexations were supposed to be a part, Molotov continued to threaten a separate peace but had to be content in the end with an official proclamation which promised further to deepen Anglo-Soviet relations but did not give formal approval for the annexations. Molotov did correctly assume, however, that Britain had now accepted the Soviet territorial demands.45 Seen against this background, it is not surprising that in the following months Churchill ended up making several further, Finland-related concessions to the Soviets. When in early 1942 the Soviets claimed that Finnish troops had begun to use chemical weapons against them, weapons that the Germans had allegedly supplied, Churchill appears in principle to have been ready to undertake even significant reprisals. Stalin demanded that Great Britain respond to this illegal use of chemical weapons (which had not actually taken place) with like methods, and that it provide the Soviets with battlefield gases so that they, too, could make reprisals. Churchill decided to send the Soviets a 1000-tonne shipment of mustard gas and another thousand tonnes of chlorine. He assured Stalin that Great Britain would use its own chemical weapons against Germany and Finland whenever an opportunity arose.46 It never did. The only significant opportunity for offensive operations directed against Finland remained the so-called Operation Jupiter. This was a modification of the old plans for northern Norway, in which Churchill seemed to have a considerable interest after the summer of 1942. The operation was intended to occupy northern Norwegian (and possibly Finnish) airfields, which would then have been used to supply the Soviets with war materials. It was also hoped that the operation would so hinder German war-making that the Nazis would have to transfer significant numbers of troops from other fronts and thus relieve the pressure on the Allies. It was therefore part of peripheral strategy. Had the operation been launched, it would have included British offensives on Finnish soil, given that an eventual occupation of the Arctic seaport of Petsamo was also a goal. The British general staff, however, did not regard the plan as workable and it was never implemented, but throughout 1942 and all the way to the summer of 1943 Churchill himself was interested in it and tried to push it through.47 This was the sole operative plan which would have taken Britain into actual combat against the Finnish army. It must, however, be stressed that not even Operation Jupiter was a plan directed against Finland. Churchill simply had no such plans. He kept assuring the Soviet leaders that he was ready to fight the Finns, but actually he was not

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ready to do so: all such talk belonged to periods when Churchill felt the need to assuage Soviet fears, and it never led to any action. Indeed, Great Britain undertook no other offensive action against Finland in the course of the War of 1941–1944 except for a single bombing operation in the Petsamo region in the summer of 1941. As the Finnish Minister of Education of the time stated, this act of war had the sole result that fishing for salmon in the Petsamo area rivers became impossible for some years, for Finnish and British anglers alike. Churchill never had much interest in fishing.48 The fact remains that an apparent willingness to undertake offensive operations in Finland was highlighted whenever Churchill needed to appease the Soviets, but this willingness was always followed by a long series of counterarguments and proposals. More suggestive of Churchill’s own desires was the fact that, even amidst preparations for Operation Jupiter, Churchill tried to have Stalin accept a new American initiative for a negotiated peace with Finland. This appeal came at a time when Churchill was particularly concerned about German advances and when he had already decided to intensify the supply of war materiel to the Soviets. To remove Finland from the war seemed to Churchill a very sustainable proposition at that exact moment. When he made his appeal, Churchill also made a point of stressing how he still regarded Finland as a special case and hoped that it would be treated differently from the rest of Germany’s co-belligerents. He specified that the Finnish government was not pro-German in sympathies, and that its people were definitely anti-Nazi. It would be of great benefit to the Soviet Union itself, said Churchill, if the Finnish army stopped helping the German assault on Russia and if Soviet troops could thereby be concentrated solely against Germany. It would be highly damaging, too, to the war morale of the Axis powers, if Finland could be persuaded to leave the war.49 Another example of the Churchillian refusal to appease the Soviets with concessions over Finland appeared in the draft for a postwar European order which Churchill began to outline at about the time of his declared willingness to undertake offensive action against Finland. In October 1942, Churchill produced a plan for Foreign Secretary Eden for a postwar Europe of federations, one constituent part of which would have been formed by a new FinnishScandinavian federation. In an early 1943 address he developed the plan further. The Soviets were not enamoured with the plan, given that it was manifestly designed to forge a new continental order which, through its several foci of power, could have offset and contained the Soviets both in the north in particular and throughout Europe. Finnish leaders were aware of this design, which must also be seen as an incentive for the Finns to leave the war in the surety that anticommunist protection would be forthcoming in the future if they only joined the right side in time. Churchill continued to advocate this kind of federated Europe well into 1943, and it became one of the cornerstones of his postwar geopolitical programme.50

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The whole spectre of a Finnish-Scandinavian federation must be seen as a faint indication of the policies that Churchill himself would have preferred to follow had he not had to take into consideration the wishes of his communist ally. The federation idea was a natural elaboration of Churchill’s earlier support for various Border States and cordon sanitaire policies, and it was rather overtly directed against the Soviets. The timing was partly explained by the resurgence of Churchill’s anticommunist fears, which took place in the summer of 1942—not least because of the treatment to which he was subjected on his trip to Moscow. On this trip, during which he met Stalin for the first time, Churchill suffered such a torrent of personal insults and libels that he left the Soviet Union with very conflicting feelings.51 Soon afterwards he began to tell his advisers how a ‘measureless disaster’ would overtake Europe if the Red Army reached Central Europe before the Anglo-American landing in the West. ‘Russian barbarism’ would, Churchill feared, in that circumstance have destroyed all remnants of Western culture and civilisation everywhere in Europe, and subjected all the continent’s ancient states and peoples to its reign of terror.52 The negotiating strategy with which Churchill entered the crucial Allied conferences of 1943 and 1944—the Moscow, Teheran and Cairo Conferences—was therefore predicated even more than before on the search for Anglo-American cooperation in containing the Soviets. On the other hand, Churchill hoped to advance his concept of a Europe of federations as a pre-emptive strike against the expected postwar aggressiveness of a strengthened Soviet Union. On both levels, Churchill’s strategy impacted on Finland as well. Churchill’s intention was to use the conferences to set binding and mutually agreed terms for the dilution of what had already been accepted as the core Allied demand—the unconditional surrender of all enemy belligerents. He wanted to make sure that none of the Allies—that is, the Soviet Union—could interpret the demand for unconditional surrender in ways that forced a given belligerent—like Finland—to make concessions unacceptable to the other Allies. The Soviets had already complained about the way in which they felt they had been sidelined in decisions over the Italian surrender, and Churchill did not want to take the risk that they would retaliate by sidelining the Western Allies elsewhere. To make sure that that did not happen, Churchill proposed the creation of a special trilateral commission that would decide beforehand on the exact terms to be offered to any given enemy country. At the same time, every Ally would agree to forego special spheres of influence and to support Churchill’s plan for a Europe of federations. This was the model that Foreign Secretary Eden offered to the other Allies from late 1943, putting his emphasis on the Wilsonian concept of self-determination—just as Churchill had done in 1941, and with as few results. The foreign minister’s Moscow meeting, which was supposed to have decided on the matter, actually reached no clear conclusion. In principle the foreign ministers agreed that mutual consultations would precede the armistice and

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peace terms offered to any given enemy country which sued for peace. However, a decision on the contents of such armistices was referred to yet another commission. What was not decided, in particular, was whether the commander of the army that had born the brunt of fighting on a given front—such as the Soviet Red Army on the Finnish front—could in the period between an armistice and a final peace treaty make independent decisions on military and civil matters.53 The Soviet Union decided to proceed on the basis that this division of labour and power was exactly what had been agreed to, and Great Britain acceded in practice, at least in part. However, no binding undertaking had in fact been made that would have forced Churchill to accept Soviet dictums on, for example, when peace was to be made with Finland. On the contrary, the whole idea behind Churchill’s and Eden’s trilateral commission was to make sure that no unilateral decisions could be made and that the inter-Allied power relations would always prevent the Soviets from acquiring dominance anywhere. Yet this principle too failed to be implemented in practice. It mirrored Churchill’s thinking, but could not become the official, settled policy of Great Britain. When he left for the Teheran Conference in November 1943, Churchill still affected optimism, but at the conference itself he was overshadowed by the bilateral Roosevelt-Stalin relationship and failed in his attempt to limit the Soviets’ unilateral activities further. Churchill’s negotiating position was not assisted by the fact that he was unwell throughout the conference, and fell seriously ill immediately afterwards. Thus both Churchill and Roosevelt ended up accepting, almost in toto, the armistice terms that the Soviets proposed to offer to Finland if Finland sued for peace. Churchill himself emphasised how vital it was to transfer to the Soviets the islands on the Gulf of Finland on which they had in 1939 wanted to set up their naval bases. He also stressed that Stalin had a reasonable right to decide on other details, not least because the Finns had caused notable harm to his, but not others’, armed forces. What was significant, however, was that once he heard what peace terms Stalin envisaged for Finland, Churchill noted that he might accept them or might not.54 After the Teheran Conference there remained no option for Churchill but to accept the Soviet terms. All those obstacles that thus far had prevented Churchill from implementing the policies he desired descended upon him in late 1943 and early 1944, and forced Churchill to adopt the policies vis-à-vis Finland that were eventually implemented. It became quite clear to Churchill that he would not receive the American support that any real containment of the Soviets would require. At this time, President Roosevelt enhanced his campaign for Indian independence and thus showed that he did not necessarily intend to respect the territorial integrity of the British Empire. He continued to undermine Churchill’s peripheral strategy, appeased the Soviets and tried further to deepen and elaborate the Soviet-American relationship. In an incredible blunder, Roosevelt also let both Churchill and Stalin know that he would not keep

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American troops in Europe after the war. This last statement was, of course, the final nail in the coffin of Churchill’s anticommunist plans. That was not all. As major victories were not forthcoming, Churchill was again subjected to increasing domestic criticism, both from the old pro-Soviet group and from among the Conservatives, some of whom began to claim that Churchill was making too many concessions to socialists at home—concessions that might lead Britain towards socialism.55 Whilst this criticism assailed Churchill from two different directions, the Germans unleashed major new attacks on the Soviet Union. The Western Allies had not yet managed to open a second European front, and even materiel shipments to the Soviets had had to be suspended. All these factors contributed to Churchill’s failure to push through his essentially anticommunist plans—plans that would have helped Finland too. Another factor was Churchill’s somewhat changed emotional impression of Finland. As he told Stalin in Teheran, he had formerly been a staunch supporter of Finland and an opponent of the Soviet Union, but Finland’s ‘disgraceful’ alliance with the Nazis had changed his views. He was therefore quite willing to accede to Soviet territorial designs on Finland, provided that the Finns would not be incorporated into Russia ‘against their will’. He had personally versed himself in the geography of the Hanko region in particular (a southern Finnish port which the Soviets wanted to, and did, take over), and had concluded that a Soviet annexation of this port would not jeopardise his goal of a ‘an independent Finland’ but would satisfy the moral need to punish Finland for its ‘execrable behaviour’. On other matters relating to Finland, Churchill wanted to ‘plead for leniency’ on Stalin’s part.56 Churchill was therefore quite willing to accept the original Soviet terms for a Finnish armistice—terms that were significantly more punitive than the ones eventually imposed. These original terms were seen in Finland as utterly impossible and a death-blow to Finnish independence, and had therefore been turned down in the secret, Swedish-mediated peace negotiations in which the Finns had been engaged from March 1944. An essential aspect of the terms had been the stipulation that Soviet troops would arrive in Finland if Finns could not on their own disarm the German troops on their soil. Churchill accepted that provision, thanked Stalin for his leniency towards Finland, and painted a picture of a somewhat powerless and insignificant country, a mere sub-plot to the World War, which could not be judged too harshly if in its state of weakness it failed to drive the Germans off its soil. Not least because of these rather generous terms offered to Finland, Churchill concluded by April 1944 that the Soviet leadership’s ‘bark may be worse than its bite’. At times he still dared to indulge in the hope that the Soviets wanted to maintain close relations with the Western Allies and that it would therefore treat Finland, Romania and Bulgaria—the other two German co-belligerents were also on the road to separate peace—in lenient ways that did not offend the West. The Soviets’

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public rhetoric might be of one kind, but when it came to practical measures Churchill still hoped that ‘they will in fact watch their step carefully’.57 On the other hand, Churchill thought that no war reparations should be imposed on Finland. On this matter he tried to pressurise the Soviet leaders, both personally at Teheran and later diplomatically through the Foreign Office. Ever since the First World War Churchill had opposed war reparations on principle, since he thought that they always caused more problems than the benefits accrued to the recipient were worth. Besides, compared to Germany, the Finns were ‘only poor little musk rats and ermine, and they had nothing to give’. If the Soviet Union intended to force Finland into making reparations, and to occupy the country until the payments had been made, say for eight years—as Stalin proposed at one point—Churchill would not support the policy. He also insisted that the reparation question be decided by the general peace conference after the war. If an undertaking to this end was given, Churchill thought that the Finns would be more likely to make peace soon.58 It was no trivial thing to interfere with Soviet desires and plans in this way. The interference can only be explained through anticommunism. Despite the fact that at Teheran the Allies had apparently reached agreement on the modalities of ending the war and on treatment of the losers, there rose in Churchill, as his physician noted, a ‘presentiment of evil’. By April he could be heard complaining to Anthony Eden that he could not feel ‘the slightest trust or confidence…in these Communist leaders’. They believed only in ‘force’ and tried always to ‘blackmail’. In May of the same year Churchill was even ready to recall the British Ambassador from Moscow and to undertake never again to have a conversation with Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, a man he detested. He braced himself for the coming ‘showdown’ between the British and the Soviets in Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece.59 Finland must be placed in this context. It was when Churchill voiced these new fears about Soviet intentions that he intervened for Finland as well. He was worried about the development of the Soviets’ Finland policy because that development was one sign and symptom of what he thought was a broader push for continental domination. He was more worried, of course, about developments in areas closer to key British interests. It was the interrelation between these latter interests and the general anticommunist concern that, more than anything else, continued to shape the extent of Churchill’s involvement in Finnish affairs in the closing months of 1943 and during 1944. Yet Churchill dared not go out on a limb for Finland. Indeed, he did not want to do so. His sympathies towards Finland had been dealt several heavy blows after his intervention on Finland’s behalf at Teheran, not least because the Finns proved persistently unwilling to enter the separate peace for which he and the Americans had been working. Tentative Finnish-Soviet peace talks, which had been underway since March 1944, had been broken off, and the Finns had refused to accept the terms offered—terms that had been acceptable to

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Churchill. Then, on 22 June 1944, the Finnish President signed an overt military and political agreement with Nazi Germany, the so-called Ryti-Ribbentrop Agreement, which officially bound Finland not to make a separate peace without prior German approval. This agreement, which led to a rift in FinnishAmerican diplomatic relations, showed that Finnish leaders had after all chosen to link their fate to that of Germany. Even though they no longer believed that Germany could win the overall war, they still persisted in hoping that she could destroy or so weaken the Soviet Union that Finnish security could be guaranteed. Another reason for the agreement was the very precarious situation on the Russo-Finnish border and the imminent threat of an outright Soviet victory over Finland, which could only be offset through greatly increased German military assistance to the Finnish army. Therefore President Ryti made the fateful decision officially to link Finland, hitherto the ‘co-belligerent’, to the Nazi war effort. None of this was likely to endear Finland to Churchill, who did not know that Ryti had no intention of persisting with the agreement after the immediate Soviet threat had been countered.60 Consequently, in the spring of 1944 Churchill strongly disapproved of the demand for a parliamentary debate on the future of Finland which was brought to him by 42 MPs. He refused to give a reply to the MPs’ query as to whether he would insist that Finnish independence be secured and fair peace terms imposed on it. Likewise, a few days after the Ryti-Ribbentrop agreement he reacted very ungenerously to an appeal from Sir Patrick Donner, pleading for help for Finland. Donner was no longer a friend of Churchill’s, since in the 1930s he had sided with the appeasers and had thus become, in Churchill’s eyes, a traitor to whom Churchill had not spoken ever since. However, Donner nevertheless wanted to appeal to Churchill on the behalf of old anticommunist allies and in the name of Western civilisation and small nations. He stressed that Finland was, after all, ‘more sinned against than sinning’, and that to ‘save’ the country depended entirely on Churchill’s ‘great influence’ in Moscow. In his short reply Churchill assured Donner that he understood the views thus conveyed to him, but that Finland had ‘wrongfully attacked’ the Soviet Union and that it was up to the Soviets to decide how to treat her. The Soviets had let it be known that they were willing to let Finland retain independence. It was best for Finland to make peace as soon as possible.61 Churchill was therefore ready to leave the exact modalities of Finnish surrender largely up to the Soviets. In addition to those general framework conditions which he had outlined to Stalin at Teheran, he did not intend to take any active measures to assure a settlement that suited Finnish wishes. Thus it was that Finland removed itself from the war soon after Field Marshal Mannerheim had, on 4 September 1944, ordered his troops to cease fighting, without Churchill taking much notice of it. At this very time, Churchill was at a meeting with American leaders in Canada, and he stayed there for two weeks—just as the final armistice terms were framed for Finland. Working on

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the basis of the Prime Minister’s well-known general instructions and under the guidance of the pro-Soviet Anthony Eden, the Foreign Office did not even request details of the pro posed final armistice terms. No major changes were made to these terms once the British had seen them retrospectively, or in the consultations between the Soviet leaders and the British Ambassador, which coincided with the presence in Moscow of the Finnish peace delegation.62 These matters were of such a peripheral and detailed order that even if Churchill had been in London when the final decisions were made, he would not have intervened. From Churchill’s perspective, it was best for Finland to accept whatever was on offer and for Britain to pay as little attention as possible. The fate of Finland did not impact on the final outcome of the World War; its independence was in any case assured, and for the rest, it was good to appease the Soviets wherever possible. Thus the hostilities between Great Britain and Finland ended in much the same way as they had been conducted: in close relation to the dynamics of Anglo-Soviet relations. Churchill and a vanquished Finland Officially, Finland and Britain were not at peace until the Paris Peace Treaty had been signed in mid-1946. In the armistice period that fell between the Finnish surrender and this final peace treaty, Finland was not occupied (it was the only country allied with Germany that was in this situation) but rather ruled by its own leaders under the guidance of an Allied Control Commission. British and Soviet representatives made up this commission, and the primary power in it belonged to the Soviets. Therefore Finland remained under Soviet influence and the constant threat of onerous Soviet demands not sanctioned by any Allied agreements. Yet Finland was not sucked into the vortex of the growing Anglo-Soviet tensions and conflicts which increasingly bedevilled Allied relations while the war still continued in other parts of Europe. In these years, Finland proved one of the few areas where Churchill did not need to assert anything but diplomatic pressure to keep the Soviets in check. To Churchill, vanquished Finland was a special case. He gave very little attention to it because he perceived much more potent threats in those other areas of Europe where fighting still continued, and where the eventual power relations between the West and the Soviets were still up for grabs. The Soviet Red Army advanced swiftly towards these areas in Central and Southern Europe just at the time when the Finnish Control Commission was beginning its activities, and Churchill’s attention was necessarily riveted there rather than in Finland. The Soviet Red Army’s advance towards areas crucial to the security of the British Empire had a cumulative effect on Churchill, intertwining with the underlying concerns about Soviet intentions on which Churchill had made intermittent and unconnected remarks ever since 1942. He concluded eventually

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that the Soviets were not, after all, interested simply in securing their own immediate neighbourhood or in continuing the wartime cooperation, but rather in expanding their own military power and the sway of their ideological and political system throughout Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and maybe even Denmark. Churchill’s premonitions were confirmed once the Red Army actually began to move towards each of these named countries. It became increasingly clear that mere diplomatic appeasement would not suffice to stop the Soviet advance. Churchill had to search for some military counterweight and incentive. The crossroads in Churchill’s thinking was reached in August 1944, when Soviet troops suddenly stopped their advance on the eastern bank of the Polish river Vistula and allowed the Germans brutally to eliminate the local Polish resistance movement. As he witnessed this taking place, with tacit Soviet collaboration, Churchill did not doubt but that the Soviet decision to stop at the Vistula was a deliberate and considered move, which exposed the Soviet leaders’ general immorality and unbounded unscrupulousness in their pursuit of more power. Despite several demands by Churchill, the Soviets refused to assist the Poles being massacred by Nazi forces or to allow American arms shipments to these Poles. Even President Roosevelt repeatedly refused to help, despite Churchill’s pleadings.63 When the tragedy was unfolding on the river Vistula, Churchill’s physician noted in his diary how Churchill no longer talked about Hitler but only about the communists: ‘He dreams of the Red Army spreading like a cancer from one country to another. It has become an obsession and he thinks of little else’.64 In 1944 Churchill was, in fact, the anticommunist he had always been. His activities were bounded by the time-tested formula where British national and imperial interests were threatened by an aggressive and expansionary Soviet Russia, and where all other countries were required to join in a grand alliance to stop the communist advance. As long as the World War still continued in places other than Finland and Romania, Churchill thought that this formula was best served if Western military forces were concentrated and directed in such areas where they could prevent the Red Army from entering crucially important regions. In Churchill’s still-Mackinderian framework, these crucial regions included those that were at the interface of the land and naval powers, regions from which both naval movements and British imperial communications could be controlled. Churchill therefore concentrated on Greece and Turkey, and secondarily on the axis from Denmark through Berlin to Vienna. A distant third came that group of countries of which Finland was one—countries already out of the war, unoccupied, but their fate already practically sealed by the Soviets, and geostrategically less important for the British Empire. The challenge, as Churchill saw it, was to face the Soviets in regions which were still up for grabs. From late 1943 onwards, Churchill’s attention was thus riveted almost completely on regions other than Finland.

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Churchill’s anticommunist strategy was also slightly different in each of the threatened regions. In Southern and Eastern Europe, he tried to use both the military and the diplomatic tools at his disposal. In the north, he used only the diplomatic tools. In both regions Churchill tried to persuade the Soviets into moderation both through inter-Allied negotiations and alternative bilateral arrangements. The time for appeasement was, however, at an end everywhere. As early as August 1944, British military planners had been directed to make preparations for the so-called Operation Manna. This operation would have flooded Greece with as many British troops as possible in as short a time as possible, thereby preventing the Soviets from taking that country over. There were active local communist militias in the country by this time, and Churchill suspected that the Soviets were carefully encouraging these militias’ activities so as to prompt a full-scale civil war. When the situation escalated just before Christmas 1944, Churchill ordered an immediate, explicitly anticommunist intervention, and personally flew to Athens to direct the operation. At the same time he tried to impress on those British troops which were advancing on German soil how crucially important it was to capture Berlin, and he appealed both to President Roosevelt and to the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Eisenhower, to give orders to this end as soon as possible. Yet Churchill did not want to destroy or too much weaken what was left of Germany, for he wanted it to remain another counterweight to the Soviets. In addition, Churchill still believed in the necessity of a joint operation on the Italian front for an advance towards the Istrian peninsula—an operation he had proposed immediately after the fall of Finland as a key means of preventing Soviet control in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria. Finally, Churchill viewed Soviet activities in the Baltic Sea with grave concern, and he wanted some measures in place to prevent them from occupying Denmark.65 By this time Churchill had, however, concluded that the Americans could not be relied upon to lend anticommunist assistance, at least not as long as President Roosevelt continued to direct US policies. The way in which Roosevelt had, at Teheran in late 1943 and at Yalta in February 1944, bypassed Churchill and conducted his private negotiations with Stalin had been a major blow to Churchill’s persistent hopes for a coordinated Anglo-American front against the Soviets. Immediately after the Teheran conference Churchill told his physician how he was ‘appalled at his own impotence’ and at the American decision to abandon the democracies and to align itself with the Soviets. The events at Yalta further confirmed Churchill’s impression of American inability to recognise the importance of joint action by the Western democracies, and of such joint action as the only means of containing the Soviets. Roosevelt’s attitude to the tragedy at Vistula was a further shock, as was the refusal of the American military leaders to proceed forthwith to Berlin and Vienna. In Greece, Churchill thought that the Americans had assumed a posture that directly undermined British anticommunist efforts.66

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Churchill therefore had no option but to act alone. He had to maintain his direct communication with the Soviets if he was to have any chance of challenging Soviet-American dictums and if he was to secure from Soviet expansion, at a minimum, the core British interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Churchill’s willingness to enter into bilateral understandings with Stalin underlined, of course, how weak Britain had become. It testified to Churchill’s continued faith in the reliability of the Soviets, provided that they were appealed to on the basis of old-fashioned realpolitik and offered concrete benefits that they would otherwise have to fight for. The result was, of course, the famous ‘naughty document’, the percentage deal agreed to in Moscow in October 1944, in which Great Britain and the Soviet Union were allocated shares of influence in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece.67 This arrangement was meant, above all, to secure democracy in areas where Britain had more resources available than elsewhere and where her primary strategic interests were at stake. Secondarily, Churchill hoped to use the understanding to convince Stalin of the continued usefulness of friendship—that is, he tried to contain the Soviets by the means of diplomacy. Churchill did not start on the road of a bilateral understanding unaware of Soviet intentions, nor under the false surety that the deal would wean the Soviets away from their expansionist plans. Admittedly, at this time he did begin to express a new confidence in the continued friendly and co-operative relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union. He talked of Stalin’s personal trustworthiness and geniality. However, at the same time Churchill gave orders to purge the British intelligence services of all communist sympathisers. He began to draft a long-term plan for a ‘United States of Europe’, which would possess its own armed forces but would not allow the Soviets to join. This United States of Europe was instead to disarm the Soviets and encourage in every possible way the emergence of such a web of multilateral trade and other contacts that could gradually dissolve communism.68 The whole notion—much like Churchill’s earlier, 1942 draft of a Europe of federations—highlighted Churchill’s continued search for new allies both alternative and supplementary to the weakening Anglo-American alliance. He tried, in other words, to secure both his front and his flank; to shape Soviet policies through a bilateral understanding and to build an alternative future alliance in case his fears became reality later on and the Soviets refused to be contained otherwise. Finland was not mentioned in the ‘naughty document’, since decisions about its future had already been made. The Control Commission’s make-up and competency satisfied Churchill’s basic demand for a British voice in decision-making on Finland’s future, and Churchill did not therefore need to take a personal interest in Finland once this commission had been created. The commission had established itself in Helsinki in October 1944—at the very time, in other words, when the tragedy at the Vistula was unfolding, and only a few days before Churchill’s trip to Moscow that yielded the ‘naughty document’. The

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functions and composition of the Finnish Control Commission reflected Churchill’s preferred methods of operation in areas where a military decision had already been reached and where the only task that remained was to moderate and contain the Soviets’ actions. It had been decided during the war that these control commissions would include representatives of all those Allies who had officially been engaged in hostilities against the country to be controlled. Of these Allies, the main responsibility for control was given to that country which had borne the brunt of the war effort against a particular enemy. Originally Churchill had tried to insist that every country conquered by the Soviet Union would get a trilateral control commission—that is, a commission where the British and the Americans would be present and where they could watch and control the Soviets’ actions as well.69 Churchill had, however, to abandon this clearly anticommunist demand. This did not assuage his concerns at all. Yet in Finland—and, according to Churchill, only in Finland—the Soviets had indeed proved willing to let Western observers in immediately, in a way that promised good things for that country at least. This made Finland a special case, and Churchill feared less for its future than for the future of those other countries in which control commissions were created at about the same time—that is, Romania and Bulgaria. Churchill underlined the difference explicitly. However, the perceived difference also meant that, after the Finnish Control Commission had been created, Churchill did not regard it necessary personally to involve himself on Finland’s behalf to any significant degree. Practical decisions about the British role in the Finnish Control Commission were made at a level far removed from the Prime Minister, although within guidelines set by Churchill. Its British members voluntarily relinquished the Control Commission’s direction to Soviet representatives at an early stage, and British members were instructed to treat the Soviet members with ‘candour and kindness’. According to Foreign Secretary Eden’s further instructions, British members of the Commission were not to forge direct contacts with Finnish politicians or military leaders, and they were to remember that it was Finland’s own actions that gradually had to earn it a place among fully sovereign nations. On the other hand, the British government did send a separately tasked political representative to Finland, and both this representative and the Control Commission members were asked to provide reports of all possible Soviet infractions on Finnish independence.70 As has often been noted, the only major point of contention between the Control Commission’s British and Soviet members was an early 1945 disagreement over the extent of Finnish war reparations. The British opposed Soviet demands for very high reparations, and when they did this they were acting on the basis of Churchill’s earlier personal insistence, and without the need to involve the Prime Minister himself. The British did not, however, want to make the reparations issue into an obstacle to good Anglo-Soviet relations,

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and they did not, therefore, directly insist that the Soviets abandon their demand for extensive reparation payments. The same desire not to cause needless complications in Anglo-Soviet relations also impacted on the question of war crimes trials of Finnish leaders. In principle the British did not think that any Finns had committed war crimes, but in practice the British members of the Control Commission were told simply to remain aloof from the trials on which the Soviets insisted and which in the end did take place. Churchill himself did not intervene in this matter, even though he disapproved of war crimes trials in Germany and elsewhere. He was afraid that such trials would bleed the vanquished nations of all staunch anticommunists, and that was a danger he did not want to encourage. It would have been better, according to Churchill, to have imprisoned only the remaining German senior leaders and otherwise to allow local army groups’ commanders to execute those they regarded as war criminals, but only the Germans.71 In the end, however, Churchill thought it best to conform to Soviet desires in this matter and to allow war crimes trials to proceed in Finland as well. These early decisions of the Finnish Control Commission exposed but a faint hint of that growing anticommunist concern with which Churchill was obsessed. Most of the decisions regarding Finland were made at the Foreign Office, which was led by Sir Anthony Eden, a man long known for his relatively pro-Soviet bent. Eden stressed that even if Britain hoped that Finland would be left with at least a modicum of independence in trade and cultural affairs, and a parliamentary democracy, it was still a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would be dominant in the country and that, since no key British interest was involved in Finland, Britain could neither prevent that dominance nor try to.72 This attitude did not mean that even the Foreign Office had entirely lost interest in Finland, for it hadn’t—as was shown, for example, in a late 1944 missive to the Finnish government imploring that it would not allow a too left-wing government to succeed it.73 However, Eden’s views and influence meant that Great Britain did not in any concrete or major way involve itself in anything that might happen in Finland. Churchill himself rebelled at this kind of attitude. Privately he characterised the Foreign Office as ‘a lot of scuttling rabbits’, which had no courage to stand behind clear principles because it had no clear principles.74 At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill tried to tempt the Soviets into such final peace treaties with Finland and other relevant Border States that would have ejected the Soviets from those countries forthwith. In the summer of 1945 he proposed again that the control commissions’ work be wound down speedily—in other words, straight away. This would have relieved some of the Soviet pressure in countries where the Soviets had lodged themselves through the control commissions, and would have helped in restoring full independence to the countries in question. The arrangement would also, so Churchill hoped, assist in the necessary concentration of anticommunist forces in areas of more

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pressing need—the ultimate prompting of his stance which Churchill did not voice to the Soviets, but which was clearly central. His proposal not being acceptable, at the next inter-Allied meeting Churchill had to counter Stalin’s alternative suggestion for the permanent institutionalisation of Soviet influence in all the control commission countries. At Potsdam, Stalin demanded that the new governments of the ‘three satellite countries’, as he called Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, be recognised by all the Allies. Churchill and the new American President, Harry S. Truman, were ready to recognise only Finland, because they felt that the other two countries had been overrun by the Red Army and the control commissions and had lost that true independence and democratic order which had been retained in Finland.75 Viewed from Churchill’s perspective, Finland was now in a class of its own among all those who had lost the war to the Soviet Union. It therefore needed less direct protection against domestic and foreign communists than did others. Altogether, the role that Finland played in the broader anticommunist constellation had definitely become a minor one by 1945. Therefore, too, Churchill’s attention to the country was minimal. Finland mattered little for the simple reason that in other regions more important for Britain, the Soviets were close to acquiring a fuller dominance than it had already achieved in Finland. The danger was no longer that of Soviet control in areas adjacent to it, but the upsetting of the whole balance of power on the European continent. A single small state like Finland mattered little when these were the stakes. Whatever happened to Finland, the European balance of power would not be affected on its account. Therefore it was incumbent on Britain to concentrate its anticommunist activities elsewhere. On the other hand, Churchill felt that Finnish independence was already more or less assured. He had not been successful in his effort to abolish the Control Commission at an early stage, but neither had the Soviets used the Commission to undermine (all) Finnish sovereignty or to impose a communist system upon it. For this reason too, little attention needed to be paid to Finland. The third reason that made Finland more or less irrelevant for Churchill was the fact that Britain simply did not have the resources to engage in anticommunist activity everywhere—not on its own, without American help. Almost all the available British resources, and most of Churchill’s time and energy, were tied up in anticommunist work in the critical region of Southern Europe and in a broader, emerging effort at the construction of a future comprehensive anticommunist alliance structure. Churchill simply did not pay attention to Finland anymore. Several factors outside Churchill’s control therefore shaped the policies with which he decided to deal with Finland in the armistice period. In biographical terms, Churchill’s wishes, fears and inclinations must be separated from the political decisions that he had to make due to his limited material and persuasive power. Churchill must also be distinguished from the decisions of the British government as a whole. As the Prime Minister, Churchill was, of course,

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ultimately and officially responsible for the decisions made, but this does not mean that the decisions made were what he desired or thought the best. This observation holds true not just for the peace settlement and the Control Commission, but for the whole period of the War of 1941–1944. Especially towards the end of the period, Finland was no longer in any sense an important country to Churchill. Even if it had been important, Churchill probably would have been able to do little about it, given the very limited resources and the lack of full American support with which he had to grapple. The policies that Churchill did in fact implement vis-à-vis Finland testified to Churchill’s and Britain’s weakness, and must not be used as the bases for conclusions regarding Churchill’s deepest hopes or objectives. Both during and immediately following the Finnish-Soviet War of 1941–1944, what appeared to be a policy of principled non-involvement in Soviet machinations in Finland was actually a choice not at all but was dictated by necessity. Had he had his way, Churchill would have been much more assertive in his anticommunist defence of Finland. However, Churchill could not possibly have had his way, and he knew it; therefore he concentrated his efforts in other areas even more threatened by a resurgent expansionist Soviet Russia. It cannot justly be claimed, however (as some have done) that Churchill himself consistently followed the ‘policy of strict non-interference’76 which the Foreign Office allegedly implemented in Anglo-Soviet-Finnish relations during the War of 1941–1944. A policy of non-interference aptly describes the line taken by the Foreign Office and thus the official British line—a line that flowed from Sir Anthony Eden’s relatively pro-Soviet and almost always conciliatory preferences. However, the designation does not describe Churchill’s personal preferences, and nor is it a fair characterisation of Churchill’s own activities. Whenever Churchill did involve himself in matters relating to Finland, which was not all that often, he acted in a restrained and subdued manner, but there cannot be any doubt that he hoped to interfere in Soviet actions, or that he did so whenever he could. Even though Churchill thought that the primary requirement in 1941–1944 was to keep the Soviets content, and even though he was ready, as in 1919, to sacrifice small states to larger purposes, those Finns were not correct who assumed that he gave in to the Soviets as a matter of course whenever Finnish matters came up for discussion.77 Churchill did not always leave Finnish matters for the Soviets to decide as they wished, but rather intervened, throughout the war, whenever he thought it requisite. These interventions were part of his eternally suspicious attitude towards Soviet activities and expected future plans, but must be seen in the circumscribing context where the primary need was to retain an eastern front and to keep the Soviets as friendly as possible for as long as possible. Since immediate British interests were not involved in the region of Finland, and Churchill rarely had the means to fight for less immediate interests, he intervened in the Soviets’ Finland policies with

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caution. As he stressed to Stalin at Teheran, other matters were in any case more important than the fate of Finland.78 For Foreign Secretary Eden, it was not difficult to set priorities between Finland and the Soviet Union. Eden always solved a conflict between the two in the Soviet interest, and he did not even need to grapple with the issue. This attitude and ease is evident in Foreign Office documents and in the daily diplomatic interchange which Eden directed. However, for Churchill the question of Finland was one of how to square the demands of anticommunism and geopolitics, how to satisfy both demands, and how to make sense of their often complex interrelationships. The question had its principled, theoretical side, but it also had its practical side, which was shaped by factors beyond Churchill’s control—most particularly by President Roosevelt’s attitude. Within his limited area of manoeuvre, Churchill did, however, try—whenever opportunities arose and whenever momen tary constellations were propitious—to reach outcomes in matters related to Finland from which the Soviets could derive as little benefit as possible. This is not apparent, for the most part, in official documents, but it is evident in Churchill’s personal statements. Those statements can be properly understood only if they are viewed against the background of Churchill’s own ideological and biographical constants—anticommunism and geopolitics. Churchill’s activities during the War of 1941–1944 and its peace settlement failed to lead to outcomes satisfactory either to himself or to Finland, and Churchill frequently did not even expect to reach such results, given the unfortunate balance of power within the Allied coalition. However, Churchill regarded important goals as being both the assuring of Soviet friendliness and the securing of independence for countries like Finland. Maintaining Soviet friendship was not an end in itself; nor was the sacrificing of countries like Finland to that friendship a conscious or principled policy. Churchill consistently tried to retain Soviet friendship without sacrificing countries like Finland, but he did not act in an ideal world but as a weakened leader of a weakened country fighting a war on several continents, without the support that he desired and needed from the United States. Thus it was inevitable that Churchill could not do much to help countries such as Finland.

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6 CHURCHILL, FINLAND AND THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945–1955

Just as the Soviet Union began to cement its hold over Central and South-eastern Europe, Churchill lost political power. He lost the 1945 parliamentary elections and became the leader of the opposition, devoid of a direct role in the shaping of British-Soviet policies. On the other hand, this ejection from political power afforded him the opportunity to campaign more directly and actively for a new cooperative international front to contain or crush Soviet communism. This campaign was to characterise much of Churchill’s political activities in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and indeed took up most of his time and attention. Churchill’s activities now touched upon Finland only indirectly. Especially in the immediate postwar period, when postwar Finnish leaders fashioned their new, ‘neutralist’ foreign policies and when Churchill was a mere leader of the opposition, his views had very little practical impact on Anglo-Finnish relations, on Finnish policies, or, initially, on the immediate practice of international anticommunism. In his public statements of this period Churchill very rarely mentioned Finland and, according to available accounts of his public conversation, the country simply did not appear to him important enough to spend much time thinking about it. It is, however, possible, largely through analogy and induction, to isolate from Churchill’s postwar statements some general conclusions on the policies and position of Finland after 1945. It is certain that a definite asymmetry was created by the palpable weakening of anticommunism as an overt Finnish state policy just at the moment when Churchill stressed the need for strengthening anticommunism across the entire Western world. Churchill cannot have welcomed this development even if Finland was no longer at the very centre of the moment’s most pressing anticommunist activities. Despite the centre of anticommunist work having moved to Central and Southeastern Europe, the fact remains that Churchill envisioned policies that would have joined all of the Western ‘free’ world in the anticommunist cause, and he regarded all ‘neutral’ deviations as beneficial only to the Soviet Union. As at the earlier crisis moment for Finnish neutrality, in 1939, Churchill wished that Finnish leaders would alter their policies. When those policies did not change, he lost almost all interest in Finland.

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Anticommunist options after 1945 To understand properly the decline of Finland in Churchill’s eyes requires a glance at the broader framework of anticommunist thought, protagonism and attempted implementation after 1945. Because he no longer maintained personal contacts with any leading Finnish figures, Churchill did not, of course, know much about the persistence or otherwise of anticommunist frames of reference among Finns, and what little he did know was derived from the overtly very non-anticommunist postures of postwar Finnish leaders. If the final stage of the Churchill-Finland relationship is to be properly understood and contextualised, it is nevertheless important to sketch the different anticommunist options available after 1945, and also their relation to and representation in Finland. As is well known, in the immediate post-1945 years Anglophone anticommunism went through a definite rebirth or rejuvenation. This rejuvenation was transferred into policy with a certain time-lag, yet its ideological framework was constructed immediately after the Second World War and remained practically unchanged thereafter.1 Three very different policy proposals were then competing for the attention of those who implemented foreign policy, and it took some time before one of them established itself as being dominant. First, there persisted the idea, resembling Roosevelt’s wartime beliefs, of gradual convergence between two essentially or increasingly similar systems. It was represented most clearly by Henry A.Wallace, Vice President of the United States. Wallace did not approve of any anti-Soviet acts, but rather accepted in toto the demands of Soviet leaders for securing the areas close to the Soviet heartland. He believed that the Western countries were in any case developing into collectivist states and that they needed Soviet ideological inspiration to develop properly. Therefore he disapproved of anticommunism, which was directed, as he saw it, against this very type of inspiration. When visiting Scandinavia in 1946, Wallace further emphasised that the social democratic Scandinavian countries had a special responsibility to mediate such information to the West that would convince it of the social progressivism of the Soviet system, and thus assist in the process of convergence and cooperation.2 The Finnish politicians who were on the ascendant after 1945 felt or expressed distinct affinity towards just this kind of a Soviet policy. Some of them, like the postwar Speaker of the Finnish Parliament and Prime Minister, and subsequently President, Urho Kekkonen, had been converted to the Wallacean option when it had still been in its infancy during the war, when President Roosevelt himself had nurtured similar hopes, Indeed, while it was primarily grounded in realpolitik and personal opportunism, Kekkonen’s move from rather right-wing anticommunism to this posture of accommodation and cooperation had been partially prompted by his acquaintance with left-wing American diplomats in the latter stages of Finnish belligerency.3

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Second, and essentially similar, was the thinking of those liberal anticommunists who congregated in the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). This influential organisation, created in 1947, tried gradually and under the general inspiration of the New Deal to rebuild American society in the social democratic image, and its members tended to believe that Soviet communism would gradually become more moderate as the time since the death of its ideological founders increased, and the more contact it had with everyday problems. The ADA intended to gather together the moderate left and the non-interventionist anticommunist right and to offer an alternative to Soviet methods of social change, to contain Soviet expansionism and to lure countries threatened by it onto the road of social democratic renewal. On this ideological basis, some of the leading representatives of ADA analysis—especially George F.Kennan, then at the United States’ embassy in Moscow—constructed the policy propositions that have since been known as ‘containment’. The postwar Labour government of Britain followed an essentially similar line of reasoning even if its foreign policies were directed by Ernest Bevin, the socialist who in 1920 had led the revolutionary and pro-Bolshevik Council of Action. Containment accepted the continued existence of the Soviet Union and tried only to prevent possible military attempts at expansion on the part of the Soviets. Its protagonists did not want to use armed force but rather economic and ideological countermeasures, and to implement these measures pragmatically, in a series of constantly changing geographical locations, and so that the United States would provide the funding and others would act. A core assumption in containment was that by withholding from the Soviets openings for territorial expansion, it would eventually become possible to construct, on the basis of mutual calculation and cooperation, a durable modus vivendi. Finally, the containment and accommodation policy was opposed by a rejuvenated conservative anticommunism. Protagonists of this type of anticommunism drew attention to the sympathies shown by liberal and Wallacean anticommunists to collectivism and communism, and assumed that containment could never really defuse the Soviet threat. These conservatives believed that the West needed more active, aggressive and potent policies than mere containment and an expectation of convergence. These aggressively anticommunist policies could not, the conservatives averred, be devised by liberals who were in sympathy with communism; rather, they must be built on realistic foundations by those who regarded communism as the sworn and unchanging enemy and opposite of Western democracy and Christianity—one that could be resisted only with armed force and had eventually be destroyed. The most important early publicist for this position was James Burnham, formerly a leading American Trotskyite intellectual, professor of philosophy and polemicist, who had lost his faith in the Soviet Union because of the Stalinist terror, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Winter War. During the Second World War he had written the new magnum opus of geostrategical anticommunism, The

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Struggle for the World, wherein he had stressed that the Soviets were intent only on acquiring a ‘monopoly of power’ and not interested in any coexistence or convergence. According to Burnham, this Soviet quest was derived from the inherent nature of communist ideology, but in the post-1945 situation—where there existed no real impediments to Soviet expansion—it acquired a purely geopolitical and real-political complexion. Containment was leisurely, half-hearted, pragmatic and inconsistent, and by no means did it employ all those forms of power in resisting the Soviets that the Soviets used in their own campaigns. Therefore, the Soviet monopoly of power could only be prevented from emerging if internationally coordinated economic, moral, subversive and military measures were undertaken with the sole objective that ‘the present Soviet regime is overthrown and world communism as a whole rendered impotent’.4 There were very few public figures in Finland who dared to express this type of sentiment after 1945. The old philosophical, moral and essentially anti-Russian anticommunism that had prompted that country’s War of 1941–1944 lived on, but it rarely found overt expression of any kind. It never really played a part in foreign policy-making again, for so thoroughly had the military form of anticommunism been discredited in the course of the War of 1941–1944 that practically nobody dared put their hope in it anymore. Those few who did, like President Ryti’s former Ambassador to the US, lived in selfimposed exile and could only hope for a resurgence in foreign policy anticommunism after a possible new world war; for the rest, Finnish conservatives simply concentrated on combating communists at home, and in doing this through public exhortation, education and limited, preventative social reform.5 As the West had failed to see the military roll-back project through in the Winter War (and in 1919), and with the Germans in 1941–1944, conservative anticommunist Finns tended to conclude that foreigners simply were not to be trusted ever to follow up on their demands. Moreover, alone Finland was more powerless than ever. Therefore, no one really missed Finnish participation in the Burnhamite project. Wallacean convergence theory and the quest for friendship, the containment policies of the liberal anticommunists and the new geopolitical anticommunism of the conservatives were each based on ideological beliefs that pre-dated the Cold War. With arguments derived from these beliefs, postfactual explanations were constructed for postwar Soviet behaviour. In the early Cold War, each of the three types of anticommunism vied for decision-makers’ attention and searched for methods of implementation. In Finland there really was no contest: early on the choice was made to opt for accommodation and cooperation, and it was this choice that doomed whatever place people such as Burnham and Churchill would otherwise have envisioned for this country. For Churchill’s choice was also very clear from very early on in the Cold War.

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Churchill’s thinking evolved in close affinity with the Burnhamite paradigm, but it also incorporated elements from the liberal anticommunist quest for a new modus vivendi. Whereas these latter flowed logically from his wartime and 1939 efforts at cooperation, the Burnhamite paradigm must be seen as a later version of the military interventionist anticommunism that Churchill himself had articulated in 1918–1921. He had made his conclusions about Soviet intentions and tactics before the end of the Second World War, and subsequent events had only confirmed his thoughts. As a matter of fact, his conclusions dated to 1918 and were rooted both in empirical observations and in a more profound ideological assessment, the core of which had not changed since 1918. After 1945, Churchill’s conclusions led to policy propositions which were both based on the Burnhamite paradigm and developed it further. In Fulton, Missouri in 1946 Churchill outlined the framework through which he approached postwar challenges. He let it be known that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’ and that communist parties active on both sides of the curtain constituted a ‘growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization’. The Soviet Union effectively was the leader of all of these parties, Churchill stressed, and through them it tried to spread its influence and the totalitarian practices which endangered the continuity of Western freedom and historical traditions. Yet Churchill averred that the Soviets did not want war, but rather the ‘fruits of war’ without a direct, overt confrontation. They had chosen their postwar tactics (like their 1920 tactics) in the knowledge that it would be relatively easy for them to spread their dominion as long as the Western nations remained weak and unable to coordinate their activities. ‘They admire nothing so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness’, Churchill emphasised at Fulton.6 Churchill’s policy proposition followed logically from these conclusions. He insisted that no United Nations diplomacy and no bilateral arrangements like the Yalta agreement could produce the respect necessary for world peace, and for the assurance of the inviolability of Western democracies. Experience had shown to his satisfaction that both of these approaches were no better than appeasement, garbed in lofty rhetoric but oblivious to the facts of life and communism. Only the re-arming of the Western democracies, Churchill insisted, only their economic integration and moral self-assurance, could inhibit the Soviet leaders and force them into a situation where they could no longer expand their power. In such a situation—where all other avenues were closed to it—the Soviet Union could be expected to opt for a comprehensive new world order where its basic interests would be guaranteed by joint action. Also, those nations currently subjected to Soviet rule could eventually be freed through such a policy, Churchill added, intimating that his policy proposal was intended precisely for the freeing of all such nations throughout Europe. In the constellation of powers then existing it would be impossible for the West to

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undertake actual wars of national liberation, yet all democracies needed both to re-arm to prevent further Soviet aggrandisement, and constantly to broadcast a message on the moral evil of communist totalitarianism. Nor was Churchill entirely averse to subverting local anticommunist resistance, even armed resistance, when such seemed to yield decisive results.7 Churchill’s postwar policy proposition was thus based on the principle, as he often stated, that appeasement owing to weakness would bring disaster but appeasement from strength would assure peace. Throughout his career, Churchill continued to believe that the democracies could and should draw not only on their manpower and military resources but also on that far more potent form of anticommunist power, the power of higher, more humane and more inherently moral ideas. Lenin had believed the former no less than Churchill, but he had mistakenly thought that the communist idea was the higher and more powerful idea. Churchill knew that it was not so. He was convinced that the ‘soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life’.8 Until that point was reached, Churchill intended to offer the comprehensive anticommunist programme that he had drafted at Fulton. After the Fulton speech, Churchill campaigned incessantly for those kinds of military deterrents and moral incentives that he had outlined in it. He tried constantly to emphasise that these deterrents and incentives were designed not as a call for another war but as the prompt for such a new modus vivendi as would benefit both sides through the erection of a new balance of power and network of mutual restraint. However, such a network could be erected only after the states currently under Soviet domination were again free. Churchill believed that only a determined policy by the West could create the preconditions for such an arrangement. After the preconditions had been reached—Churchill thought this would be achieved in the mid-1950s—he wanted personally to meet the Soviet leaders and to reconstruct the world system together with them.9 All the themes that had been typical of Churchillian anticommunism throughout his career coalesced in this one last attempt, since his concept of modus vivendi included both a new Locarno-type non-aggression agreement and a definite role for nuclear deterrence, since it tried to guarantee Soviet borders yet encourage trade and other contact as solvents of the communist system, and since it hoped to offer ways for the transference of resources from an arms race to such social reform as might help to remove the appeal of communism. Thus, Churchill’s policy proposal would not just have removed the communist menace but would also have made it possible for him to end his very militaristic career as a man of peace, which was of central concern to the now aged politician.10 In a manner of speaking, Churchill’s speech at Fulton started the Cold War. Such a war would not have come about had the West not decided after the

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Second World War to resist Soviet ideological aggrandisement, subversion and military aggression. Appeasement, inaction, surrender, and cooperation based on the expectation of convergence were all options, and the Cold War would not have ensued had one of them come to dominate British and American policies. Before Fulton, a cluster of these policy options did, more or less, guide American policies; afterward it did not.11 At Fulton Churchill had voiced the conservative anticommunist battle-cry, and it was quickly embraced in British and American leadership circles. It was the resultant anticommunist policies that began the Cold War just as much as the Soviet actions to which these policies were responses. Soon after Fulton, the United States decided to embrace the originally British policy of containment. This first took place in the acute crisis area of Iran, where the Soviet Union was expanding militarily. A diplomatic and moral offensive was also begun in other regions, so that by the end of 1946 the United States, making its position known at the Paris meeting of Allied foreign ministers, for the first time absolutely refused to accede to Soviet demands (especially with regard to war reparations from Italy, the demanded transfer of Trieste to Yugoslavia, and the demand for a share in the control of Tripolitania). The United States forbade the delivery of further war reparations from Germany to the Soviet Union unless the Soviets first acquiesced in the creation of unified, democratic institutions in Germany. The US began to demand a full right of participation in the various control commissions in Eastern Europe, and also made known its intention to assist the anticommunist struggle in Greece and its willingness to undertake strategical cooperation with India.12 These measures, radical in themselves, were followed by President Truman’s extensive aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, by the so-called Truman Doctrine (which promised similar assistance to all other countries menaced by communism), and finally by the Marshall Plan (which set out systematically to distribute such assistance). Furthermore, the process of constructing a new defensive alliance had begun soon after Churchill’s speech, and Truman had rearranged his own national security apparatus. The new official guide to US policy, the so-called NSC-68 program, was itself very Churchillian in its emphasis on the need for Western victory and the necessity of combin ing military, economic and moral force. The new policy planned to resist the Soviets everywhere in the world, and especially through defensive military alliances.13 By the end of 1949 these kinds of policies had in fact moved Britain and the United States away from that accommodation which refused to be proactive and systematically planned, and was containment in a very limited sense only—restricted to physical and reactive measures. Churchill’s proposals were not yet fully implemented, and non-military containment still existed as one element in the new strategy (as indeed Churchill, too, hoped). The tactic of economic subversion also continued to be followed (it, too, was acceptable to Churchill). Therefore, none of the three competing anticommunist policy

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propositions had yet predominated, but nevertheless the Cold War had most definitely begun. After 1946, the leading Western powers sought a comprehensive military alliance that would be active both in containment and in other, more direct anticommunist activity. The futile effort to entice Finland Once the West had opted for something more than mere reacting, non-proactive containment, Finland again became relevant. Finland did not wish to take part in the burgeoning Cold War, certainly not on the anticommunist side, but as far as the leading Western formulators of the new anticommunism were concerned, it, too, should play a role. The role that Finland was to play could not be central—not in the military fashion that it had been in 1919, nor in the way of appeasement as in 1939 and 1941–1944. However, because of its geographical position, Finland could, if willing, make a major diplomatic and physical hole in the containment edifice that Churchill envisioned. This hole had to be filled if Churchill’s comprehensive cordon was to be effective. Churchill was of the opinion that Anglo-American unity and rearmament needed to be supplemented by a pan-European front in which all Western democracies stood and worked together, and which, even by its very comprehensiveness alone, would leave the Soviets no other option but to acquiesce in what was demanded from them. In a situation where the Soviets already controlled a major part of Eastern Europe, it was necessary to include countries such as Finland if the counter-coalition was ever to be effective. Part of the building of the projected anticommunist front included the originally secret negotiations about a possible Scandinavian military alliance which began soon after Churchill’s speech at Fulton. These negotiations started at the same time as Britain began to expand what was originally an Anglo-French defensive arrangement, to cover the Benelux countries and the rest of Western Europe. Out of this project there eventually grew the Western European Union (WEU). Early on in its construction, some Scandinavian countries showed an interest in joining. To that end, Norway, Sweden and Denmark began to discuss possible new modalities of defence cooperation in the spring of 1948. These negotiations were supported by American and British diplomats interested in moving anticommunist policy beyond mere economic containment. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, reacted to these negotiations (and to the Churchillian presuppositions that it correctly detected in them) by starting a major propaganda campaign against Scandinavian and other Western countries. Finland was chosen as a special target, and the demand was made that it stay away from all Scandinavian defence cooperation and instead sign a treaty of military cooperation and friendship with the Soviet Union. This pressure led to a treaty between the two countries later in the year, but it did not arrest the Western search for a comprehensive military alliance. On the contrary, Soviet

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actions (especially in the 1948 Berlin crisis and during the Czechoslovakian uprising) proved Churchill’s analysis of Soviet intentions and Western needs, and it only gave added impetus to the quest for an alliance. When in 1949 the leading Western powers then gathered to found the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the desire still waxed strong to have the Scandinavian countries (including Finland) join.14 The continuing interest in a Scandinavian dimension was of importance to Churchill. During the Second World War he had repeatedly spoken of the desirability of a Scandinavian military alliance, and the negotiations to that end which began in 1948 gratified him. A year after the ending of the war he had indeed predicted that, unless the Scandinavians were grafted into the worldwide anticommunist front, a new world war was likely within seven or eight years. This war, Churchill supposed, would be a major world war in which the Anglophone world, France, the Benelux countries and the Scandinavians would in any case have to fight together. As will be remembered, in 1942 Churchill had also sketched a possible postwar Fenno-Scandinavian federation, and as late as 1943 he had specifically named Finland as a necessary part of the Northern flank of the anticommunist front. Since that time the palpable influence that the Soviets wielded over Finnish policy had, however, forced Churchill to reassess the realism of such plans, and he had begun to speak of a Soviet empire the actual borders of which ran along the Finnish-Swedish border. East of these borders Churchill no longer hoped to receive anticommunist assistance. In 1950 he again named ‘the Scandinavian countries’ as part of the desired anticommunist coalition, but by this time he no longer regarded them as fully fledged democracies because, as he saw it, in their internal arrangements they had begun to develop social democratic governance to an extent that made them perilously similar to the Soviet communist system.15 Churchill did not explicate whether he saw Finland as included in this designation of ‘Scandinavia’. It is not difficult, however, to see what kind of a role Churchill would have hoped Finland to play. Finland needed to be an integral part of the Western anticommunist front. It is more difficult to assess what Churchill thought about the likelihood of such a thing coming to pass. As a mere leader of the opposition he did not, of course, need to fret about questions of that kind; he could freely concentrate on the selling of his plans both in public and in the frequent conversations that he had with Foreign Secretary Bevin.16 The public statements that Churchill did make on the projected Scandinavian alliance must, indeed, be seen as part of an attempt to create and maintain such public pressure as might somehow induce Finland to reorient its relevant policies. Only after such a hoped-for reorienting of Finnish policy would it have been possible to see how in practice Finland would fit into the anticommunist front. Finnish leaders, however, showed no interest in reassessing their policies. They had chosen a foreign policy which distinctly cleaved Finland from any and all Western alliances. Postwar Finnish leaders felt no sympathy whatsoever

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towards the Churchillian anticommunist analysis; instead, led by President J.K.Paasikivi, they studiously refrained from giving a single positive comment on Churchill either in public or in private. Paasikivi knew well what Churchill had stated in public, and he thought he also knew Churchill’s true intentions. A man dedicated to policies of appeasement throughout his long career, Paasikivi refused to accept Churchillian categories or presuppositions on any level, whether ideational or political. Instead he admired the new American President, Harry S.Truman, with whose name he (somewhat erroneously) associated the policy of mere containment and accommodation. As a matter of fact, Paasikivi admired those of Truman’s policies which had been practised before Fulton—policies in which Truman appeared in the guise of appeaser or Rooseveltian cooperationist, and where the goal was only the physical containment of Soviet aggressions, economic assistance being the primary tool.17 The Finnish press seemed at that time also to have made an inappropriate distinction between Truman’s policies and Churchill’s proposals. Editorialists in the leading dailies claimed that at Fulton Churchill had spoken only as a private citizen, as someone who tried to resuscitate the 1919 intervention and was thus a menace to the safety of all small nations. The ‘peace forces’, on the other hand (and the American leadership was included in these), were said to be opposed to Churchill’s plans.18 In any case, Paasikivi’s Finland made absolutely sure that it stayed away from any kind of participation in the defence of the West. Paasikivi was indeed an anticommunist, but he saw the proper task of a Finnish anticommunist as being only the marginalisation of domestic communists and the isolation of Finland from the broader, world struggle between anticommunists and communists. He refused to take sides in this world struggle which, according to Churchill, would seal the fate of the whole world, and which required the joint participation of all Western nations if it was ever to be won. Paasikivi refused Marshall aid and Scandinavian military cooperation alike. Joining NATO never even entered the realm of conjecture, not after the 1948 treaty of non-aggression, friendship and mutual assistance that Paasikivi signed with the Soviets. This treaty glaringly exposed Paasikivi’s insistence on defending only Finland, and only from a direct communist invasion or take-over. He was proud of it, since he thought that by virtue of being merely military the treaty prevented the Soviets from interfering in Finnish domestic politics.19 Seen from Churchill’s perspective, this attitude was remarkably selfish and irresponsible, being totally oblivious to the fate of the rest of the Western world, and Churchill regarded it with extreme disdain. After the Finnish-Soviet treaty, Paasikivi’s Finland continued on a path that was diametrically opposed to Churchill’s wishes. Finland refused to accept a role in the process of European integration which Churchill had envisioned during the war, and which he had then after the war championed in his pivotal

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speech at Zürich in 1946. The project of economic and political integration was an essential part of Churchill’s planned anticommunist front, since it would have helped to create the economic foundation for a successful prosecution of the expected, prolonged struggle against the Soviets. The very fact of integrating Europe would also have powerfully attested to the moral superiority and unity of the Western world, and this too would have had a great deterrent value. However, Finland would have nothing to do with it. Nor would Finland cooperate with the 1950 project that Churchill suggested as an expansion of NATO—the plan for a new European Defence Community (EDC). Churchill emphasised that the EDC was the only real alternative to that network of non-aggression treaties which the Soviets were busy building, and which could only lead to Soviet hegemony in the countries which bought into them. He did not think that the EDC could really contain the Soviets unless the Scandinavian countries also joined it, and he regarded as very unfortunate and ill-advised the stance of apparent ‘neutrality’ which some of them (Finland and Sweden) had opted for in the aftermath of the abortive negotiations for a Scandinavian alliance.20 This ‘neutrality’ only weakened the anticommunist front and thus benefited the Soviets. From Churchill’s perspective, therefore, all Finnish policy choices were threats to the workability of the Western anticommunist front and causes for regarding Finland as a country beyond the pale of Western anticommunism. Finland could be regarded as a full partner in Western Europe only if it abandoned the Paasikivi foreign policy and immediately joined the anticommunist front. Conversely, Finnish participation in the front was possible only if that front was first, by the actions of its members, made so strong and imposing that even countries like Finland would dare to trust it rather than ‘neutrality’. Churchill must have known that it was unrealistic to hope for any speedy change in Finnish policy, no matter what the anticommunist Western nations did. Nor did he undertake any significant activity to encourage a Finnish change of policy. There was a hint of Churchillian interest in doing just that in the dinner invitation that Churchill sent to a Finnish parliamentary delegation led by the Speaker of the Finnish Parliament, Urho Kekkonen, when this delegation visited Britain in 1948. After a cigar-filled dinner, Kekkonen tried to maintain some kind of contact with Churchill, but Churchill clearly regarded such contact as neither necessary nor fruitful. No invitation was given to Kekkonen when he arrived in Britain in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. By that time Churchill was again Prime Minister, and his Foreign Office had tried to coax him into granting an audience to Kekkonen, a rising star in the political firmament of Finland who was soon to succeed Paasikivi as President. However, Churchill ignored all Foreign Office claims that Kekkonen was a representative of a ‘key’ anticommunist buffer state and should be consulted. Churchill did not think so. In theory, of course, Finland was an anticommunist

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buffer, but its leaders still refused to turn theory into practise, and Churchill resented this. He had very little respect for Kekkonen, and did not want to consort with the man.21 The disdain for Kekkonen was understandable, given Kekkonen’s prominent advocacy of a distinctly pro-Soviet policy of Finnish ‘neutrality’. After 1948 Kekkonen had, in fact, distinguished himself as a prominent champion of just that Wallacean, accommodationist and appeasing conception of international relations that Churchill fought with all his rhetorical might. In a series of widely noted speeches in 1952, Kekkonen had urged Sweden, Norway and Denmark to opt for Finnish-style ‘neutrality’. These speeches had been delivered at the instigation of the Soviet leadership, and they formed a part of the Soviets’ multiformed attempts to create an international environment more conducive to the expansion of their own power. Kekkonen was being used as an instrument of the Soviets. In other speeches he had, furthermore, strongly criticised American social and value systems and praised Joseph Stalin. The British government did not retain, as it told Sweden in 1955, any optimism about the future of Finland as long as Finland followed Kekkonen’s strictures.22 Viewed from Churchill’s perspective, the policies of Paasikivi and Kekkonen had driven Finland from an unfortunate state into a worse one. Finland’s mistaken policy choices had been detrimental not just to Finland itself but also to all others who faced up to their duties in the defence of the West and who did not care only about their own formal independence and physical inviolability. It may have been that Finland’s chosen policies defended her immediate, purely national interests, if national interests were defined as the maintenance of a non-communist domestic order and if national interest was divorced from the sovereign power of the nation to make its own, uncoached foreign-policy decisions. However, Churchill had little patience with such an interpretation. Finnish leaders were wont to counter his calls for proactive anticommunism by supposing that if Finland did say ‘no’ to the Soviets, the Western powers would not be there to help—that therefore it was better to acquiesce in whatever foreign and defence policies the Soviets asked of Finland and to concentrate at the same time on containing the domestic communist danger. If the Soviet Union was in any case to remain the single most important and powerful nation on the continent of Europe—as Paasikivi deterministically assumed—there remained in any case no realistic option for small nations but a policy of appeasement. And small countries had to think of themselves alone.23 Churchill’s worldview could not countenance such an analysis. First of all, he did not think that the Soviets aspired only to physical security for their state; therefore he also did not think that they would ever be satisfied with mere defensive arrangements of the type of the Finnish-Soviet treaty of non-aggression. In no way did Churchill think, either, that the Soviets were destined to remain the dominant power in Europe. Rather he thought that the Western powers—all Western powers—could through cooperation prevent such

THE EARLY COLD WAR 153

a future. Furthermore, unlike Paasikivi and Kekkonen, Churchill did not, of course, see Finland as in a category of its own—not now, at the beginning of the Cold War, any more than earlier in his encounters with the country. From his perspective, the question was not how Great Britain or the United States could assist some single country; the question was how all Western countries would together prevent the (physical and ideational) expansion of Soviet power. Any and all policies not so predicated—including the policy chosen by Finland— could only weaken the West, undermine collective security, encourage the Soviets and eventually redound to the harm of all countries—countries like Finland included. Of course Churchill did not state this in so many words, and he did not explicitly mention Paasikivi and Kekkonen as the culprits, but everyone familiar with his values and his sets of goals knew with surety that this is what he meant. During his second Premiership (1951–1955) Churchill therefore had no reason to be interested in Finland. There were no signs that Finnish policy was about to change, and Churchill did not have the time to engage in probably futile persuasion. By this time Churchill was an old man who concentrated his energies in one last effort to arrange a meeting of Western and Soviet leaders, a meeting where complications like Finland could be ignored and a sustainable overall modus vivendi reached on the assumption that the West had already became sufficiently strong and therefore a serious enough opponent to make an arrangement appealing to the Soviets. According to his personal physician Churchill was no longer interested in anything else, but the Foreign Office (and especially its incumbent, the formerly pro-Soviet and now embittered Anthony Eden) tried hard to prevent such a summit meeting. It even went so far as to deny Churchill some diplomatic and intelligence reports, pleading the dangers inherent in Churchill’s alleged senility.24 Thus, even the amount of information that Churchill received about Finland was severely limited. Nor did Churchill any longer have personal contacts in Finland. After Field Marshal Mannerheim had left public life in 1946 and retired to Switzerland, Churchill knew no Finnish leaders. He disliked Paasikivi. No lasting contact was forged with Kekkonen. Sir Patrick Donner was no longer his friend. All former contacts with Finland were gone, and the Finnish leaders’ refusal to be part of the Western anticommunist coalition meant that the country had no practical relevance. Churchill’s theme was anticommunism, and Finland’s theme was friendship and cooperation with the Soviets regardless of Soviet actions in other parts of the world. These themes clearly had very little in common, especially given Churchill’s conviction that all policies of ‘neutrality’ made the task of creating a modus vivendi based on anticommunist credibility that more difficult. Thus the beginning of the Cold War underlined the profundity of the change that had at length taken place in the power relations of the world. The Soviet Union had indeed become that aggressive and hostile superpower the emergence of

154 THE EARLY COLD WAR

which Churchill and Mannerheim had tried to prevent in 1919. To paraphrase Churchill, the monster had indeed grown up and had spread its net all across the world. This had forced the anticommunists of the world to react, and the result was the Cold War. In the process Finland had lost its usefulness for anticommunists like Churchill, since its usefulness had always been tied to the prevention of a situation such as the Cold War. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union was dominant in large parts of Eastern Europe and increasingly assertive elsewhere in the world; it was no longer that regional, distant and containable danger in one corner of Eurasia which Churchill had at first tried to destroy, had then hoped to contain and moderate, and with which he had at last and briefly hoped to build a friendship. After the Cold War began, Churchill finally concluded that it was possible to maintain and weaken the Soviets only through the instrumentality of a worldwide anticommunist common front, but Finland wanted no part in such a front or dared not join it. Seen from Churchill’s vantage point, Finland had once again made a strategical and moral miscalculation and placed its purely selfish interests ahead of the shared interests of the free world.

CONCLUSION

Churchill’s engagement with Finland began with the anticommunist campaigns of 1919, and ended when the Cold War began. Between these two landmarks lay 30 years of anticommunist effort during which Finland maintained a hostile and suspicious attitude towards its eastern neighbour, and Churchill sought allies for his various schemes for the destruction of Soviet communism. From beginning to end Churchill’s engagement with Finland was strictly tied to military anticommunism, him being one of the leading Western representatives of this for most of his political career. Churchill would have fought his anticommunist battles regardless of Finland. The destruction or containment of Russian communism and the modification of the Russian communist regime were constantly in his thoughts and efforts, and did not depend in any way on the existence of the state of Finland or the occasionally similar quests of Finnish leaders. Throughout his career, Churchill opposed communism and socialism wherever he detected them—in Russia in 1919, in the General Strike of 1928, in the New Deal, in the Labour Party, in the fascism and National-Socialism of the interwar years, at the end of the Second World War in Poland and Greece and elsewhere in Europe, and at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. It was an effort that drew its strength directly from the core of Churchill’s most cherished values and feelings, and he could never entirely suppress it in favour of any other points of view. Churchill chose varied strategies according to the demands of different situations and cost-benefit analyses, but his dedication to anticommunist outcomes itself never wavered. On several occasions, and in very different ways, he saw Finland as a useful tool or proxy for his chosen strategies. It was Finland’s geographical position that made the country relevant to Churchill. The palpable strength of anticommunism in Finnish leadership circles up to 1945 transformed a theoretical relevancy into a potentially immediate and practical usefulness. It is very unlikely that without this geographical and anticommunist coincidence Churchill would have had any real knowledge about Finland, interest in its politics or contact with its leaders. The extent of his interaction with the country was entirely dictated by the changing demands of anticommunism.

156 CONCLUSION

Churchill paid most attention to Finland in 1918–1920, during and just after the Finnish War of Independence, when he thought that the country had the most to offer to anticommunist projects. There was a direct correlation between the two, and because Churchill regarded the years 1918–1920 as those most conducive to a final destruction of international communism, he used all his powers in his prolonged attempt to persuade Finland (and other Border States) to accept the position of proxies in his plans. This period is therefore the most revealing regarding Churchill’s own thinking and policy preferences, since it was then that he could fully concentrate on anticommunism in particular and did not have to consider other, competing factors. This Churchillian concentration and dedication could mean, as Mannerheim realised, a potentially major change in the international significance and influence of Finland. Such a change was, however, contingent upon a Finnish willingness to lend itself to Churchill’s schemes and thus to strengthen Churchill’s hand in the persuasion required for his schemes to be implemented. Only by having a broad international coalition at his side would it have been possible for Churchill to change the deeply entrenched Anglophone aversion towards military anticommunism; without it, his anticommunist project was doomed to failure from the start. In the end, Finland dared not to join such a coalition, and this refusal had a definite impact on Churchill’s views about the country. The negative image was only partly tempered by General Mannerheim’s personal role in their joint scheming—a role that Churchill esteemed very highly, and which prompted him to some degree to project Mannerheim’s heroic qualities onto Finnishness in general. Finland meant even less to Churchill during the Russo-Finnish War of 1941–1944. At that time Churchill thought that the Soviets could, through personal contacts, wartime cooperation and mutual compromises, be kept from any attempt to export their revolution. He could not support countries which endangered this hope and which at the same time assisted the German war effort. Furthermore, by 1941 Churchill was the leader of a country so much weakened that he could not—even if he had wanted to—have led a world crusade against Soviet communism, even had the German threat magically disappeared. He did hope for an implicitly anticommunist alliance with the United States but could never quite achieve this, and in its absence there was nothing left for Churchill the anticommunist but to appease and foster such multilateral ties as might hopefully moderate Soviet behaviour at some future time. Quite possibly the anticommunist choices that Churchill made in these years were dictated by his powerlessness and rationalised through the supposition that mutual contacts could help to dissolve communism. In any case, his nation’s weakness severely limited Churchill’s options. For Finland, this British weakness was disastrous, since it meant that Churchill acquiesced in Soviet demands regarding Finland. It was this weakness that explained Churchill’s declaration of war against Finland and his acceptance of territorial annexations by the Soviets. Churchill was dependent on Soviet

CONCLUSION 157

co-belligerency, and he had to appease the Soviets in those few areas where he had something to offer. He could ship war materiel to the Soviets and bombard Petsamo, but until 1944 he could not offer that Western front and offensive which Stalin demanded the most. However, he could give in to Soviet demands regarding Finland. Yet even here Churchill’s persistent fear of a postwar, aggressive Soviet Union played a role, prompting him to reticence and obstruction for as long as he deemed safe. Even in this period, Churchill persisted in resisting Soviet demands over Finland for as long as he possibly could, before he eventually had to give in. In all of this Churchill did not care about Finland as such, but he recognised that the Soviets had made Finland into a test case, and that in Finland the Soviets tried to gain objectives that were either not part of or deleterious to the more general war aims of the Allies, the balance of powers, and British imperial interests. Within the confines of a severely restricted area for manoeuvre, Churchill did what he could to limit such Soviet gains. Finland interested Churchill least in the immediate post-Second World War situation. In this period his anticommunist fears returned to haunt him with a vengeance. Even if Finland had at that stage offered its partnership to the pan-European anticommunist front that Churchill worked for, he would hardly have been able to create any coalition similar to the one he had been building in 1919. It was not just that Churchill was out of office and therefore capable only of that rhetorical persuasion intended to influence the decision-makers through public opinion. The crux of the matter was the changed overall situation, a situation where the Soviets had already expanded their sway over such a large part of Europe that a country like Finland hardly had a noticeable function left. In 1919, when Russia was weak, it would have been possible with Finnish help to destroy the Bolsheviks in that small area in which they ruled. Likewise, in 1939 it would have been possible, conceivably, to contain the Soviets while a Grand Alliance negated the German threat. This is what Churchill himself believed. But after 1945 the situation was entirely changed, and anticommunism had to be built on a different foundation—a foundation in which Finland could not play a central role. According to Churchill, a new world war could be prevented only through a comprehensive military alliance by all Western countries, the inculcation of a moral sense of Western superiority and will-power, and re-armament and nuclear deterrence. Only these implementations could work, since they alone were sufficiently powerful both to contain the Soviets and, hopefully, to make the Soviets interested in a general modus vivendi. However, Finland could no longer conceive of an anticommunism even of this revamped version, and instead, calling itself ‘neutral’, it refused to join any and all projects for a Western anticommunist coalition. After 1945, as far as Churchill was concerned, Finland became one of those small nations that the West needed, when possible, to protect from Soviet communism; it no longer had any relevance whatsoever for any proactive

158 CONCLUSION

anticommunism. There were, indeed, no guarantees that the West could keep countries like Finland outside of the Soviet orbit or tease them away from it. The most that Churchill could realistically hope to do was to shorten the period of present danger during which the Soviets were in a position to expand their power in countries like Finland. And that period of danger could no longer be reduced through any kind of military destruction of communism; it could only be shortened through the creation of such a multilateral architecture of abstention, constraint and limited benefits as would make it too dangerous for the Soviets to expand their power. Countries like Finland would benefit from such a modus vivendi only gradually, but always only in relation to it being predicated on Western military credibility and on a new, deeply entrenched Western moral self-confidence. This whole plan was in fact a variation of the older Arms and the Covenant scheme, directed now against the sole surviving form of totalitarianism. Because the original Arms and the Covenant scheme had not worked, the Winter War occurred. The Churchillian investment in anticommunism was at its most problematic during this war, when Churchill had great difficulties in squaring what he regarded as the primary, immediate need for a Grand Alliance and his underlying anticommunism. He had, of course, already moved from anticommunism to anti-fascism, and inasmuch as he equated communism and fascism, the anti-fascist war also served an anticommunist purpose. However, the Soviet Union did still represent the communist menace, and when Churchill had to choose between the two, he had manifest difficulties. No matter what policy proposition he offered in the end, it was bound in some way to undermine either the search for a Grand Alliance (the destruction of fascism) or his own moral convictions (anticommunism). No matter what the chosen policy, it was bound to lead to all sorts of complications. The events unfolding in Finland were now so intricately intertwined across the range of Churchill’s goals and promptings that there simply was no way of avoiding difficulties of one or another kind. As a matter of fact, the Winter War briefly shattered the ideational framework which Churchill had constructed during the anti-appeasement years; the framework in which only Nazi Germany was an immediate danger and the Soviets’ participation was needed in a shared fight. The Winter War recalled earlier constellations and enemy images which still appealed to Churchill and to Western public opinion at large, but which also endangered the successful prosecution of the war and possibly even ultimate victory. The way in which Churchill solved the dilemma was by convincing himself that since fascism and Nazism were part of totalitarianism, the defeat of these two was also necessary for the further prosecution of the campaign against the third form of totalitarianism, Soviet communism. He also linked the anti-German NarvikGällivare-Baltic Sea operations with the anticommunist aiding of Finland. Since (for reasons unrelated to Churchill) it proved impossible to put into effect all that

CONCLUSION 159

Churchill envisioned as the practice of this linkage, it is impossible to say what the results of his ingenious schemes would have been. What is clear, however, is that at an early stage—even before final decisions were made about the Northern operations—Churchill was willing to risk war with the Soviets, and to take this risk for Finland’s sake, for specifically anticommunist reasons. Churchill supported military assistance to Finland even though such assistance weakened the anti-German fight and endangered the goal of a Grand Alliance. Because he was so conscious of these dangers, Churchill did not, on the other hand, become a public champion of a new anticommunist war; nor would he have accepted such a war unless it was thrust upon him. In Churchill’s view, geopolitical considerations ultimately had to rule in the Winter War, and anticommunism, while not abandoned, had to be subservient to these considerations. Finland itself had to be subservient to geopolitics and anticommunism alike. This was the rule, in fact, in every period and episode of Churchill’s interaction with Finland. To him, Finland was relevant because of its geostrategical position (relative to Russia but in no other sense). He never regarded Finland as a co-equal actor in international affairs, and never saw it as a nation whose points of view or national desires should have equal weight to his own calculations of context, expediency, priorities or goals. Finland was there to be used. Both on a tactical and on a principled level, Churchill regarded all small nations as the proper tools of the Great Powers; tools in projects for which the small nations would have insufficient resources or insight but which nevertheless remained crucial for all nations to see through. The Finnish refusal to join the 1919 St Petersburg operation and the 1939 Grand Alliance were among the episodes which further strengthened such a condescending but realistic attitude towards small nations, as was Finland’s decision to join Nazi Germany at a time when the most comprehensive military coalition ever had been created for the destruction of Germany. None of this meant by any means that Churchill had no sympathy or understanding for Finland; he did, and also genuine admiration. His knowledge of Finnish history, culture, character and society was very limited, but he admired Field Marshal Mannerheim as he admired few of his contemporaries, and through Mannerheim’s personality he associated with Finland some of those qualities which were to him the most respected and noble. The Winter War further strengthened these perceptions. In no small measure, it was because of this that after the war Churchill did try—and this despite all the frustrations that Finns had caused him in 1919, 1934–1935, 1939 and 1941–1944—to insist that Finnish independence be preserved. Only an admiration for Finland that grew out of shared anticommunist projects could explain this. However, Churchill was of course only one of the many decision-makers of twentieth-century Britain. His views were in many cases at distinct variance with the views of most of his fellow-citizens and members of the governing elite. Churchill was unrepresentative even of twentieth-century British

160 CONCLUSION

diplomacy, since he tended to prefer working outside it, either through informal personal networks and secret coalitions or through the building of public opinion. Nor was Churchill in any period of his career free to act as he would have wished. His Finnish and anticommunist policies were always contingent either on the stances of his political superiors or on the demands of coalition warfare, and his area for manoeuvre—unlike his faith in the supreme justification of his vision—was always severely restricted. The policies of Great Britain cannot, therefore, be automatically traced back to Churchill’s thinking, planning or preferences, not even during those years when he was the Prime Minister. Rather, the case of Churchill and Finland witnesses to the importance but contingency of individuals in history, and the dynamics created when individuals of strong convictions, trying to steer national policies in directions of their preference, collide with limited resources and with the forces of bureaucratic and ideological opposition. Churchill tried consistently to square the two dominating impulses of his foreign policy—anticommunism and geostrategy—but for all these various reasons he hardly ever succeeded. Churchill rarely reached the anticommunist goals that he hoped to achieve with the proxy or assistance of Finland in particular, not least because Finnish leaders were infrequently genuinely or unreservedly interested in cooperating with him. In 1919 it appeared for a while that Finland might be willing to act as a proxy. Mannerheim agreed with Churchill as to the manifest requirements of the hour, and he engaged very actively in the formulation of Churchillian anticommunist plans. However, in the end he proved unable to convert the rest of the Finnish leadership to these plans, and Churchill’s plans imploded. During the 1939 attempt to create a Grand Alliance Mannerheim was still close to the Churchillian preference, but other Finnish leaders opted for a policy totally different from Churchill’s. During the Winter War and the War of 1941–1944, not even Mannerheim regarded Churchill’s stratagems as realistic or supportable, and consequently Finland did not become such a part of the Western alliance that it otherwise might have been. In each case, the choices were Finnish choices and they went against Churchill’s hopes. Apart from the peace settlement following 1944, it was Finnish, not Churchillian, choices that dictated the direction of Finland. Churchill’s intentions and achievements must, therefore, be separated. Churchill tried to influence Finnish policies, but he rarely succeeded in prompting the kind of anticommunist choices that he looked for. He did leave an imprint on Finnish history. At every major turning point in the first 30-odd years of that country’s history he helped make sure that Finnish independence was preserved and that communism did not subjugate the country. Churchill did not act for these ends out of any great love for Finland, a country of which he knew little; he acted rather because of the reasons that he so emotionally voiced in his speech on the Winter War in January 1940. Churchill believed that if

CONCLUSION 161

communist totalitarianism expanded into Finland, it would unleash a series of events which would destroy freedom and civilisation elsewhere in the world, including in his beloved British Empire.

162

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 This has been the case especially in the two studies of Anglo-Finnish relations in 1939–1941 by Jukka Nevakivi, studies which are based on otherwise extensive but in Churchill’s own case very limited documentation (Nevakivi 1972, 1976). In the English translation of the first-mentioned book, The Appeal That Was Never Made: The Allies, Scandinavia, and the Finnish Winter War, 1939–1940 (Nevakivi 1976b), the criticism has been toned down considerably. 2 Churchill memorandum, 16 December 1939, in Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (1989a, reprint of the 1950 edition: 544–7).

1 BEFORE THE BOLSHEVIKS, 1900–1918 1 Winston Churchill (1951:665–72); Rhodes James (1959:325–8); Foster (1981: 346–7). 2 Winston Churchill to Lady Jennie Churchill, 14 and 26 December 1887, and 12 January 1888, in Randolph Churchill (1966:149, 152 [hereafter CV]). 3 Browne (1995:301). 4 The best sources for Churchill’s childhood, youth and early political career are: the first volume of the official biography by Randolph Churchill (1966); Gilbert (1991); Manchester (1983: esp. 112–212); Rose (1994); and his own memoirs, My Early Life (1980, reprint of the 1930 edition). 5 Manchester (1983:347–91). 6 Lackman (2000, esp. Chapters 1 and 2). For an English-language examination of the Russification campaigns, see Polvinen (1995); and for a concise English-language history of Finland, see Jussila et al. (1999). 7 Sykes (1997:87–99, 101); Paasivirta (1978: esp. 316–20, 332–9, 388–93). 8 Winston Churchill (1980:374–5); Halmesvirta (1990: esp. 272–93 and Chapters 5–6); Lyytinen (1980:36–54). 9 See Rautkallio (1987:13–17, 20–3). 10 See Rose (1993:148–53). 11 Churchill’s article in the Daily Telegraph, 6 November 1897, in Woods (1992: 49–52); Gilbert (1991:89, 234–51).

164 NOTES

12 See Green (1995:59–77); Matthew (1973); Semmell (1960: esp. 13–16, 23–8, 180–3, 234–7); Sykes (1997:133–42). 13 Clarke (1898: xiv–xv, 170–87); Sir George Sydenham Clarke’s memoranda, ‘Future Relations of Great Britain and Japan’, 4 May 1905, and ‘Note on the AngloJapanese Treaty of 1905’, 14 December 1906, Viscount Sydenham of Combe papers, Add. MS. 50836, British Library, London. 14 Earl Percy’s articles, National Review (January 1912:881–95); and (August 1912: 972–3). 15 See Rose (1994:84–9). 16 Lyytinen (1980:43–54); Paasivirta (1978:348–50, 372–3, 392). 17 Gilbert (1991:58–60, 68–9, 99–100); Churchill’s speech, 25 January 1905, in Rhodes James (1974:409–10, [hereafter CS/1]); Churchill’s speech, 14 August 1908, CS/2:1084–5. 18 Churchill to Clementine Churchill, 5 June 1911 and Churchill to Sir Edward Grey, 21 June 1911, CV/2/ii: 1089, 1091–2. 19 For the left’s views, see Walling (1917:83–103, 226–30). 20 Wilson (1899a:2–4, 579–80; 1899b, in Link et al. 1971:269; 1908:85–8, 103–4). 21 Halmesvirta (1990:257–8). 22 Viscount Sydenham of Combe, the originally Liberal Imperialist writer who had been a prime protagonist of Anglo-Russian cooperation, was another typical example of men who drew this conclusion. In his case, as in Churchill’s, the result was a rather vociferous anticommunism. See Ruotsila (2000a:47–64). 23 Winston Churchill, ‘Russia—Is It the Turning Point?’, Sunday Pictorial, 8 July 1917:5; War Cabinet minutes, 26 December 1917, CV/4/i: 218; Winston Churchill (1991a, reprint of 1923 edition: 201–4, 510–11). Lyytinen (1980: 69–70) deals with the British supply of Russia through Finland, but does not note that Churchill was in charge of it from early 1917. 24 For a concise English-language summary, see Jussila et al. (1999); Screen (2000: 1–42). 25 Churchill’s speeches 3 and 9 October 1917 and 11 January 1918, CS/3:172–3, 174, 183–6; Churchill’s memoranda, n.d. [late 1918], Winston Churchill papers [Chartwell papers], CHAR 9/56, Churchill College, Cambridge [hereafter CHAR]; War Cabinet minutes, 13 October 1918, CHAR 27/39; Woodrow Wilson’s address, 8 January 1918 in Arthur S.Link et al. Vol. 45, (1984:534–9).

2 CHURCHILL, FINLAND AND THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION 1 ‘Churchillism’ was named and identified by Lord Robert Cecil, the Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in early 1920. According to him, it meant a policy of supplying Russian and Border State anticommunists with military material and of assisting them in toppling the Bolshevik regime. See Lord Robert’s address in the House of Commons, 12 February 1920, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th ser., Vol. 125:282–6. 2 The subsequent several paragraphs’ sketch of Churchill’s geostrategic thought is based on the following works: Ben-Moshe (1992: esp. 23–5); Jablonsky (1990);

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3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17

McKercher 42–64, in Parker (1995); Thompson (1983: esp. 14, 54–6, 79–88, 223–44). C.P.Scott diary, 28 September 1917, in Wilson (1970:303–5); Churchill’s address, 10 December 1917, CHAR 9/55; Churchill memorandum, ‘The Unfinished Task’, 19 November 1918, CV/4/i: 417–21; Churchill memorandum, 15 October 1919, J.C.C.Davidson papers, DAV/103, House of Lords Record Office, London. Gilbert (1981:70–82). For these negotiations, see McFadden (1993:85–131). Churchill memorandum, ‘The Eastern Position’, 7 April 1918, CHAR 27/35, and an unfinished draft memorandum, c. 30 April 1918, CHAR 27/38; Sir Robert Sanders diary, 1 December 1917, in Ramsden (1984:93). For detailed reconstructions of the wartime intervention, see especially Carley (1983); Fogelsong (1995). Churchill memorandum, ‘The Eastern Position’, 7 April 1918, CHAR 27/35; Churchill to Lloyd George, 17 June 1918, CV/4/i: 326–7; Churchill memorandum, ‘A Note on the War’, 22 June 1918, CV/4/i: 328–34. For examples of criticism by Cabinet colleagues, see Walter Long to Arthur Balfour, 11 June 1917, Arthur Balfour papers, Add. MS. 49777, British Library, London; Lord Derby and General Robertson to Lloyd George, 15 August 1918, CV/4/i: 133. Winston Churchill (1957, reprint of the 1900 edition: 30–2, 105, 158–9, 200–1, 209–10; ‘Liberalism and Socialism’, 11 October 1906, CHAR 9/19). See also Gilbert (1991:150–1); Thompson (1983:76). Winston Churchill (1989, reprint of the 1908 edition: 76–8); Churchill’s addresses, 22 January and 4 May 1908, in Rhodes James (1974:875–6, 1028–34 [henceforth CS]; quotation from page 1034). Winston Churchill, The Illustrated Sunday Herald, 5 January 1920:5; Sunday Express, 5 December 1920; 1, 5. Churchill draft memorandum, 4 September 1918, CV/4/i: 383–4; Gilbert 1991: 395. The British Cabinet did not endorse the proposal. For conservative press coverage, see ‘Latest Bolshevik Outrage’, Morning Post, 5 September 1918:5; ‘News of the Week’, Spectator, 7 September 1918:242; ‘The Late Captain Cromie’, Morning Post, 13 September 1918:5; ‘A Warning to the Bolshevik’, Morning Post, 4 September 1918:4. Lloyd George’s statement is in The Truth About the Peace Treaties, Vol. 1, (Lloyd George 1938:324). Winston Churchill (1992, reprint of the 1929 edition; 97–9); Churchill’s addresses, 29 May and 5 November 1919, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th series, Vol. 116, (1919:116, 120, 1518–9, 1547–8); Winston Churchill (1989a, reprint of the 1948 edition: 539). For left-wing accusations, see Nation, 13 April 1918:32; New Statesman, 26 April 1918:61–2; Nation, 14 June 1918:315; Daily Herald, 29 September 1919. Winston Churchill, Evening News, 28 July 1920:1; Winston Churchill (1991b, reprint of the 1932 edition: 124). Lenin’s statement is in ‘Lenin Interviewed’, Morning Post, 8 February 1918:6. Winston Churchill (1991, reprint of the 1932 edition: 124–5). Winston Churchill (1992, reprint of the 1929 edition: 428). This interpretation of the competing anticommunist policies at the Paris peace conference is based on the detailed examination in Markku Ruotsila, ‘The Origins

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18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35

of Anglo-American Anti-Bolshevism, 1917–1921’, unpublished University of Cambridge PhD dissertation (1999: Chapter 3). Imperial War Cabinet minutes, 31 December 1918, CHAR 27/57. ‘Summary of Reports Received from General Officers Commanding-in-Chief, Great Britain’, 19 and 15 February 1919, CHAR 9/57. These details on troop numbers, deployments and areas of operation are derived from Rhodes (1988, esp. 21–47); Pereira (1996:105). ‘Appreciation of the Internal Situation in Russia, 12 January, 1919, General Staff, War Office’, CHAR 16/29. Imperial War Cabinet minutes, 31 December 1918, CHAR 27/57; ‘The Situation in Russia, Notes of a Conversation Held in Mr Bonar Law’s Room’, 13 February 1919, J.C.C.Davidson Papers, DAV/90, London, House of Lords Record Office; War Cabinet minutes, 13 February 1919, CV/4/i: 525; ‘Proposal for a Committee of the Associated Powers to Examine the Probabilities of Allied Military Intervention in Russia’, n.d. [14 February 1919], CHAR 16/21; Uncirculated Memorandum by Churchill, 12 February 1919, CHAR 16/15 A. Bruce Lockhart memorandum, ‘Memorandum on the Internal Situation in Russia’, CHAR 27/55 (Churchill scribbled in the margin the words ‘very interesting’); ‘Plan d’Action en Russie’, 17 February 1919, CHAR 16/23; Caldwell (1927:148, 157–8). This very basic factor has oddly been ignored by all but two historians. See Fredborg (1951:23); Ullman (1968:28, 348–9). For the most up-to-date discussion of these decisions, see Ruotsila (unpublished PhD dissertation 1999:155–65, 184–93). For the most perceptive English-language biography of Mannerheim, see the two volumes by Screen (1993, 2000). Ahti (1987:105–19, 127–46, 165–74); Jägerskiöld (1969:152–9, 174–5, 189). Memoranda by C.G.E.Mannerheim, 11 December 1918, C.G.E.Mannerheim papers, box 123, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki; Michael Gripenberg diary, 11–22 November 1918, Mannerheim papers, box 123; Morning Post, 13 December 1918:7; 16 February 1919:5. Rudolf Holsti to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, 14 April 1919, Rudolf Holsti papers, box 17, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki. For details on the Coalition Group for Foreign Affairs, see Rose (1997:150–1) and Schmidt (1974: 115–16); for Hoare’s career, see Cross (1977); Hoare (1930). Samuel Hoare to Harold Williams, 2 February 1919, Templewood papers, 2/3/2, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Hoare memorandum, 22 March 1919, Templewood Papers, 2/3/2; Coalition Group on Foreign Affairs memorandum, ‘The Russian Situation’, May 1919, Templewood Papers, 2/3/13; Hoare to Churchill, 3 May 1919, Templewood Papers, 2/3/33. Sir Henry Wilson to Churchill, 30 March 1919, CHAR 16/5; Churchill to Lloyd George, 9 April 1919, CV/4/i: 611; Kettle (1992:69–170). Kettle (1992:69–70); Polvinen (1971:130–49). Sir William Sutherland to Churchill, 11 March 1919, David Lloyd George Papers, F/8/3/31, House of Lords Record Office, London. Churchill memorandum, n.d. [late 1918], CHAR 27/57. For the only detailed reconstruction of this broader, and much neglected, Conservative campaign for intervention, see Ruotsila (2001: esp. Chapters 6–8).

NOTES 167

36 For details on Spears’ career, political beliefs, and positions on the intervention, see Egremont (1997) and Kettle (1992:111). 37 For their roles in the Curragh Mutiny, see Addison, in James W.Muller (ed.) (1997: 195–6). For Gough’s detestation of Churchill and Sir Henry Wilson, see Sir Hubert Gough to Walter Shaw Sparrow, 25 December 1918, Walter Shaw Sparrow Papers, Add. MS. 48203, British Library, London; Gough to R.D.Blumenfeld, 10 June and 4, 12 and 22 September 1919, R.D.Blumenfeld Papers, GOU. 4–7, House of Lords Record Office, London. For comments on Gough’s left-wing sympathies, see T.W.Kempt to Viscount Sydenham of Combe, 8 April 1924, Viscount Sydenham of Combe papers, Add. MS. 50840, British Library, London; Vares (1994:24–6). 38 These were mostly verbal instructions given by Churchill himself and additional to the somewhat different, official guidelines provided by the Foreign Office. See Ullman (1968:261). 39 Sir Hubert Gough to Churchill, 14 June 1919, CHAR 16/8. 40 Donner (1949:279, 281). Italics in the original. 41 General Golovin memorandum, ‘An Estimate of the Strategical Situation’, 5 May 1919, Templewood Papers, 2/3/34; Golovin to Sazonov, 6 May 1919, reproduced in Morning Post, 5 July 1920:8. See also Kettle (1992:297–301, 327–53). 42 Churchill to Lloyd George, 26 April 1919, CHAR 16/6; Sir Henry Wilson to Churchill, 28 April 1919, CHAR 16/6; War Cabinet minutes, 6 May 1919, CV/4/i: 643–4; War Cabinet minutes, 11 June 1919, CV/4/i: 685–8 (quotation on page 685). 43 Gough to Mannerheim, 26 May and 2 July 1919, Mannerheim papers, box 603; Holsti memoranda, 1 and 11 November 1919, Holsti papers, box 19; Holsti to Mannerheim, 24 June 1919, Holsti papers, box 19; Gough to Arthur Balfour, 3 July 1919, in Woodward and Butler Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, First Series, Volume 3 [hereafter DBFP/3] (1949:411–12). 44 See Silverlight (1970:309). 45 Gough thought that the General was driven solely by personal ambition. Gough to R.D.Blumenfeld, 10 June 1919, Blumenfeld papers, GOU. 4. 46 Memorandum by Mannerheim and Yudenich, n.d. [18 June 1919], Holsti papers, box 19; Telegram from the War Office to Arthur Balfour, 19 June 1919, DBFP/3, 394–5n.1. 47 War Cabinet minutes, 4 March 1919, CV/4/i: 567–70. 48 See Gardner (1984:251–6); Kettle (1992:387–93, 403–9); Levin (1971:221–8); Schild (1995:113–15). 49 Churchill to Lloyd George, 26 April 1919, CV/4/i: 624–6; Churchill to Lloyd George, 5 May 1919, CV/4/i: 640; Churchill to Lloyd George, 21 May 1919, Lloyd George Papers, F/8/3/57. The final, official query to Kolchak was drafted by Lloyd George’s secretary, Philip Kerr. It would hardly have been acceptable to President Wilson if he had known that its terms were, in fact, derived from Churchill’s memoranda. For the final conditions, see Notes of a Council of Four Meeting, 24 May 1919, DBFP/3:312–19. 50 Telegrams from Churchill to General Alfred Knox (War Office representative with Kolchak’s HQ), 29 April, 5 May, 22 May, 26 May and 28 May 1919, CHAR 16/22; General Golovin to S.D.Sazonov (with Hoare memoranda as enclosures), 3 June 1919, Templewood papers, 2/3/56. 51 Balfour to Lord Curzon, 21 June 1919, DBFP/3:394–5.

168 NOTES

52 Kolchak to Georges Clemenceau, 4 June 1919, DBFP/3:363; Kolchak to Mannerheim, 23 June 1919, Templewood papers, 2/3/64. 53 Holsti to Mannerheim, 27 June 1919, Holsti papers, box 19; Holsti to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, n.d. [circa June 1919], Holsti Papers, box 19; Holsti memorandum, 11 November 1919, Holsti papers, box 19. 54 Churchill to Knox, 28 May 1919, CHAR 16/22; Hoare to Churchill, 31 May 1919, Templewood Papers, 2/3/53; War Cabinet minutes, 11 June 1919, CV/4/i: 685–8. 55 Ossian Donner to Lord Curzon, 1 July 1919, and Lord Curzon to Ossian Donner, 27 July 1919, 5/C7, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archives, Helsinki. 56 Jägerskiöld (1969:143–50, 228–35, 251, 290–7). The most complete reconstruction of these coup d’état plans is Ahti (1987). 57 War Cabinet minutes, 1, 12 and 19 August 1919, CV/4/ii: 766–74, 787–8, 798–804, 811; William Phillips to Woodrow Wilson, 19 September 1919, and Wilson to Phillips, 20 September 1919, in Link et al. Vol. 63, (1990:394, 421). 58 Gilbert (1991:416–17). 59 Nation, 11 October 1919:23; Mannerheim, Vol. 1, (1951:444–5). 60 Mannerheim to Marie Lubomirska, 23 October 1919, in Jägerskiöld (1983b: 194–5); Paasivirta (1961:242). 61 Donner (1937:233–6). 62 Sir Archibald Sinclair memorandum, 30 October 1919, CHAR 16/25; Mannerheim to Churchill, 30 October 1919, CHAR 16/8; Notes of a conversation between Churchill and Otto Brunström, 1 November 1919, CHAR 16/26; Spears to Churchill, 7 and 8 November 1919, CHAR 16/41. 63 Egremont (1997:89). 64 Churchill memorandum, 25 September 1919, CV/4/ii: 878–9; Cabinet minutes, 4 November 1919, CV/4/ii: 945–8; Churchill memorandum, ‘Russian Policy’, 12 November 1919, CHAR 16/19. 65 Gilbert (1975a:430). 66 Churchill memorandum, ‘Russian Policy’, 12 November 1919, CHAR 16/19; Churchill to Louis Loucheur, 21 November 1919, CV/4/ii: 963–5; Churchill to Lloyd George et al., 3 December 1919, CV/4/ii: 970; Churchill memorandum, ‘Inter-Allied Russian Policy’, 15 December 1919, CHAR 16/19. 67 Mannerheim to Lubomirska, 12 September 1919 and 20 November 1919, in Jägerskiöld (1983b:191–2, 197–8). 68 Draft conclusions of a conference between Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, 12 December 1919, CV/4/ii: 973; Notes of conversations between Lloyd George and Clemenceau, 12 December 1919, DBFP/3:744–8; Bradley (1975:195–8); Gaworek (1975:58–69); Ullman (1968:312–16). 69 Sir Henry Wilson diary, 12 December 1919, CV/4/ii: 979–80. 70 Hoare to Harold Williams, 2 December 1919, Harold Williams papers, Add. MS. 54438, British Library, London; Spears to Churchill (with enclosures from Savinkov and Chaikovsky), 2 December 1919, CHAR 16/42A; Spears to Churchill, 14 December 1919, CHAR 16/42B. 71 Bradley (1975:197–8). 72 Jägerskiöld (1969:169, 329); Winston Churchill (1991, reprint of the 1937 edition: 74–81, 123). 73 Mannerheim to Lubomirska, 23 October 1919, in Jägerskiöld (1983b:194–5); Jägerskiöld (1969:244–351); Hovi (1979:131–47).

NOTES 169

74 Draft letter by Churchill to Denikin, 11 December 1919, CV/4/ii: 971–3; Spears to Churchill, 17 December 1919, CHAR 16/42B. 75 Spears to Sinclair, 26 and 29 January and 16 February 1919, CHAR 16/63; Sinclair to Spears, 2 January and 16 February 1919, CHAR 16/63; Spears to Sinclair, 24 February 1920, CHAR 16/65; Savinkov to Churchill, 5 March 1920, CHAR 16/ 66; Churchill to Edward Marsh, 3 March 1920, CHAR 16/66; Spears to Churchill, 6 March 1920, CHAR 16/66; Spears to Sinclair, 29 May 1920, CHAR 16/66; Sinclair to Spears, 2 June 1920, CHAR 16/66. 76 Gilbert (1975a:357–82); Wrigley (1990:254–5). 77 See Ullmann (1968:306–30); Keeble (1990:63–9). 78 Churchill to Sinclair, 31 December 1919, CHAR 16/56; Churchill to General Holman, 3 February 1920, CHAR 16/55; Gaworek (1975:58–69). 79 Churchill memorandum, 20 July 1920, CHAR 16/52B. 80 Korhonen (1966: esp. 68–72); Paasivirta (1988:299–306, 443–4). 81 Churchill memorandum, 19 February 1921, CHAR 22/5. 82 Henry A.White to Henry Cabot Lodge, 12 June 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge papers, microfilm 59, Massachussetts Historical Library, Boston.

3 THE TRAVAILS OF ANTICOMMUNISM IN THE INTERWAR YEARS 1 Donner (1949:221–33); Churchill’s draft of a letter to Stanley Baldwin, 14 October 1930, CHAR 2/572; Prince Otto von Bismarck memorandum, 20 October 1930, CV/5/ii: 197–8; Churchill’s addresses, 2 February, 6 March and 22 April 1931, CS/ 5:101–3, 120–1, 145. 2 Churchill notes, 8 June and 24 September 1921, CHAR 9/64; Churchill to Spears, 27 May 1927, CHAR 2/152; Churchill’s addresses, 15 November 1928, 2 February 1931 and 29 June 1931, CS/5:36, 101–3, 186–8; Churchill’s address, 3 December 1936, CS/6:5817–19; Winston Churchill (1991b, reprint of the 1932 edition: 33–4, 80, 187–8, 208, 242–5; quotations from pages 33–4, 80, 245). 3 Churchill’s address, 15 November 1928, CS/5:36. 4 Addison (1993:222–32, 259–68); Gilbert (1975b:146–221); Winston Churchill (1991b:237–45). 5 Churchill’s address, 29 June 1931, CS/5:187–8. 6 Quotes from Churchill’s draft letter to David Lloyd George, 9 April 1919, CV/4/i: 613; Churchill’s address, 29 May 1919, CHAR 9/57. See also Churchill, ‘Russia and Germany’, 23 November 1919, CHAR 8/36; and for interwar examples, see Churchill’s address, 17 February 1933, CS/5:272; Churchill’s address, 4 March 1936, CS/6:5696–7; Charmley (1993:205–33). 7 Gilbert (1975b; 225–6 (quotations), 457); Manchester (1983:815–16); Carlton (2000:31–9, 49–66, 200–9); Pombeni (1995:65–82). 8 Nordström (1996:414–35, 463–4, 508, 545, 565, 581–2, 590). 9 Mannerheim’s sympathies are clear in his address, 30 September 1930, and in his notes for a statement to a delegation of the Lapua movement, 7 July 1930, C.G.Mannerheim papers, folder 124, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki; and in Heikki Renvall to Eino Suolahti, 2 October 1929, Eino Suolahti papers, folder 5, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki. For more detailed examinations of the

170 NOTES

10 11 12

13 14 15

16

17

18 19

20 21 22

interwar Finnish far right, see Ekberg (1991:18–29, 35–48); Hyvämäki (1971: esp. 7–10, 188–200); Rintala (1962:103–12, 143–54, 164–98). Ruotsila (2000b:318–31); Webster (1926:140–2). Winston Churchill (1989a, reprint of the 1948 edition: 15). Winston Churchill (1957, reprint of the 1900 edition: 30–2, 105, 158–9, 200–1, 209–10); Winston Churchill, ‘Open Letter to a Communist’, 25 August 1934, CV/5/ ii: 859–61 (quotation from pages 360–1). See Gleason (1995, esp. Chapters 1–3); Webber (1986:63–8, 104). Churchill summarised his motivations thus in a 1936 letter to General Mannerheim. Churchill to Mannerheim, 9 July 1936, CHAR 8/528. In addition to the fifth volume of Martin Gilbert’s official biography, the best sources on Churchill’s activities in the interwar years, and especially on the Arms and the Covenant campaign, remain Addison (1993:320–4); Charmley (1989: 355–65); Manchester (1988); Rhodes James (1970: Chapters 6–7). These should now be supplemented by Parker (2000). Lord Davies to Lord Robert Cecil, 20 March 1923, Lord Robert Cecil papers, Add. MS. 51138, British Library, London; Sir Maurice Hankey to Sir Thomas Inskip, 19 April 1936, CV/5/iii: 108; Churchill’s address, 15 October 1936, CHAR 2/283; Churchill memorandum, 15 June 1937, CV/5/iii: 704–5; Churchill to Sir Anthony Eden, 3 October 1937, CHAR 2/311; Lord Robert Cecil to Lord Irwin, 7 June 1927, Cecil papers, Add. MS. 51079; Churchill to Lord Robert Cecil, 9 June 1936, Cecil papers, Add. MS. 51073; Churchill to Lord Robert Cecil, 25 April 1936, Cecil papers, Add. MS. 51138; Churchill’s addresses, 25 November and 3 December 1936, 4 March 1937 and 9 May 1938, CS/6:5814, 5817–19, 5835, 6955–63. Churchill’s comments to Maisky, cited in Robin Edmonds (1993:311). See also Churchill’s addresses 15 October 1936, CHAR 2/283, and 23 October 1935, 25 November 1936, 3 December 1936 and 14 April 1937, CS/6:5682–4, 5788–90, 5815, 5817–19, 5850. Jägerskiöld (1983a:141–2); Virkkunen (1989:29–32). Andrew (1992:103, 145–6, 496, 502–3, 628, 678); Manchester (1988:267–8); Rislakki (1982:109–12); Stafford (1997:144–57). How Finnish Foreign Office documents reached Churchill is still unclear, but one must assume that they formed part of the packages that were brought to MI5 by the Finnish Secret Police throughout the 1920s and the 1930s. Churchill’s links to British intelligence agents in Finland were so close that in the interwar period Soviet representatives often (and most usually mistakenly) accused Churchill of leading various propaganda and sabotage operations from Finland. See Rislakki (1982: 109–12). Donner (1949:279, 281). Italics in the original. Screen (2000:104–36); Selén (1980). Sir Patrick Donner was a Conservative MP from 1931–1955. His close relations with Churchill dated to the early 1930s when he worked as the honorary secretary of the India Defence League, the organisation that opposed Indian independence and of which Churchill was a major spokesman. Later the two came very near to breaking even casual contact when Donner embraced appeasement and gave his support to the Munich agreement. Subsequently Donner worked as a private secretary to one of Churchill’s opponents, Sir Samuel Hoare. In the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force and, for a short period in 1944, as the

NOTES 171

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36

37 38 39

40 41 42

parliamentary private secretary to the Colonial Secretary. See Donner (1984): Kuka kukin oli (1961:83–4). For the meeting, see Donner (1949:281); Donner (1981:188–9). For Mannerheim’s views, see Jägerskiöld (1983b:237, 245–6, 285, 296); G.A.Gripenberg memoranda, 31 January 1936, G.A.Gripenberg papers, folder 68, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki. Mannerheim does not mention the meeting in his memoirs. Donner (1981:188–9); Jägerskiöld (1973:263–5); G.A.Gripenberg memorandum ‘Frih. Mannerheims samtal med Mi. Eden a Foreign Office den 31. 1. 1936’, Gripenberg papers, folder 68. See Jacobson (1955:51–8); Kuehl and Dunn (1997:167–70). Winston Churchill (1992, reprint of the 1929 edition: 97–9). Mannerheim to Sir Patrick Donner, 27 April 1936, CHAR 8/528; Sir Patrick Donner to Mannerheim, 1 May 1936, CHAR 8/528; Churchill to Mannerheim, 26 June 1936, CHAR 8/528. Mannerheim to Sir Patrick Donner, 27 April 1936, CHAR 8/528. Churchill to Mannerheim, 26 June 1936, CHAR 8/528. Mannerheim to Churchill, 3 July 1936, CHAR 8/528; Churchill to Mannerheim, 9 July 1936, CHAR 8/528. Churchill’s address, 29 June 1931, CS/5:186–8; Gilbert (1975b:445–6); Harbutt (1986:31). Committee of Imperial Defence minutes, 19 February 1925, CHAR 22/31; Churchill memorandum, 24 February 1925, CHAR 22/31. Carlton (2000:49–50); Churchill to Clementine Churchill, 8 March 1935, in Soames (1999:391) (quotation). For the Finnish attitude, see Gripenberg (1965: 247–63); Korhonen (1971:30–62). Mannerheim and the rest of the Finnish leadership opposed plans for an Eastern Locarno. Churchill’s address, 14 March 1938, CS/6:5923–7; Churchill to Lord Halifax, 31 September 1938, CHAR 2/331. Churchill (1989a:293–4); Manchester (1988:451–2). For an example of the material handed over by Maisky, see Maisky to Churchill, 4 October 1938 (with enclosure), CHAR 9/130. Churchill’s addresses, 5 October 1938, and 3 and 13 April and 19 May 1939, CS/6: 6004–13, 6090–6, 6099–105, 6117–23; Churchill’s press statement, 26 September 1938, CHAR 9/132; Churchill to Richard Acland, 9 October 1938, CHAR 2/332; Churchill to Sir Henry Page Croft, 29 October 1938, CHAR 2/332; Churchill notes, 21 June 1939, CHAR 9/137. Churchill’s address, 3 April 1939, CS/6:6093–4. Churchill (1989a:448). This interpretation is based on the controversial but convincing argument on the core difference between Churchill’s and Chamberlain’s geostrategic views, as developed in Charmley (1989: esp. 4–5, 8–10, 23–5, 74); and in Charmley (1993: 362–4, 559–60). Rhodes James (1986:138–46); Jägerskiöld (1973:257–63). Churchill to the editor of The Times, 11 May 1936, CHAR 2/254. Churchill to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound and to Admiral Tom Phillips, 27 October 1939, CHAR 19/3; Churchill’s addresses, 19 May and 28 June 1939, CS/6:6118– 23, 6144; Charmley (1993:343–4); Manchester (1988:458–9); Gilbert (1983: 99–100).

172 NOTES

43 G.A.Gripenberg’s reports to the Finnish Foreign Office, 22 April, 12 May and 15 May 1939, 5/C7, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archives, Helsinki, Finland. 44 For more details on the Finnish attitude to this period’s Great Power negotiations, see Häikiö (1975:21–38); Jakobson (1955, Chapters 1–2); Korhonen (1971: 162–76, 179–91, 195–206); Nevakivi (1976b:6–14); Paasivirta (1992:32–45, 50–7). For the Finnish-Soviet negotiations, see also Paasikivi (1959:1–115); and for the explanations of Finnish position given to the British, see Gripenberg (1965: 5–28). For Mannerheim’s views, see also Jägerskiöld (1973:344–51). 45 Feiling (1947:403). 46 For an excellent examination of some of these points, see Häikiö (1975:21–38). 47 G.A.Gripenberg’s reports to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, 15 May, 12 June, 28 June, 30 June and 8 July 1939, 5/C7, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archives. See also Häikiö (1975:21–38). 48 Churchill’s addresses, 19 May, 23 May, 3 June and 28 June 1939, CS/6:6118–23, 6124, 6135, 6138, 6144 (quotation from page 6144); Manchester (1988:473); Edmund Ironside diary, 27 July 1939, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:34). 49 Churchill’s address, 5 October 1938, CS/6:6004–13; Gilbert (1975b:996–1001, 1095). 50 Churchill (1989a:380). 51 Churchill’s address, 1 October 1939, CHAR 9/138. 52 Churchill memorandum, 25 September 1939, in Gilbert (ed.) (1993), The Churchill War Papers, Volume 1, At the Admiralty, September 1939-May 1940 [hereafter CWP/1]: 147–9. 53 Churchill to Pound and Phillips, 27 October 1939, CHAR 19/3; War Cabinet minutes, 16 November 1939, CWP/1:374. 54 G.A.Gripenberg’s reports to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, 31 October and 24 November 1939, 5/C7, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archives. It must be noted how both of Halifax’s interventions immediately followed Churchill’s advice thus to intervene. 55 Churchill (1989a:380). 56 See Churchill’s address 6 December 1939, in which he bemoans (after the beginning of the Winter War) what he regards as the manifest pro-German stance of the Finnish leadership; CS/6:6177.

4 THE ANTICOMMUNIST CHALLENGE OF THE WINTER WAR 1 Edmund Ironside diary, 25 July 1939, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:84); Churchill to Neville Chamberlain, 15 September 1939, and War Cabinet minutes, 21 September 1939, in Gilbert (1993:98, 130–1) [hereafter CWP/1]. Some of the key memoranda have been reprinted in Churchill (1989a:534–6, 544–7). 2 See Fisher (1919:49–74). Also useful on these points are Ben-Moshe (1992: 3–44); Kaarsted (1995:98–104). 3 Churchill’s addresses, 11 July and 26 September 1935, CS/6:5652, 5661–4. 4 Sir Maurice Hankey to Sir Thomas Inskip, 19 April 1936, CV/5/iii: 108; Churchill’s memorandum, 27 March 1936, CHAR 4/96; G.A.Gripenberg’s report

NOTES 173

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17

18

19 20

to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, 21 September 1939, 5/C7, Finnish Foreign Ministry Archives, Helsinki. See also Ben-Moshe (1992:119–20). Churchill’s memorandum, ‘Plan Catherine’, 12 September 1939, CWP/1:82–3; Sir Dudley Pound memorandum, 20 September 1939, CWP/1:126. Churchill to Neville Chamberlain, 12 October 1939, CWP/1:234. Minutes of a Board of Admiralty meeting, 18 September 1939, CWP/1:115–16; War Cabinet minutes, 19 September 1939, CWP/1:119; Churchill to Pound, 19 September 1939, CWP/1:120–1; Churchill memorandum, 16 October 1939, CWP/1:249–51; Churchill memorandum, ‘Norway and Sweden’, 29 September 1939, CWP/1:180–2; Churchill to Pound and Phillips, 27 November 1939, CHAR 19/3. See also Gilbert (1983:25–38, 101); Salmon (1979:305–17). Gilbert (1983:101–2). See Churchill (1939). War Cabinet minutes, 30 November 1939, CWP/1:445; Churchill’s notes, 5 December 1939, CWP/1:467 (quotation); War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939:555–6. Churchill’s marginal notations on a copy of Admiral Pound’s letter to Churchill, 3 December 1939, CWP/1:456–7; Churchill’s memorandum, ‘A Possible “Détente” with Italy in the Mediterranean’, 18 October 1939, CWP/1:258–9. War Cabinet minutes, 6 December 1939, CWP/1:469. Churchill’s memoranda, 12 and 16 December 1939, CWP/1:500–1, 523–4. War Cabinet minutes, 11 and 18 December 1939, CWP/1:492, 532–3; Military Co-ordination Committee minutes, 20 December 1939, CWP/1:547–9; Churchill memorandum, 22 December 1939, CWP/1:552; War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939, CWP/1:553–6; Churchill memorandum, ‘German and Russian Designs on Scandinavia’, 24 December 1939, CWP/1:559; Churchill memorandum, ‘A Note on the War in 1940’, CHAR 19/3; Churchill to Lord Cork and Orrery, 29 December 1939, CWP/1:581–2; Churchill to Pound, 1 January 1940, CWP/1: 593. Churchill’s memorandum, ‘Norway Iron-Ore Traffic’, 16 December 1939, CWP/1: 522–4; Military Co-Ordination Committee minutes, 20 December 1939, CWP/1: 548–9; War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939, CWP/1:553–5; Churchill’s memorandum, ‘A Note on the War in 1940’, 25 December 1939, CHAR 19/3. Churchill’s memoranda, 29 and 31 December 1939, CWP/1:585, 587–8; secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 2 January 1940, CWP/1:597–8. Ironside diary, 31 January and 1 February 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962: 214). For the chronology, see Häikiö (1976: Chapters 3–6); Nevakivi (1972: 99–156, (on the Petsamo plan, esp. 132–45); 1976b:68–118); Gilbert (1983: 108–15, 127–33). War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939, 10 January 1940 and 11 January 1940, CWP/1:555–6, 619–20, 625–9; Churchill to Neville Chamberlain, 25 December 1939, CHAR 4(99); Churchill to Pound, 25 December 1939, CHAR 19/3; Churchill memorandum, 29 December 1939, CWP/1:585; Churchill memorandum, 31 December 1939, CWP/1:587–8. See also Dilks (1977:33–6); Charmley (1989: 375–6). Gilbert (1983:174–88); Nevakivi (1976b:98–101). See also Ironside diary, 5 February 1930, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:215–16). Claims to the contrary that have been made in Häikiö (1976:79) and in Nevakivi (1976a:11–13) are incorrect. See Churchill to Pound, 25 December 1939, CHAR

174 NOTES

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22

23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35

19/3; Churchill’s memorandum, ‘A Note on the War in 1940’, 25 December 1939, CHAR 19/3. In mid-January, 1940, Churchill concluded that it would be impossible to implement Operation Catherine that year but he insisted that it would be implemented in 1941: Churchill to Pound, 15 January 1940, CWP/1:644–5. War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939, CWP/1:555–6; Ironside diary, 28, 29 and 31 December 1939, and 2 and 12 January 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962: 186–7, 189–90, 190–1, 192–3, 196–7); secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 1,11 and 17 January 1939, CWP/1:601–2, 625, 656. Hoare to Chamberlain, 26 January 1940, Templewood papers, 11/2739, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Hoare diary, 8, 10 and 12 January 1940, Templewood papers, 11/2; secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 27 December 1939, CWP/1:573; Churchill’s notes, 2 January 1940, CWP/1:599; secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 17 January 1939, CWP/1:654–6. See Addison (1993:331); Charmley (1989:269–82, 302). Häikiö (1976:103–17). Gilbert (1983:129–33). See also Churchill’s notes, 2 January 1940, CWP/1:599; secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 11 January 1940, CWP/1:625; Churchill to Halifax, 15 January 1940, CWP/1:642; Hoare’s notes (and Churchill’s marginal notes thereon), 10 January 1940, Templewood papers, 11/2; Ironside diary, 17 January 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:209); secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 17 January 1940, CWP/1:654–6. See Churchill (1939). Churchill’s memorandum, ‘Notes on the General Situation’, 25 September 1939, CWP/1:147–9; Churchill to Pound and Phillips, 27 November 1939, CHAR 19/3; War Cabinet minutes, 30 November and 6 December 1939, CWP/1:445, 469; Churchill’s memorandum, ‘German and Russian Designs on Scandinavia’, 24 December 1939, CWP/1:559. Churchill’s address, 20 January 1940, CS/6:6184. Churchill’s draft was slightly different in some places, but not in paragraphs that related to Finland. The draft is in CHAR 9/134. The address was later published as a pamphlet entitled The State of the War, courtesy of the government. Gilbert (1983:840); Churchill’s address, 27 January 1940, CS/6:6189–90. Churchill’s address, 29 January 1940, CS/6:187–8. Churchill’s address, 20 January 1939, CHAR 9/143 and CS/6:6184–6. Churchill’s address, 20 January 1939, CS/6:6184–6. See ‘Suomen ihmiskunnalle tekemä palvelus on suurenmoinen’, Uusi Suomi, 21 January 1940:7; ‘Churchillin puheen jälkisadosta’, Uusi Suomi, 23 January 1940:1, 5; ‘Churchill ymmärtää väärin puolueettomuuden’, Helsingin Sanomat, 24 January 1940:6; ‘Puolueeton ei ole puolueellinen’, Helsingin Sanomat, 24 January 1940:7; ‘Puolueettomilta ei kysytty lupaa sodan aloittamiseen’, Helsingin Sanomat, 24 January 1940:7; ‘Churchillin puhe saanut epäsuopean vastaanoton puolueettomissa maissa’, Uusi Suomi, 24 January 1940:6. For Scandinavian reactions, see also Charmley (1989:380); Gilbert (1983:138). Halifax to Churchill, 26 January 1940, Churchill to Halifax, 26 January 1940, and Halifax to Churchill, 26 January 1940, CWP/1:689, 690–1, 691–2; Kaarsted (1995: 311). Churchill’s addresses, 27 January, 27 February and 30 March 1940, CS/6: 6189–90, 6196, 6199–200.

NOTES 175

36 Churchill’s memorandum, ‘Stoppage of Traffic in Norwegian Territorial Waters’, 14 February 1940, CWP/1:761–2; secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 18 and 22 February 1940, CWP/1:779–80, 786. 37 Churchill’s address, 6 December 1939, CS/6:6177. 38 Gripenberg (1965:112–15). 39 Pakaslahti (1970:305). 40 War Cabinet minutes, 2 February 1940, CWP/1:717. 41 The committee in question was the Military Co-ordination Committee which worked under its chairman, the Minister for Defence Co-ordination Admiral Sir Ernle Chatfield, from the beginning of the war. Churchill was an active member of the committee, and its chairman from April 1940. 42 No satisfactory study exists of the activities of the Finland Fund. The best sources remain the memoirs of those involved, especially Bell (1942); Gripenberg (1965: esp. 91–4). 43 For the Davies-Churchill relationship, see Charmley (1989:195–7, 235, 242–7, 391); Lord Davies to Churchill, 1 August 1936, CHAR 2/285; Lord Davies to Churchill, 4 September 1939, CHAR 2/364; Lord Davies to Churchill, 2 May 1940, CHAR 2/393. For Macmillan’s role, see Macmillan (1967:24–7). There are brief further descriptions of the activities of the Finnish Aid Bureau in Nevakivi (1972:35–62; 1976b:171–7); and in Gripenberg (1965:95–109). 44 Macmillan (1967:35–6). 45 War Cabinet minutes, 22 December 1939, CWP/1:555–6. 46 War Cabinet minutes, 27 December 1939, CWP/1:573; Churchill to Lord Cork and Orrery, 29 December 1939, CWP/1:581–2; Churchill’s notes, 2 January 1940, CWP/1:599. 47 Churchill’s memorandum, 8 February 1940, CWP/1:729. See also Gilbert (1983: 135–6); Nevakivi (1972:131); Ponting (1994:418). 48 War Cabinet minutes, 20 January 1940, CWP/1:667; General Knox’s address, 7 February 1940, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th series, Vol. 357 (London: HMSO 1940): 187. The Cabinet did not allow pilots to go to Finland. 49 Unlikely as it was that Churchill possessed a set of skis, this is the claim of the Finnish Ambassador who coordinated the donations. According to him, Anthony Eden also donated his skis. Gripenberg (1965:91–2). 50 Secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 12 February 1940, CWP/1:750. See also Nevakivi (1976b:101). Brigadier Christopher Ling (1880–1953) was a career military officer who had served in the First World War, and subsequently as the Head of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and as a Brigade Commander in India. He had retired in 1937 but was recalled to service as a general staff officer in 1939. CWP/1:750n1. 51 Häikiö (1976:66–9, 118–20); Nevakivi (1976b:35, 47–9, 68–9, 79–83); Macmillan (1967:26–7); Magill (1981:58–72). On General Ironside’s activities, see also his diary entries for 12, 15 and 19 February 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962: 216, 217, 219). 52 Leo Amery diary, 24 January 1940, in Barnes and Nicolson (1988:582); Nevakivi (1976b:174–7). 53 Harold Gibson to Lord Robert Cecil, 4 January and 6 April 1940, Lord Robert Cecil papers, Add. MS. 51184–5, British Library, London; Nevakivi (1972:207).

176 NOTES

54 55

56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69

70 71 72

73

See also Max Beaverbrook to Churchill, 3 December 1939, CHAR 2/363; Max Beaverbrook to Sir Samuel Hoare, 3 December 1939, Beaverbrook papers, C/308. War Cabinet minutes, 29 January 1940, CWP/1:703. Supreme War Council minutes, 5 February 1940, CWP/1:719; Ironside diary, 5 February 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:215–16). See also Gilbert (1983: 174–88); Häikiö (1976:128–34); Nevakivi (1972:131–56). Secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 12 and 18 February 1940, CWP/1: 750, 778. Häikiö (1976:154, 164–5, 171–6); Wahlbäck (1964: esp. 287–315, 325–89). Secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 18, 19 and 22 February 1940, CWP/1: 777, 779–80, 789–90; War Cabinet minutes, 23 February 1940, CWP/1: 795–6; Churchill to Pound and Phillips, 20 February 1940, CWP/1:780; War Cabinet minutes, 1 March 1940, CWP/1:839–41; Churchill to Pound, 6 March 1940, CWP/ 1:853–4. War Cabinet minutes, 29 February 1940, CWP/1:824–7; secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 1 and 4 March 1940, CWP/1:839–41; Sir Alexander Cadogan diary, 1 and 11 March 1940, in Dilks (1971:241, 245). Secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 1 March 1940, CWP/1:840–1; Cadogan diary, 1 and 10 March 1940, in Dilks (1971:257, 260). Gilbert (1983:182). Juho Niukkanen to Kyösti Kallio, 12 March 1940, Juho Niukkanen papers, folder 1, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki; Nevakivi (1972: Chapters 8 and 9). Häikiö (1976:156–71); Jägerskiöld (1983a:186–8); Tanner (1950:200–9, 229–55, 273–8, 293, 310–45). Secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 4 March 1940, CWP/1:846; War Cabinet minutes, 8, 11 and 12 March 1940, CWP/1:859, 869, 873–4. Tervasmäki (1987:57–9); Hoare diary, 13 March 1940, Templewood papers, 11/2; Cadogan diary, 13 and 14 March 1940, in Dilks (1971:262–3); Häikiö (1976:178–9). Cadogan diary, 16 March 1940, in Dilks (1971:263); Churchill to Halifax, 14 March 1940, CWP/1:883–4. Churchill memorandum, 14 March 1940 (with enclosure, ‘Effect of the RussoFinnish Treaty on Our Naval Situation’ by the naval staff), CWP/1:879–80; secret appendix of War Cabinet minutes, 15 March 1940, CWP/1:879–80. War Cabinet minutes, 15 March 1940, CWP/1:885. See also Gilbert (1983:184, 188–9); Häikiö (1976:178–9); Ironside diary, 14 and 19 March 1940, in Macleod and Kelly (1962:228, 230); Churchill to Halifax, 14 March 1940, CWP/1:883–4; War Cabinet minutes, 15 March 1940, CWP/1:885. Secret appendix to War Cabinet minutes, 18 March 1940, CWP/1:898; Churchill to Pound, 23 March 1940, CWP/1:910–11; War Cabinet minutes, 27 and 29 March 1940, CWP/1:920–1, 929. Churchill to Lord Cork and Orrery, 20 March 1940, CWP/1:902; Churchill’s address, 30 March 1940, CS/6:6199–200. Gilbert (1983:199, 213–84; 1991:635). See the addresses of Clement Attlee, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Sir Leslie HoreBelisha, Harold Macmillan and Sir Henry Page Croft in the relevant House of Commons debate, 19 March 1939, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th ser., Vol. 358:1846–903; Jefferys (1995:15–26). Churchill (1989a:543–4).

NOTES 177

74 For example, Jägerskiöld (1983a:183–8); Jakobson (1955:264–5, 326–9); Nevakivi (1972:115, 267–72); Myllyniemi (1982:89). 75 Rose (1997:257–60); Carlton (2000:71–5).

5 CHURCHILL AS ALLY OF THE SOVIET UNION, ENEMY OF FINLAND 1 See Lawlor (1994: esp. 44–111, 115–256); Kimball (1998: esp. 48–59, 67–76). 2 Harbutt (1986:33); Carlton (2000:78–82); Kimball (1998:69). 3 Churchill to General Sir H.L. ‘Pug’ Ismay, 6 January 1941, in Churchill (1989d, reprint of the 1950 edition: 13–14); Nevakivi (1976a:45–61, 97–108); Rislakki (1982:208). 4 Ryti, cited in Lundin (1960:337–40, 347–9). For more on Ryti’s views, see Turtola (1994:254–9, 275–9, 287–90); and for Mannerheim’s views, see Tervasmäki (1987: 62–86). Even J.K.Paasikivi, the future President of Finland who was in charge of most of the Finnish-Soviet negotiations in 1939–1944 and had a reputation as a great realist, believed that Germany, not Great Britain, would win the war: J.K.Paasikivi diary, 23 October 1941, in Paasikivi (1991:114–15). 5 See Nevakivi (1976a:63–72, 97–120, 127–32); Paasivirta (1992:98–106, 118–19, 132–57). For more detailed examinations, see Crosby (1967); Korhonen (1961). 6 Magill (1981:78–9, 85); Nevakivi (1976a:138–40); Polvinen (1979:80, 89, 91). 7 Churchill’s address, 22 June 1941, CS/6:6427–31; John Colville diary, 21 June 1941, in Colville (1985:404); Carlton (2000:82–6); Charmley (1989:453–5). 8 Churchill’s memorandum ‘Part I—The Atlantic Front’, 16 December 1941, CHAR 4/235; Churchill memorandum, 18 January 1942, CHAR 20/67; Churchill to Joseph Stalin, 9 March 1942, CHAR 20/132; Sir Alexander Cadogan diary, 4 December 1941, in Dilks (1971:416). 9 Churchill to Eden, 5 and 10 July 1941, PREM 3/170/4, Public Record Office, London; Churchill to Eden, 16 July 1941, CHAR 20/36. A facsimile of Churchill’s instructions to Eden is reproduced in Nevakivi (1976a:134). On Eden’s attitude, see Eden to Churchill, 15 July 1941, PREM 3/170/4. Even in well-informed Finnish circles it was thought at this time that Eden was actually more sceptical about the Soviets’ intentions than Churchill, and that Eden opposed stricter measures against Finland. See G.A.Gripenberg, ‘Havaintoja Englannista’, 3 March 1942, G.A.Gripenberg papers, folder 68, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki. 10 Gilbert (1983:1137–9); Churchill to Stalin, 20 July 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Eden to Churchill, 9 July 1941, copy in Max Beaverbrook papers, C/308, House of Lords Record Office, London; Stalin to Churchill, 13 September 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Nevakivi (1976a:181–2). Only some of the Finnish citizens resident in the United Kingdom were interned for the duration of the war (in the Isle of Man). Their treatment differed significantly from the treatment of nationals from other co-belligerents of Germany, a total of 27000 of whom were interned with the intention of swiftly expelling them from the country. See Addison (1993:342–3). 11 Charmley (1989:472); Kimball (1998:110); Polvinen (1979:101). 12 John Colville diary, 22 June 1941, in Colville (1985:405); Churchill to Cripps, 28 October 1941, CHAR 20/44; Addison (1993:345–6); Browne (1995:158); Maisky (1967:190–1).

178 NOTES

13 Churchill (1989d: 526). 14 War Cabinet minutes, 15 September 1941, FO 371/29353, Public Record Office, London; Churchill to Eden, 15 November 1941, FO 371/29362; ‘Suomelle tehdyt esitykset’, Helsingin Sanomat, 5 November 1941:4; Paasivirta (1992:96). For a more detailed exploration, see Polvinen (1979:100–32). 15 Churchill to Stalin, 4 November 1941, CHAR 20/44; Churchill to Stalin, 21 November 1941, CHAR 20/45; Stalin to Churchill, 8 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Stalin to Churchill, 23 November 1941, CHAR 20/45. 16 Churchill to H.V.Evatt (Deputy Prime Minister of Australia), 28 November 1941, CHAR 20/45. 17 Nevakivi (1976a:169–78); Polvinen (1979:126–30, 323n82). The Australian government represented the only Dominion that demanded a declaration of war against Finland. See Polvinen (1979:321n64). 18 Churchill to Eden, 28 and 29 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Eden to Churchill, 29 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1. 19 Nevakivi (1976a:169–78); Polvinen (1979:126–30, 323n82); Alexander Cadogan memorandum, 27 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Churchill (1989d: 534–5). 20 Churchill’s draft telegram to Mannerheim, 15 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1; Churchill to Mannerheim, 28 November 1941, CHAR 20/45 and PREM 3/170/1; Eden to Lord Halifax, 26 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1. 21 Lord Halifax to the Foreign Office, 4 December 1941, CHAR 20/46; Polvinen (1979:128–32); Paasivirta (1992:104, 194–5); Tervasmäki (1987:97–100, 104–5, 108). 22 Cadogan diary, 5 December 1941, in Dilks (1977:416); War Cabinet minutes, 3 December 1941, in Gilbert (1983:1250); Cadogan memorandum to Churchill (and Churchill’s marginal comments written on it), 5 December 1941, PREM 3/ 170/1; Churchill to Eden, 4 December 1941, PREM 3/170/1. 23 Polvinen (1979:129); ‘Sodanjulistus Suomelle’, Uusi Suomi, 8 December 1941: 2; ‘Suomen vastaus’, Uusi Suomi, 8 December 1941:3; ‘Sotatila Ison-Britannian ja Suomen välillä’, Helsingin Sanomat, 8 December 1941:1; ‘Englannin sodanjulistus’, Helsingin Sanomat, 8 December 1941:4; Edwin Linkomies, Vaikea aika: Suomen pääministerinä sotavuosina 1943–44 (Helsinki: Otava 1970): 91–2. Also J.K.Paasikivi diary, 20 December 1941, in Paasikivi (1991:122–3). 24 Nevakivi (1976a:118–19); Sinerma (1997:223); Jägerskiöld (1983a:222–3, 335–6). Mannerheim wrote thus to his friend G.A.Gripenberg after Churchill’s Second World War memoirs had been published. 25 Polvinen (1979:96). 26 These newspaper articles should in themselves have been enough to convince the reader of Churchill’s grave dilemma: ‘Venäjän tappio voi kukistaa Churchillin hallituksen’, Helsingin Sanomat, 11 October 1941:10; ‘Englannin lehdistö arvostelee kirpeästi hallitusta’, Helsingin Sanomat, 11 October 1941: 10; ‘Moskova vaatii Englannin sotilaallista apua’, Helsingin Sanomat, 12 October 1941:14; ‘Englannin hallitus ristitulessa’, Helsingin Sanomat, 24 October 1941:8; ‘Lordi Beaverbrook eroaa hallituksesta’, Helsingin Sanomat, 31 October 1941:9. The first title reads in English as ‘Russia’s Defeat May Topple the Churchill Government’. 27 G.A.Gripenberg to Mannerheim, 21 February 1942, C.G.Mannerheim papers, folder 609, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki; G.A.Gripenberg, ‘Havaintoja

NOTES 179

28

29

30

31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41

42

Englannista’, 3 March 1942, G.A.Gripenberg papers, folder 68, Finnish National Archives, Helsinki. See Charmley (1989:474–8); Jefferys (1995:74–9). For the information about Soviet propaganda, which Churchill received through his informant Desmond Moston, see John Colville diary, 11 September 1941, in Colville (1985:439). See also Cadogan diary, 20 and 26 October 1941, in Dilks (1971:409,410). For Beaverbrook’s admiration for Stalin, see Max Beaverbrook to Ivan Maisky, 12 November 1936, Beaverbrook papers, C/238. The extensive BeaverbrookMaisky correspondence began in 1935, and can be perused in the Beaverbrook papers, C/238. Maisky (1967:161–3, 179–80, 190–1, 201–4, 218); Max Beaverbrook memoranda, ‘Military Aid to Russia’, 28 October 1941, and ‘Assistance to Russia’, 19 October 1941, Beaverbrook papers, D/96/20/1; Beaverbrook’s draft memorandum, ‘Policy Towards Russia’, 31 January 1942, Beaverbrook papers, D/93/19/3; Beaverbrook memorandum, ‘Controversy Over Russia’, 2 March 1942, Beaverbrook papers, D/96/20/1. Jefferys (1995:74–7). Eden to Lord Halifax, 26 November 1941, PREM 3/170/1. Churchill (1989a:609). In recent revisionist historiography it has been usual to claim that Churchill lost his freedom of action immediately after the United States joined the war and that he had to give up all efforts to seriously protect British imperial interests. This is the argument especially in Charmley’s Churchill, The End of Glory: A Political Biography (1993) and Churchill’s Grand Alliance (1995). The interpretation must be questioned inasmuch as it tries to describe the development of Churchill’s own thinking on a supposed decline of the British Empire. It would seem to hold true as far as it refers to the actual results of Churchill’s efforts, as was originally stressed in Barnett (1972). For a more detailed examination of these points, see Kimball (1988: esp. 128–30, 141–66, 193–216); Lawlor (1994: esp. 115–33, 258–9). See Watt (1984); Louis (1978). Kimball (1998:335), and sources cited therein. A typical, forcefully argued contemporary case to this effect was given by a major political critic of Roosevelt’s in Flynn (1948:esp. 75–84, 152–5, 245–54, 339–53). In addition to Kimball (1998:335) and sources cited therein, see Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address, 11 January 1941, in Rauch (1989:339–48); Powers (1998: 113–14, 160–70, 180–1); Badger (1989:94–8, 127–9, 215–27); Pells (1985:12–40, 60–70). See Jefferys (1995:85–106, 150–9). Also useful is Moore (1979). Eden to Churchill and Churchill to Eden, n.d. [December 1941], copies in Beaverbrook papers, D/93/19/3; Harbutt (1986:36–7). Eden to Churchill and Churchill to Eden, n.d. [December 1941], copies in Beaverbrook papers, D/93/19/3; Beaverbrook memorandum, ‘Policy Towards Russia’, 31 January 1942, and draft memorandum, 18 February 1942, Beaverbrook papers, D/93/19/3. Lord Moran diary, 20 December 1941, in Moran (1966:9); Eden to Churchill and Churchill to Eden, n.d. [December 1941], copies in Beaverbrook papers,

180 NOTES

43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56

57

58

59

D/93/19/3. See also Gilbert (1983:7, 15–17); Churchill (1989e, reprint of the 1950 edition: 326–7). This was first noted in Kimball (1998:137–40). Beaverbrook’s draft memoranda, 31 January 1942 and 18 February 1942, Beaverbrook papers, D/93/19/3; Lord Moran diary, 20 December 1941, in Moran (1966:9); Churchill to Roosevelt, 7 March 1942, CHAR 20/71; Churchill to Stalin, 20 March 1942, CHAR 20/72. Gilbert (1986). Churchill to Stalin, 20 March 1942, CHAR 20/72; Stalin to Churchill, 21 March 1942, CHAR 20/67; Sir A.Clark Kerr to the Foreign Office, 30 March 1942, CHAR 20/73; Churchill to Roosevelt, 4 January 1942, CHAR 20/73; Churchill to Stalin, 9 April 1942, CHAR 20/73. Battlefield gases were not used against Finland: Gilbert (1986). For more details on Operation Jupiter, see Gilbert (1986:116, 121, 142–5, 231–2, 445–6); Polvinen (1979:157–70). Uuno Hannula’s address, 3 September 1943, in Wirtanen (1967:170–1). Churchill to Stalin, 20 March 1942, CHAR 20/108; Gilbert (1975b:75). Churchill to Eden, 21 October 1942, PREM 4/100/7; Churchill’s address, 21 March 1942, CS/7:6758; Polvinen (1979:195–6); Sainsbury (1985:24–35). Lord Moran diary, 12, 13, 14 and 15 August 1942, in Moran (1966:61, 62–4, 64–7, 69–70). Churchill to Eden, 21 October 1942, CHAR 20/67. Sainsbury (1985:13–35, 57–92); minutes of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow, 30 October 1942, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, I, General (Washington, DC: USGPO 1958): 681; secret enclosures to the minutes of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow, 30 October 1942, in Sainsbury (1985:315, 318–19). Minutes of secret conversations at the Teheran Conference, and of conversations between Roosevelt and Stalin, 1 December 1943, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 1943 (Washington, DC: USGPO 1958:590–5); minutes of conversations between Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, 1 December 1943, CHAR 23/13. See also Edmonds (1991:315–59); Sainsbury (1985:222, 240–59, 267–75, 293–309); Polvinen (1979:289–94). Charmley (1993:486–96, 538–40); Gilbert (1986:137–40); Jefferys (1995: 140–59, 170–2); Sainsbury (1985:240–1). Minutes of conversations between Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, 1 December 1943, CHAR 23/13; Churchill to Sir Alexander Cadogan, 25 October 1943 and Cadogan to Churchill, 27 October 1943, PREM 3/170/3. Aide Memoire, 19 February 1944, PREM 3/170/3; Churchill to Roosevelt, 21 March 1944, in Kimball (1984:61 [henceforth CR/3]); Churchill to Eden, 11 March 1944, PREM 3/170/3; Churchill to Roosevelt, 1 April 1944, CR/3:69. Roosevelt tended to agree: Sainsbury (1985:271–5, 293–5). Minutes of conversations between Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, 1 December 1943, CHAR 23/13; secret appendices to War Cabinet minutes, 11 and 20 April 1944, PREM 3/170/3; Churchill to Cadogan, 12 April 1944, PREM 3/170/3. Lord Moran diary, 29 November 1943, Moran (1966:151); Churchill to Eden, 1 April 1944, CHAR 20/152; Gilbert (1986:754–5).

NOTES 181

60 See Martti Turtola, Risto Ryti: Elämä isänmaan puolesta (Helsinki: Otava 1997: 275–305). 61 Sir Patrick Donner to Churchill, 20 June 1944, CHAR 20/141A; Churchill to Sir Patrick Donner, 25 June 1944, CHAR 20/137C; Polvinen (1980:31). 62 Polvinen (1980:106–24). 63 Churchill to Eden, 14 August 1944, CHAR 20/180; Churchill to Eden, 18 August 1944, CHAR 20/180; Churchill to Roosevelt, 18 August 1944, CHAR 20/170; Churchill to Lord Selborne, 18 August 1944, CHAR 20/153; Churchill to Brendan Bracken, 23 August 1944, CHAR 20/180; John Colville diary, 3 September 1944, in Colville (1985:508); Churchill to Roosevelt, 4 September 1944, CHAR 20/171; Roosevelt to Churchill, 26 August 1944, CHAR 20/170; Churchill to Stalin, 4 September 1944, CHAR 20/171; Churchill to Roosevelt, 4 September 1944, CR/ 3:309–10. 64 Lord Moran diary, 21 August 1944, Moran (1966:185). 65 Gilbert (1986:518, 919, 1087–104, 1108–36); Kimball (1998:272–4). 66 Lord Moran diary, 29 November 1944, Moran (1966:151); Churchill to General Eisenhower, 31 March 1945, CHAR 20/213; Churchill to Roosevelt, 5 April 1945, CHAR 20/124; Churchill to Harry Hopkins, 10 December 1944, CR/3: 451; Churchill to Roosevelt, 10 December 1944, CR/3:453–5. 67 Churchill to Roosevelt, 11 and 18 October 1944, CR/3:353, 359. See also Gilbert (1986:990–1031). Churchill had proposed such an arrangement in May 1944, but Roosevelt had declined: Churchill to Roosevelt, 31 May 1944, CR-CC/3:153–4; Roosevelt to Churchill, 10 and 22 June 1944, CR/3:177, 201. 68 Churchill’s memorandum, ‘Europe Since the Russian Revolution’, c. September 1944, CHAR 8/170; Lord Moran diary, 16 October 1944 and 11 February 1945, Moran (1966:217–18, 249–50); Churchill’s draft letter to Stalin, 11 October 1944, in Gilbert (1986:1020–1); Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper, 6 April 1944, CHAR 20/161; Churchill to Alexander Cadogan, 13 April 1944, CHAR 20/152; Churchill to Alfred Duff Cooper, 23 April 1944, CHAR 20/163; Churchill to Eden, 21 October 1942, CHAR 20/67; Lord Moran diary, 30 January 1943, Moran (1966:92). 69 Churchill to Eden, 31 March 1944, CHAR 20/152. 70 ‘Directive for British Section of Allied Control Commission in Finland’, FO 371/ 43196/N 6108. See also Nevakivi (1985:212; 1983:70–2); Polvinen (1986: 24–9, 58–9). 71 Churchill to Roosevelt, 17 September 1944, CR/3:329–30; Churchill to Roosevelt, 22 October 1944, CR/3:364; John Colville diary, 20 May 1945, in Colville (1985: 600); Nevakivi (1983:71–2); Polvinen (1981:37–8). 72 See Polvinen (1981:274–5). 73 J.K.Paasikivi diary, 15 November 1944, in Paasikivi (1985:60). 74 Browne (1985:132). 75 Stalin to Churchill, 27 May 1945, CHAR 20/220; Harry S.Truman to Churchill, 2 June 1946, CHAR 20/220; Gilbert (1988:97–8); Polvinen (1981:24–8). 76 Polvinen (1981:274; 1979:296–7). 77 J.K.Paasikivi diary, 27 January 1943, in Paasikivi (1985:217). 78 Minutes of conversations between Churchill and Stalin at Teheran, 1 December 1943, CHAR 23/13.

182 NOTES

6 CHURCHILL, FINLAND AND THE EARLY COLD WAR 1 Unless otherwise stated, the discussion in the next two paragraphs is based on Ruotsila (2001: Chapter 12). 2 ‘Wallace Skandinavian välittäjän tehtävästä’, Helsingin Sanomat, 23 March 1946:9. 3 See Berry (1987:334, 365–8); Suomi (1986). 4 Burnham (1947:23–33, 66–75, 90–117, 160–87, 193–6, 222–47; 1950:8–9, 90–1, 114–21, 131–7, 159–81, 190–8, 215–35). For biographical details, see Smant (1992:1–14). 5 Vesikansa (1996:39–41, 47–55, 79, 98,121–9). 6 Churchill’s draft for the Fulton address, dated 5 March 1946, in CHUR 5/4, Winston Churchill papers, Churchill College, Cambridge. 7 Churchill’s draft for an address, 5 March 1946, CHUR 5/4. 8 Churchill, quoted in Gilbert (1988:466). 9 For a detailed examination of Churchill’s late 1940s’ and early 1950s’ attempt to create such a modus vivendi, see Young (1996). Other useful discussions include Carlton (2000:162–99); Gilbert (1997); Young (1988). 10 Lord Moran diary, 7 March, 25 June, 10 July, 25 July and 27 July 1953 and 26 June 1954, in Moran (1966:429, 436, 456, 473, 475, 588–99); Churchill’s speeches, 17 December 1953, 25 February 1954, 1 March 1955, 10 May 1956, CS/ 8:232, 244–8, 265–70, 305–6. 11 I have argued this point at length in Ruotsila (2001: esp. 220–39, 243–6). 12 The catalysing impact of Churchill’s speech for all of these measures has been established in Harbutt (1986:205–13, 269–77, 280–5). 13 For introductions to these themes, see Carlton (2000:169); Gaddis (1990: 184–205); Hamby (1995:346–8, 387–93); LaFeber (1997:30–74); Paterson (1988:18–53, 114–46); Wells (1979:117–50). 14 Nevakivi (1983:18–19, 49–68); Rautkallio (1990:62–71). 15 Churchill to Eden, 21 October 1942, PREM 4/100/7; J.K.Paasikivi diary, 27 January 1943, in Paasikivi (1991:217); Lord Moran diary 8 August 1946 and 7 December 1947 in Moran (1966:337–8, 351–2); Churchill to Eden, 4 May 1945, quoted in Gilbert (1986:1329–30); Churchill’s addresses 21 January, 28 January, 4 February and 15 February 1950, CS/8:2, 11, 13, 42–3. For the 1942 plan regarding a Scandinavian federation, see also Polvinen (1979:195–6 and the sources cited therein). 16 Harbutt (1986:137). 17 Polvinen et al. (1999:400–15); Rautkallio (1990:44–5, 56–61, 124–7, 133–4). 18 ‘Churchillin puhe herättää huomiota’, Uusi Suomi, 7 March 1946:1; ‘Englantilaisvenäläinen vastakohta’, Helsingin Sanomat, 8 March 1946:4; ‘Churchillin puhe’, Uusi Suomi, 9 March 1946:1; ‘Kansainvälinen jännitys’, Helsingin Sanomat, 16 March 1946:4. 19 For the chronology, see Nevakivi (1983:78–88); Rautkallio (1990:44–53). The interpretation offered here differs significantly from that of these two works. 20 Churchill’s address, 19 September 1946, CHUR 5/8. For more on Churchill’s activities on behalf of the EDC, see Gilbert (1988:542, 682–99, 727, 789–93, 832–90, 925–32, 1003–8, 1036–57, 1089, 1103–9); Churchill memorandum

NOTES 183

21 22 23 24

‘United States of Europe, Statement of Aims’, [October 1946], CHUR 2/19; Churchill to Truman, 18 August 1950, CHUR 2/32. Urho Kekkonen to Churchill, 16 November 1953, CHUR 2/68; Suomi (1990: 198). Rautkallio (1990:196–205, 310); Rentola (1997:305). Cf. Polvinen et al. (1999:4, 514–16, 522–3, 530–1, 557–8). Lord Moran diary, 26 January 1952, 16 August 1953 and 26 June 1954, in Moran (1966:395, 481, 598–9); Browne (1995:124, 133–8); Young (1996:188–9, 226–7, 232, 249–53, 272–85).

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196

INDEX

Activist Party 25, 29, 35–7, 41 ADA see Americans for Democratic Action Afghanistan 17 Allied Control Commission of Finland 130–9, 137 Americans for Democratic Action 142 Amery, Leo 88, 91 Anglo-Finnish Society 12, 88 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement 46 anticommunism: Anglophone 27–34, 141–51; and convergence theories 26, 120–4, 143–8; Finnish 45, 48–49, 100–4, 113–17; military forms of 17, 20–2, 27–42, 125 Anti-Nazi Council 88 antisemitism 9, 11 Archangel 21, 32, 107 Arctic Sea 31, 105 Arms and the Covenant 50–5, 59, 157 Atlantic Charter 119, 122, 122 Australia 111 Austria 59

Bobrikov, Nikolai 11 Bolshevism 31, 82, 115 Border States: and the Grand Alliance 58–60, 62–6, 67, 125; in the Russian intervention 27, 33, 40–2, 155; social reforms in 47 Brest-Litovsk 17, 20 British Empire: dangers to 51, 132, 160; and the Second World War 119–3, 127, 132; and self-determination 9, 15, 127; its success 22 British Volunteer Contingent 91 Bryce, Lord 13 Bulgaria 27, 133, 134, 136 Burnham, James 143 Cairo Conference 125 Cecil, Lord Robert 113n1 Chaikovsky, Nikolai 38–39 Chamberlain, Neville: and appeasement 61–5; and the Grand Alliance, 72; in the Second World War 78, 90–3, 96, 116; and social reform 47 Churchill, Clementine 7 Churchill, Lady Jennie 5 Churchill, Lord Randolph 5–7 Churchill, Winston: at the Admiralty 68–99; and aid to Finland 86–91;

Baku 96 Balfour, Arthur 35, 41 Baltic Fleet 27 Baltic Sea 32, 70–4, 96, 144 Baltic States 27, 32, 67, 122–6, 133, 144 Battle of Britain 104, 109 Bavaria 24 Beaverbrook, Max 91, 115–20, 121, 122 Benelux 122, 146 Bevin, Ernest 142

197

198 INDEX

anticommunist thought of vii, 2–3, 7, 12–14, 17–25, 43–51, 65–7, 80–5, 98– 2, 102–7, 109, 124–32, 131–43, 154– 64; and declaration of war on Finland 110– 16; on fascism 45–49; and Finnish autonomy 15, 19; and Finnish war reparations 128, 135; and Franklin Roosevelt 118, 120–6, 126, 138 Fulton speech 144–9, 149, 154; geopolitical thought of 2, 9–10, 17–25, 49–2, 59–69, 73–6, 133–8, 154–64; on Germany 9–10, 16, 17–22, 45, 59– 2; and Grand Alliance 59–9, Churchill, Winston continued 71, 96–97, 109, 157; historiography 1, 97–1, imperialist thought of 7–8, 10–11, 17– 23, 43, 50–2; knowledge of Finland vii, 7, 9–10, 11, 14–15, 24, 43, 67, 158–3; on League of Nations 46–8, 50–5, 59–1, 74; as Liberal 9; Light of Freedom speech 81–7; and Mannerheim 1, 24, 30–8, 51–3, 55– 9, 113–18, 153, 155–60, 158; and neutrality 84, 139, 151–6; peripheral strategy of 119; and ‘radical democracy’ 47–9, 82–5; on Russia 9–13, 15–16, 17–20, 59–2; and Russian military intervention 16–42; and search for a modus vivendi 144–50, 152; second premiership of 152–7; as Secretary of War 16, 26; and Stalin 108–14, 124–9, 127, 136; at Versailles 26–8, 30–6; and War of 1941–44 106–43; at Yalta 134–7, 136 Citrine, Sir Raleigh 88 Civil Guards 14, 29, 36 Clarke, Sir George Sydenham see Sydenham, Lord

Coalition Group on Foreign Affairs 29 Cold War 146–8 communism 12–13, 16–16, 18, 20–3; see also anticommunism; Bolshevism; socialism, Stalin containment 142–7, 149 Continuation War see Finland, War of 1941–44 Conservative Party: and Bolshevism 23, 31; geostrategic views of, 10, 12; and Lord Randolph Churchill 5; and the Second World War 107, 115–19 cordon sanitaire 58, 125 Cork and Orrery, Lord 73, 74, 89 corporatism 48 Council of Action 142 Council of Four 33–6, 41 Cripps, Sir Stafford 104, 109, 121 Cromie, F.N.A. 23, 24 Czechoslovakia 20–2, 27–9, 59, 148 Curzon, Lord 41 Daily Mail 115 Daladier, Eduard 63, 64 Dardanelles 14, 71 Davies, Lord 88 Defence of Freedom and Peace Movement see Arms and the Covenant Denikin, Anton 27, 38 Denmark 131, 132, 148 Donner, Ossian 53 Donner, Sir Patrick 52–4, 56, 111–15, 129, 147, 170n22 Eastern Europe 122, 131, 132 see also Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania Eastern Karelia 1, 16, 25, 32, 110 Eastern Locarno 59, 62 EDC see European Defence Community Eden, Sir Anthony 54, 122, 124, 128, 153, 174n49; on Eastern Locarno 62;

INDEX 199

and the Finnish Control Commission 135, 137; Finnish views about 176n9; and peace settlement after Second World War 125–30; views about Finland 105, 111, 115–20, 130, 135, 137; views about Russia 61, 107, 124–9, 130 Egypt 7, 107 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 132 Elizabeth II 151 entente cordiale 11 Entente Internationale contre le III:e Internationale 48 Estonia 40, 62 European Defence Community 150 European integration 134, 150 fascism 45–53, 154 Fenno-Scandinavian federation 104, 124– 9, 148, 150 Finland: Grand Duchy of 8–16; intelligence services 52; interim peace 103; SS battalion 105; at war against Britain 118–43; War of Independence 3, 8, 15–16, 24–6, 28, 55–8, 71, 155; War of 1941–44 3, 100, 114–18, 118–43; Winter War 3, 65, 68–99 Finland Fund 88; see also Finnish Aid Bureau Finnish Aid Bureau 89, 91 Finnish Defence Council 52–4 Finnish Defence League 48 First World War 13–17, 55 Fourteen Points 15 France 59, 83, 122 Franco, Fransisco 48 Gällivare 75, 84 General Strike 46, 154 Geopolitics 11, 17–22, 120, 154–62; heartland, doctrines 19;

see also Mahan; Mackinder, realpolitik George V 30, 51 Germany 10, 16, 22 Gibson, Harold 91 Gladstone, William Ewart 8, 10 Golovin, Nikolai 31–3, 34 Golz, Rudiger von der 56 Göring, Hermann 52 Gough, Sir Hubert de la Poer 31–3, 37 Grand Alliance: Churchill’s plans for 57–68, 71, 85, 96, 100–4, 109, 131, 156, 159 Great Powers 1, 10, 57, 113, 158 Greece 128, 131–7, 146 Gripenberg, G.A. 86, 88, 96, 115 Gulf of Finland 63, 122, 126 Halifax, Lord 60, 67, 78 Hanko 127 Hitler, Adolf: in the Second World War 45, 68, 96, 107, 109, 111, 131 Hoare, Sir Samuel: and the Russian intervention 29, 33–5, 38; and the Winter War 78, 88–1, 96 Holsti, Rudolf Hoover, Herbert 26 Hoover-Nansen Plan 26, 31 Hopkins, Harry Hungary 24, 27, 133 Hyndman, Henry M. 12 India: and the defense of the British Empire 7, 10, 17, 43, 53, 109, 120–8, 146 Iran 109 Ireland 9, 10, 31, 122 Ironside, Edmund 78, 91 Italy 47–9, 53, 91, 128, 131 Japan 11, 118, 120 Jägers 8, 14, 29 Karelia 122 see also Eastern Karelia

200 INDEX

Kekkonen, Urho 141, 151, 152 Kennan, George F. 142 Kerr, Philip 169n49 Kirkkoniemi 106 Knox, Alfred 90 Kola Peninsula 27 Kolchak, Alexandr 27, 32–7 Kotlas-Viatka plan 32–7, 78 Kronstadt 71 Labour Party 12, 46, 115–20, 154 Lapua Movement 48 Latvia 40 League of Nations 46, 50–5, 60, 74, 81, 88 leand-lease 101, 107, 119 Lenin, Vladimir 12, 24 Leningrad see St Petersburg Liberal Party 8, 10 Ling, Christopher 90, 93, 174n50 Linkomies, Edwin 114 Lloyd George, David: and Bolshevism 23; and the Russian intervention 26, 28, 30, 33, 36, 38–41; and the Second World War 115 Locarno Treaty 59, 145 Louis XVI 5 Luleå 76 Macdonough, Sir George 88 Mackinder, Sir Halford 19, 132 Macmillan, Harold 88–1 Mahan, Admiral 18 Maisky, Ivan 51, 59–1, 109, 112, 116 Mannerheim, Carl Gustaf Emil: 104–8, 115, 153, 155; anticommunism of 61, 155, 159; career 28–29; and Churchill 1, 24, 30–8, 51–3, 55–8, 111–18, 153, 155, 159; on Germany 52–5, 104–8, 113–17; as head of the Finnish Defense Council 52; on the League of Nations 53–5, 61; and Ling mission 90, 93; planned coup by 35, 37; as presidential candidate 35;

as Regent 28–29, 32, 35; and Russian intervention 28–42; on the Second World War 104–8; trips to Britain 29, 61; in War of Independence 14–15, 24; in War of 1941–44 112–17, 129; in Winter War 90, 93–7, 159 Marlborough, Duke of 5 Marshall Plan 146 Mediterranean 119 Miller, General 27 Molotov, Vjateschlav 124, 128 Moscow Conference 125 Mussolini, Benito 47–9 NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nazism 45–7, 49–4, 57, 59–1, 74, 82–5 127, 157 Nazi-Soviet pact 64–7, 80 Netherlands 54 Nevakivi, Jukka 161n1 New Deal 46, 120–4, 147 New Liberalism 26 Niukkanen, Juho 94 North Africa 109, 119 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 148, 150 Norway 70–99, 107, 124 NSC-68 146 Nuffield, Lord 91 Olonets 3, 16, 25, 32 Omsk 27 Onassis, Aristotle 7 Operation Avonmouth 77–99, 108 Operation Barbarossa 101–5 Operation Catherine 72–99 Operation Jupiter 124–8 Operation Lumps 72, 75–8 Operation Manna 132 Operation Stratford 77–99 Operation Wilfred 72, 75–8 Oslo Declaration 54, 64, 83, 85, 92 Öxelosund 76, 90 Paasikivi, Juho Kusti 149–5, 153, 176n4

INDEX 201

Pakaslahti, Aarno 86 Paris Peace Treaty 130 Pearl Harbor 102, 118, 120, 122 Percy, Earl (later 8th Duke of Northumberland) 10, 11 Petrograd see St Petersburg Petsamo 76, 86, 105, 106, 156 Phillimore, Lord 88, 112 Pilsudski, Jozef 39 Poland: and the Grand Alliance 62–4; and the Russian intervention 15, 16, 24, 27, 38–40; in the Second World War 108–12 Portugal 12–13 Prinkipo Plan 26 racism 13 Rapallo Treaty 59 realpolitik 2, 50, 133, 142; see also geopolitics Red Terror 23–5 Ribbentrop, Joachim 109, 129 Romania: and the Russian intervention 27; and the Second World War 62–4, 122, 122, 133–8, 136 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 46, 120–4, 126–1, 137 Roosevelt, Kermit 91 Roosevelt, Theodore 20, 91 Russia: empire 10–11; see also anticommunism, Bolshevism, St Petersburg, Soviet Union, Stalin Russophobia 5, 9, 29, 62–4 Russo-Polish War 16, 40, 58 Ryti, Risto 104, 113–18, 129 Ryti-Ribbentrop Agreement 129 Savinkov, Boris 38–39 Scandinavia: in the Cold War 141, 148, 150–6; in the Second World War 46, 54, 104, 122, 124–9 self-determination 9, 14–15, 119, 122–7 Siberia 27, 31, 37

Slavophobia see Russophobia Social Darwinism 10 Socialism 12–14, 22–6, 46–8 see also communism; Labour Party Socialist International 12 South Africa 7 Soviet Union: aid to 108, 116–20; possibility of separate peace with Germany 108, 118, 122; see also communism; Bolshevism, Stalin Spears, Sir Edward 31–3, 37, 39 St Petersburg 7; intervention planned for 16, 23, 25, 31–42, 47, 58, 96; negotiations with Bolsheviks at 20; Red Terror in, 23–5 Stalin, Joseph: and the Second World War 107–11, 110, 116, 124–33, 136, 151, 156 Struggle for the World 143 Ståhlberg, Kaarlo Juho 36, 37 Sutherland, Sir William 30 Sweden: aid to Finland 76–99; in the Cold War 155; iron ore 70–99 Sydenham, Lord 10–11, 164n22 Tanner, Väinö 94, 113 Teheran Conference 125–31, 129 Third International 116 Trades Union Congress 88 Travers, Rosalind 12 Tripolitania 146 Trondheim 77 Truman Doctrine 146 Truman, Harry S. 136, 146, 149 TUC see Trades Union Congress Turkey 132, 146 Ulster 31 United States of Europe 134, 150 Urals 27

202 INDEX

Versailles Conference 17, 19–1, 26–8, 329, 41–4 Victoria, Queen 5 Vienna 132, 133 Vistula River 131 Vladivostok 27 Vychega River 32 Wallace, Henry A. 141, 143 War of 1941–44 see Finland Warsaw Pact 40 WEU see Western European Union Western European Union 147–2 Wilson, Sir Henry 30–2, 38 Wilson, Woodrow 13–14, 15, 26, 28, 30, 33, 41 Winter War see Finland World War, First see First World War World War, Second: peripheral strategy 119 Yalta Conference 136 Yudenich, Nikolay 27, 31, 33, 36 Yugoslavia 128, 131, 133, 146