Europe’s history offers a template, but it’s unlikely to fit Ukraine
The circumstances that led to the outbreak of war between Finland and the Soviet Union on November 30, 1939, are well-known. After the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in late August 1939, Joseph Stalin’s focus shifted to preventing Finland, the Baltic States and the Baltic Sea from being used to launch attacks on the USSR. In September and early October, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were coerced into “mutual assistance” pacts with the Soviet Union that paved the way for their annexation. Finland, however, rejected Stalin’s sweeping territorial demands, triggering the Soviet invasion.
The Soviets claimed the invasion was legitimate under their doctrine of “indirect aggression”, which stated that any “internal change or change of foreign policy” by a neighbouring government that could facilitate an attack on the USSR amounted to aggression. As a result, by rejecting the USSR’s demands, Finland had committed an act of war, with the Soviet action being mere self-defence.
However, legal pretences aside, Stalin’s decision was based on his conviction that a “military weakness and internal divisions” made Finland an easy target, ensuring the war would be over “in 12 days”. As the Red Army swept to victory it would, his intelligence services claimed, be “cheered on by happy Finns, free from the yoke of Fascist oppression”.
In reality, the Soviets’ overwhelming numerical superiority did not stop the Finns from bringing the invasion to a blood-soaked halt, before a complete change in the Red Army’s strategy and tactics led to a Soviet breakthrough in February 1940. Fearful of being “wiped off the map”, the Finns agreed to negotiate, finally making significant territorial concessions in the Moscow Treaty of March 12, 1940.
That agreement proved short-lived. When Hitler launched “Operation Barbarossa” in June 1941, the Finns joined the German attack on the USSR and once again proved their fighting prowess. Indeed, even after the German army had all but collapsed, the Finnish armed forces managed to prevent the Red Army from occupying Finland.
It was nonetheless apparent by then that the Finns could not prevail. They were consequently forced into a second round of territorial concessions, albeit ones that left the bulk of pre-war Finland intact.
That Stalin accepted the June 1944 armistice was understandable: his priority was the march on Berlin. What needs explaining, however, is that even after Germany’s capitulation the Soviet Union neither occupied Finland nor sought to transform it into a full-blown “people’s democracy”.
Instead, the 1947 Finnish-Soviet Peace Treaty and the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance allowed Finland greater autonomy than any of the USSR’s satellite states.
That was partly because the USSR had achieved its initial goal. Given the Soviets’ territorial gains, there was no conceivable scenario in which Finland could be used by a third power to stage an attack on the USSR. The crucial factor, however, was that attempting to completely suborn Finland might provoke a renewal of the war, dangerously undermining Stalin’s grand strategy.
In effect, by 1947-48, Stalin had three major objectives. The first was to consolidate the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe and on the Soviet zone in Germany, both of which imposed substantial demands on the Red Army.
A second was to prevent Sweden, Denmark and Norway from going ahead with a proposed Nordic Defence Union, which would have given the soon to be formed NATO a platform from which to attack the USSR’s northern flank. Sweden told Stalin it was willing to scuttle the Nordic Defence Union, and not seek security guarantees from the US-led alliance, if and only if he desisted from making Finland a Soviet satellite.
Finally, a third objective was to secure Communist participation in the coalitions governing France and Italy. A renewed invasion of Finland could scupper the electoral prospects of those countries’ communist parties, which were masquerading as champions of national sovereignty. But none of that meant the Soviet Union withdrew from Finnish affairs. On the contrary, Finland was forced into a condition of coerced neutrality, which Finland’s leading political parties enforced by ensuring the politicians the USSR regarded as “unfriendly” were excluded from senior positions, that the media remained extremely circumspect in its attitude to the Soviet Union, and that all major foreign policy decisions were quietly cleared through the KGB.
As anti-Soviet politicians were starved of funds and relegated to the sidelines, while the Soviet Union’s “friends” received massive support, a deeply ingrained culture of anticipatory acquiescence to Soviet demands developed, in what became known as Finlandisation but would be better described as “Helsinki syndrome”.
Yet no matter how seriously that corrupted the Finnish polity, it did not undermine the Cold War peace, which was solidly anchored by the bipolar global order. Finland’s fate consequently had few wider ramifications. But that is no longer the world we live in.
The bipolar anchor, and the stability it brought, have disappeared, creating no end of opportunities for revanchist autocracies. Moreover, after three years of intense combat, Vladimir Putin’s military is more credible and capable, and his hold on power even firmer, than in 2022, while his ambitions remain untamed. Nor are there factors at work comparable to those that restricted Stalin’s claims over Finland.
Even were Ukraine to obtain effective security guarantees – and that is far from certain – Putin’s strengthened resources of credibility, force and power are therefore likely to be put to use, both at Russia’s fringes and elsewhere. That is not to blame Trump, who is making the best of a bad lot. Rather, the fault lies squarely with the Europeans, who passively accepted the annexation of Crimea and did nothing whatsoever to enforce the agreements that had been reached about the Donbas.
To make things worse, once the war started, their military assistance was so paltry, and, like the Biden administration’s, so laden with restrictions, that the Ukrainians could not strike a decisive blow when the invading forces were at their weakest.
As Russia absorbs what was Ukrainian territory, China will not hesitate to draw the lessons of this conflict – which, along with that in Gaza, defines the era – and translate them into action. And no lesson is starker than the fact that one has go back to the 1930s to find a time when the democracies so largely lacked the will to win or were so readily, and so cheaply, intimidated into anticipatory acquiescence.
With our own government showing a timidity worthy of Helsinki at the height of the Cold War, there is no need to ask for whom the bell of Finlandisation now tolls. It tolls for you and me.
More Coverage
Pact to make nation more secure
As Donald Trump seeks to shepherd Russia and Ukraine into a negotiated agreement, the similarities to the Finnish-Soviet wars that raged from 1939 to 1944 are overwhelming. But while the settlement of those wars did stem the bloodshed, preserve Finland’s democratic constitution and retain elements of its sovereignty, the longer-term consequences of the current process are far harder to predict.