Continuation War: The Road to War Again...

The Road to the Continuation War

Relations with Russia.
The terms of the Moscow peace treaty had been hard, although the independence had been saved, at least for the time being. The Finnish population was in a kind of shock. On top of all the personal tragedies and losses the whole situation was felt deeply unfair and degrading. A big neighbour just grabs a piece of your country because he sees fit to do so and to add insult to injury, the new border was far west of the line held by the troops on the last day of the war. But even worse was the uncertainness of the future. What were really the intentions of the Russians? To make matters worse Russia continually harassed Finland with new petty demands. As an example they demanded that Finland should turn over 10 % of the rolling stock of the railroad system to them, based on the fact that 10 % of the tracks were located in the areas ceded in the treaty. Finland had to comply. Further they suddenly vetoed a Swedish-Finnish plan to form a defence union, a plan they had at first quietly accepted. This and other new re-interpretations of the peace treaty gave the impression of either a sadistic inclination or a whish to provoke a crisis which could then be used as an excuse for occupying the country. In the summer 1940 a Finnish passenger plane on the route from Tallinn in Estonia to Helsinki was shot down soon after take-off. There were no survivors. A Russian submarine was waiting at the splash-down site and quickly recovered the mail-bags. Later the same day Russian troops occupied all of Estonia and Latvia. Lithuania had been occupied four days earlier. Soon after that all three countries “asked” to be incorporated into the Soviet Union, through very questionable popular votes. Was this the same fate Stalin planned for Finland?
In Finland all this created fear. And fear leads to readiness to take desperate actions. What could have been a mutually advantageous start of a new friendlier era in the relationship between Finland and Russia in the middle of tumultuous Europe turned into a festering boil.
Finland was forcibly driven into the arms of Russia’s worst enemy, Hitler’s Germany. If one tries to find an explanation to this behaviour of Russia it is difficult to come up with anything but human weaknesses. Not only had Finland made Russia look weak, an unforgivable sin by a small neighbour against a major power (See note below) but it had completely upset Stalin’s plans. His major goal was to keep the Soviet Union out of he Second World War for as long as possible while he built up the country’s military power. In the meantime Germany and the western powers were expected to fight each one other into exhaustion whereupon Russia could come in and take over. Now Finland’s intransigence created a situation were there was a real risk that Russia would have been drawn into the war years too early and on top of that on the German side! So maybe Stalin (and Molotov) in 1940 succumbed to the very human temptation of paying back for the humiliation and change of plans forced upon them by a minor country, a country that really shouldn’t exist at all but rather be a Russian province!
Although with a fair amount of hind-sight, one can easily say that all through 1940 Russia did its best to shoot itself in the foot in respect of its relations with Finland.

Note:
It has sometimes been suggested that the whole Winter War with its rather mediocre performance by the Russian army was a major deception thought up by Stalin in order to deceive Germany that Russia was weak. There is no denying that it had such an outcome but that far from proves that that was the original intentions. Quite the contrary, it was far more likely that it was in Stalin’s interest to give the impression that Russia was strong. His goal was to buy time, not entice Hitler to an early attack.