Tightrope: Finland and Hungary in the Cold War

By Dennis Werling

Finland and Hungary both fought on the losing side in WWII. Yet the former was able to resist the overwhelming power of its Soviet neighbour, while Hungary, whose status was uncertain until 1947, was not. Could the revolt of 1956 have been a turning point? How did the Helsinki Accords contribute to the end of the Cold War?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398478381

Dennis Werling

Dennis Werling is an independent scholar with degrees in international relations, political science and history from the Universities of Minnesota (BA, 1966), Michigan (MA, 1968), and Western Illinois (MA, 2001), respectively.

Book preview

About the Author

Dennis Werling is an independent scholar with degrees in international relations, political science and history from the Universities of Minnesota (BA, 1966), Michigan (MA, 1968), and Western Illinois (MA, 2001), respectively.

Dedication

To Anita and for Dietrich.

Copyright Information ©

Dennis Werling 2023

The right of Dennis Werling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398477001 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398478374 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398478381 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

The material on the Winter War was obtained from the archives at the Finnish-American Heritage Center at Suomi College (now Finlandia University) with the help of the late archivist, Rev. Olaf Rankinnen. The author acknowledges the help and criticisms of his thesis adviser, Dr Sterling Kernek, and committee members Nicholas Pano, George Hopkins, and the late Darrell Dykstra.

He is grateful to the editors at Austin Macauley for the clarity and readability added to what was an academic exercise.

Introduction

War between Russia and Ukraine has raised again the possibility of great power conflict, as well as the dilemma of whether a smaller borderland should seek security in a defensive alliance or in territorial compromise. Can an aggressor be appeased? Is this Munich all over again?

In his book, We Now Know, historian John Lewis Gaddis refers to Czech President Eduard Benes’s bargain in December 1943 for internal autonomy in exchange for Soviet influence over foreign and military policy. Gaddis writes that Stalin’s willingness to accept compromise is evident in the permanent settlement with Finland and the free elections held in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet occupation zone in Germany.

Asking why the Czech-Finnish solution worked only in Finland and nowhere else, Gaddis suggests that at least part of the answer was the Finns’ remarkable qualities of self-control. In his brief account of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Gaddis describes Soviet confusion and delay before the decision was made to crush the revolt, but does not delve into the possibility of a compromise, like the one Władysław Gomułka had achieved in Poland earlier that spring.

Commenting on Eastern Europe shortly before his death, historian Adam Ulam wrote, ‘In what might be called the folklore of the Cold War, the region’s absorption by Communism was predetermined when it was occupied by the Red Army during the latter phase of World War II and by the Western allies’ acquiescence in this new status, as demonstrated at Yalta.’

Ulam asked, ‘Did we, whether scholars, world leaders, or average citizens, correctly understand the motivations behind the Soviet Union’s policies at crucial points of the Cold War?’ He continued, ‘The case of Finland is instructive in this respect. Although, the Finns deferred to their powerful neighbour in foreign affairs and defence policies, they were permitted to retain a democratic system. Why was Finland allowed to have internal freedom while Hungary, say, was not?’

Finland’s balancing act under two presidents, Juho K. Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen, during the Cold War is all the more remarkable because, like Hungary, Finland had been an ally of Germany. Yet Finland avoided Soviet occupation.

A German scholar credits three men with rescuing Finland from domination by its giant neighbour: (1) Marshal Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim, a thirty-year veteran of the Imperial Russian Army, who led the White Army during the civil war and the Finnish army during its three wars of World War II; (2) Social Democratic leader Väinö Tanner, who helped give Finland parliamentary and social stability between the wars; and (3) Juho K. Paasikivi, who had negotiated with the Russians since Tsarist times and was Finland’s president from 1946 to 1956.

That the two victorious superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., would engage in a new rivalry is not surprising considering their conflicting ideologies. The rivalry was expressed in alliance-building, an arms race, limited wars, proxy wars, and sphere hegemony. At the wartime conferences at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, Finland and Hungary were consigned to the Soviet sphere. Yet their dramatically different fates were largely determined before war’s end.

In 1939, Finnish leaders had tried to remain apart from Great Power conflict. In 1941, they joined what appeared to be the stronger side, but, when Germany faltered, were able to switch sides, losing Karelia permanently. While the Finns met Soviet demands by their own efforts, Hungarians in 1956 looked to external sources for aid—intervention by the West or the United Nations.

Centuries of both peaceful and hostile interaction had given Finns and Russians a certain affinity and tolerance for each other. During the Great Northern Wars, Russians had occupied parts of Finland. Finland was freed from six hundred years of Swedish rule by Tsar Alexander I.

From 1809 to 1917, Finland enjoyed special privileges as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. Khrushchev liked to refer to their common struggle in an inhospitable environment. Swedish neutrality and unofficial aid benefitted Finland during and after World War II.

For protection against the Turks, Hungarians passed the Crown of St Stephen to the Hapsburg Emperor and allied themselves with German princes. Louis Kossuth’s bid for independence from Austria in 1848–49 was suppressed by a Russian army. After defeat with Germany in World War I, Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and half of its population in the Treaty of Trianon imposed by the Allies.

Losing again in World War II and surrounded by states with which it had territorial disputes, Hungary had nowhere to turn for help resisting Soviet domination.

Part I provides the historical setting. Chapter 1 gives historical background up through the immediate aftermath of World War I. Finland gained independence from Sweden in 1809, and from Russia in 1918. In Hungary in 1919, Béla Kun briefly established the first soviet republic outside of Russia.

Chapter 2 describes how the Finns gradually developed a social democracy after a bloody civil war. A White reaction in Hungary crushed Kun’s revolution. While the regime of Miklos Horthy maintained the feudal social structure, Kun exiles received Comintern training and waited for another chance to revolutionise Hungary.

The three wars Finland fought in World War II are discussed in Chapter 3. During the Winter War, the Finns held off the mighty Red Army from the end of November 1939 until the middle of March 1940, rejecting the aid of an Anglo-French expeditionary force that would have embroiled them in the larger war. Allied with Germany in the Continuation War, 1941–44, the Finns temporarily regained territory lost in 1940.

Finally, they fought the Lapland War, 1944–45, against their former German brothers-in-arms, which Stalin demanded as a condition of the peace treaty. This allowed the Finns to leave the war without being occupied. Hungary’s attempt to negotiate with the Russians was forestalled by German occupation.

Fighting continued until the country was liberated and occupied by the Red Army. Despite pillage, rape and deportations, many Hungarians, especially Jews, were grateful for liberation from the Nazi terror.

Chapters 4 and 5 concern the post-war lull, 1945 to 1947, during which the Soviet Union and the United States were trying to decide what to do with Germany and probing each other’s intentions. Meanwhile, the Finns’ main challenge was to fulfil the terms of the peace treaty under Russian supervision.

Hungary entered a period of political struggle between the pre-war bourgeois parties and the Communists led by Kun émigrés who returned from Moscow. The Communists gradually co-opted or destroyed their opposition and declared the Hungarian People’s Republic in 1949.

Part II deals with the Cold War period, focusing on relations between these two small borderland countries and the Soviet Union. Taking 1947 as the year that cooperation between East and West decisively broke down, chapter 6 describes the Communist reimposition of class warfare and purges in Hungary. Economic problems and popular discontent resulted in a period of relaxation after Stalin’s death—Imre Nagy’s New Course.

A treaty of friendship between Finland and the Soviet Union, negotiated after the coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, was viewed in the West as a sign of intensifying Soviet domination, but formed the basis for amicable relations between the two countries for the next forty years.

Chapter 7 examines the Cold War, emphasising the continuity of wartime covert operations by both East and West, the mobilisation precipitated by the Korean War, and the avowed intent of the Eisenhower administration to rollback communism.

Finland’s two diplomatic crises during this period and the nature of what Western cold warriors called finlandisation are treated in chapter 8.

Cold War tension reached a flashpoint in the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. Chapter 9 presents events leading up to this spontaneous outburst, especially the Polish crisis and Petöfi Circle demonstrations, and the ten days during which Imre Nagy gained support of both rebel groups and the Soviet Presidium. The Malin Notes provide an unprecedented look at the inner councils of Soviet decision-making.

Chapter 10 discusses the reactions of Moscow and Washington to the crises in Poland and Hungary, as well as the effects of the Suez Crisis. The Soviet military intervention is the subject of chapter 11. A withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest was negotiated by Imre Nagy on 30 October, the day that Khrushchev issued his declaration of support.

They took up positions encircling the city. The influx of Soviet troops from 31 October to 4 November was to reinforce the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary in preparation for Operation Whirlwind, approved by the Kremlin on the night of 31 October. Could the Soviet attack, prepared well in advance, have been halted, as it was in Poland? Probably not, considering the subsequent crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.

Chapter 12 traces the gradual development of peaceful co-existence in Europe in which Finland played a vital role by sponsoring the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Basket Three of the Helsinki Accords, signed in 1975, opened the door to dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that became part of the tidal wave of popular opposition that brought down the Berlin Wall (after the Hungarian decision to open its borders in October 1989).

After 1956, Hungarians suffered retribution and three decades of stasis during which the Party presided over gradual economic liberalisation (the New Course redux) the topic of Chapter 13. The strange odyssey of Cardinal Mindszenty mirrors the dead-end to which the superpower policies in the Cold War had led.

The Conclusion, chapter 14, makes a case for the ability of a small power to influence a powerful hegemon, given the right circumstances. The Finns survived as a free people during this turbulent century because of their willingness to follow experienced leaders in peace and in war—leaders who knew when to resist and when to make bargains that their own people would accept. Hungarians, allied more closely with Germany and less unified as a nation, were not able to convince the Kremlin of their reliability.

If human factors—leadership and social cohesion—played determining roles in the fates of Finland and Hungary at the outset of the Cold War, they were also crucial in contributing to its end. The human rights initiatives sparked by the Helsinki Accords and Hungary’s role as a model for the rest of Eastern Europe resulted at last in popular demands for the free flow of ideas, trade and people that finally broke through Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain.

Part 1: Historical Background

Chapter 1: Revolution and Independence

In 1976, Americans celebrated two hundred years of independence. We have no personal memory of life under foreign occupation or the threat of invasion. We may recall that George Washington received his military training in the British Army and that not everyone supported independence from England. Many Royalists fled to Canada.

Finland and Hungary were subjected to long periods of foreign domination, achieving independence only in recent times.

Finland Gains Independence from Sweden and Russia

Raiders from the land of the Rus were the Finns’ traditional enemy long before Finland, as part of the Kingdom of Sweden, became embroiled in Great Power conflicts. The Finns were Christianised by Swedish crusaders during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the late fifteenth century, as the Grand Duchy of Moscow expanded and Novgorodians laid claim to Karelia, Axel Tott built Olof’s Castle (Olavinlinna) to protect Finnish settlers. It remains the best-preserved medieval fortress in northern Europe.¹

Tott also surround the city of Viipuri (Vyborg) with turreted walls; his brother, Laurens, made peace with the Russians in 1482. During six centuries of Swedish rule, Finns distinguished themselves in battle, notably under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War. During the Great Northern Wars, Russia occupied Finland twice, periods still known as the Great Wrath (1710–1721) and the Lesser Wrath (1742–1743).²

Finland became part of Russia, thanks to an agreement between Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon. In the Treaty of Tilsit (1807), signed after Russian defeats at Eylau and Friedland, Napoleon encouraged Alexander to attack Sweden (an ally of England) and asked him to join the Continental System, an economic blockade against England. In return, France would support Russian ambitions to advance against the Ottoman Empire.

Alexander defeated the Swedish-Finnish army, but Napoleon reneged on letting Russia gain Balkan territory. Worried about continuing Finnish resistance and uneasy about Napoleon’s intentions, Alexander treated the Finns generously. He convened the Finnish Diet of the Four Estates (aristocracy, clergy, burghers, peasants) at Porvoo and agreed to uphold the religion and fundamental Laws of the Land, as well as the privileges and rights which each estate in the said Grand Duchy, in particular, and all the inhabitants, in general, be their position high or low, have hitherto enjoyed.³

The Diet accepted the Tsar’s promise and in return pledged their fealty. Alexander became the Grand Duke of Finland and its protector. Sweden recognised this transfer in the Peace of Hamina, signed in September 1809, ceding the eastern part of Finland (Karelia) to Russia, the part which became Soviet Karelia. The border with Sweden was fixed along the Muonio and Tornio Rivers.

The Finnish army was temporarily disbanded, but pensions for officers and NCOs procured their accord. The Tsar rejected continuation of a national army, but allowed Finns to form local militia units, rather than be drafted into the Imperial army.

Finnish became an official language, something Sweden had not permitted.⁴

The Finns’ personal relationship with the Tsar (the oath and pledge of personal fealty) set Finland apart from the other provinces of Russia. The Finns gradually asserted political autonomy by passing internal laws and submitting them to the court for approval.

Nationalism reared its head during the nineteenth century. A Finnish country doctor, Elias Lönnrot, collected the legendary songs of Karelia and set them into the epic poem, The Kalevala, inspiring a surge of interest in Finnish history and language. Pan-Slavism and the desire to spread Orthodox Christianity brought attempts by the last two tsars, Alexander III (1881–1894) and Nicholas II (1894–1917), to russify Finland.

Governor-General Nicholas Bobrikov issued decrees without consulting the Finnish Senate and made the study of the Russian language compulsory. The last straw was the Conscription Law of 1901 that dissolved Finnish military units and drafted Finns into the Russian Army. Otherwise at loggerheads, the two national linguistic parties, Fennomen and Sveccomen, united against this arbitrary action.

In a ten-day campaign, without the knowledge of the Governor-General, leaders collected over half a million signatures on a petition to rescind the law. A delegation carried the trunks of petitions to St Petersburg.

Nicholas II refused to receive them and the situation continued to deteriorate.⁵ Eugen Schauman, a young Finnish patriot, assassinated Bobrikov in 1904. Due to defeat in the Russo-Japanese war and the 1905 revolution, there was a lull in Russian pressure, but the tsarist bureaucracy soon reasserted itself.

In the Finnish Senate, ‘Young Finns’ favoured resistance, while Old Compliants hoped to convince the Tsar to reinstate Finnish autonomy. Among the latter was Senator Juho Kusti Paasikivi, just beginning a lengthy career in politics. He had written his doctoral thesis at the University of Novgorod on Russo-Scandinavian relations.⁶

In 1908, Paasikivi and others left the senate to protest what they felt were dangerously anti-Russian policies, but the appeasers were in the minority. At the Olympic Games in London in 1908, Finnish athletes refused to march into the stadium behind the Russian flag.⁷

When the war broke out in 1914, two thousand young Finns enlisted in the German army. They were formed into the 27th Prussian Light Infantry (Jäger) Battalion and fought against Russia on the Baltic front.

Russian defeat in the Great War provided the opportunity for the Finns at last to gain independence. The Tsar’s overthrow in March 1917 abrogated what the Finns considered to be a personal union. The Social Democratic Party (founded in 1899) passed a resolution proposing that Finland secede. Alexander Kerensky, head of the Russian Provisional Government, travelled to Helsinki to urge the Finns to remain loyal.

V. I. Lenin arrived in St Petersburg from Switzerland to lead the Bolsheviks. When he was accused of spying for the Germans, it was a Red Finn, Eino Rakhya, who spirited him back to safety in Finland.⁸

Kerensky, by acquiescing to Western pressure to continue the war against Germany, lost the support of the Russian people. There ensued the Bolshevik coup and Lenin’s return via the Finland Station. In Helsinki, while Russian troops demonstrated threateningly outside, the Senate voted for independence, which President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud proclaimed on 6 December 1917. It was uncertain how the new Bolshevik government would react.

Finnish Leftists wanted to overthrow the bourgeois government. Trotsky, negotiating with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, was unhappy about the concessions Lenin was willing to make to secure peace. Among the German demands was that the Russians recognise Finnish independence.

A young Georgian named Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili had written a tract in 1913 on the position of nationalities within the Russian Empire. Nationalism, he wrote, was a right that defined a people, although, as a bourgeois sentiment, it would vanish in the future. On 15 November 1917, the Council of Peoples Commissars issued The Declaration on Nationalism promoting the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia and their right to self-determination.⁹

Bukharin and others argued against allowing Finland to secede, but Lenin upheld the principle. On New Year’s Eve, 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars voted to recognise Finnish independence.¹⁰

Lenin sent the newly appointed Commissar for Nationalities, Djugashvili, to Helsinki for a ceremony. It was the first appearance on the world stage for the man who would henceforth be known as Josef Stalin. He declaimed:

Full freedom to shape their own life is given to the Finns as well as to other peoples of Russia! A voluntary and honest alliance between the Finnish and Russian peoples! No tutelage, no control from above over the Finnish people! These are the guiding principles of the policy of the Council of People’s Commissars.¹¹

Banquet speeches should be taken cum grano salis, but in bargaining with the Finns, Stalin always treated them as equals and worthy adversaries.¹²

Lenin’s motives for granting Finnish independence are no less inscrutable than Stalin’s in not occupying the country after World War II. Facing mounting opposition from White forces, Lenin may have hoped for Western recognition of his own government. Alexandra Kollontai, a member of the Bolshevik inner circle who had studied labour conditions in Finland, advised Lenin that granting independence would garner support for the leftist movement there.¹³

It was an article of Bolshevik faith that workers of other countries would overthrow their bourgeois governments to join the first workers’ state.

Russian troops stationed in Finland were ready to help Red Guard units being formed by Communist-dominated labour unions. In the civil war, which broke out immediately, the Reds captured the industrial cities of the south, including Helsinki. President Svinhufvud called up a general who had recently retired from thirty-years of service in the Imperial Russian Army to ask what should be done. General Mannerheim advised the politicians to leave town as fast as they could. Svinhufvud appointed Mannerheim commander of the Civil Guards (Whites).

Gustav Mannerheim is one of the most remarkable military leaders of the twentieth century. Scion of a family of minor Swedo-Finnish nobility, he transferred to the Nikolaevsky Cavalry School in St Petersburg, after being expelled from the cadet school in Helsinki. On graduation, he joined the Chevalier Guards and served as one of four honour guards at the coronation of Emperor Nicholas II on 26 May 1896.

He married the daughter of a Russian general, served with a cavalry regiment in Poland, and fought with the 52nd Nezhin Dragoon Regiment at Mukden in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). From 1906 to 1908, he led an expedition by horseback across Asiatic Russia from Turkestan to Beijing, collecting scientific data and intelligence for the Russian General Staff. During World War I, he commanded a cavalry corps on the Austrian-Rumanian front, where one of his regimental commanders was Colonel Gyorgy Zhukov, later to become a top Soviet general and Minister of Defence.¹⁴

After the tsar’s abdication, Mannerheim retired from the Imperial Army at age fifty and made a hazardous trip across revolutionary Russia to return to Finland.

The Finnish government asked Berlin for release of the Jäger Battalion. The returning soldiers formed the officer corps of the Civil Guards.¹⁵

With arms purchased from Sweden, the Whites disarmed Russian garrisons and slowly pushed back the poorly organised Reds. Over Mannerheim’s objections, the government requested assistance from the German Army. An expeditionary force under Major-General Count Rüdiger von der Goltz landed at Hanko and liberated Helsinki on 13 April 1918.

At the end of the month, after heavy fighting, White forces captured Viipuri (Vyborg). Communist leaders, Otto Vilhelm Kuusinen among them, fled over the border. Adam Ulam credits the Germans with the victory, although it was Mannerheim’s troops who did most of the fighting.¹⁶

Conservative politicians, including Svinhufvud and Paasikivi, believed that they needed German protection against the threat of revolutionary Russia. The senate voted to invite Friedrich Karl, Prince of Hessen, to become king of Finland and placed the Finnish Army under German command. Mannerheim resigned in protest and left for London and Paris to seek relief aid for war-torn Finland.

The prince agreed to accept the throne, but the Great War ended in German defeat and the Senate decided to recall Mannerheim as Regent. During his seven-month regency, 1918–19, Mannerheim approved the use of Finnish volunteers to aid anti-Bolshevik forces in Estonia and Karelia. After the armistice, the Entente Supreme War Council ordered General von der Goltz to keep his 70,000 troops in the Baltic provinces to fight the Bolsheviks.¹⁷

Professor K. J. Stahlberg was chosen to draft the Constitution of 1919. In the first election for president, Stahlberg defeated Mannerheim, who was loathed by the working classes as the Butcher of the Civil War. Again Mannerheim left for European capitals, this time to promote Western intervention in the Russian civil war. Former Tsarist officers in Paris had formed a secret organisation called Intermarium, with the goal of uniting peoples between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas against Bolshevism.¹⁸

This émigré group and others like it would figure in covert operations after World War II.

On 2 November 1919, Mannerheim wrote an