FINNISH FINISH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 247, 17 March 1944, Page 10

FINNISH FINISH

But Why Did They Begin?

(Written for "The Listener" by

A.M.

R.

HETHER the present Fin-nish-Russian peace negotiations will actually issue into Peace is probably being decided as we read, between Russian bombs over Helsinki and German divisions at Petsamo. But there is no uncertainty that the Finns want to get out of the war. What puzzles most of us is why ever they got into it. When Russians and Finns fought, in 1940, the prelude to this present winter war, opinion elsewhere overwhelmingly favoured the Finns. And not merety as David against Goliath. A half-awakened world, trembling before the lightning evidence of totalitarian power, hailed them as champions of freedom and humbly and fervently gave thanks for their resistance as a sign from heaven that Democracy after all had guts. ... And then within two years these knights in shining armour, altogether of their own free will, rushed to support the triumphant destroyer of free nations! Now that another full turn of fate’s wheel may range them against their present allies it becomes a matter of practical importance to see Finland, and Finland’s relations with her neighbours, in proper perspective. Those of us who grew up with maps on which Finland was marked as part of Russia, find the first step in understanding her people somewhat difficult to take -namely, to realise that, even though independent Finland was within 17 miles of Russia’s late capital, Finns and Russians are as different as Scotsmen and Portuguese-and quite as conscious of it. Racially, of course, the Finns are from Asia. But, strangely "enough, that is not what makes the difference. Indeed, it is they who regard the Russians as still-barbarous Asiatics, and themselves as Europeans, and most European of Europeans. A Glance at History We must look to history to find why. Eight hundred years ago the Finns, speaking an unwritten language from the mountains behind China, still lived among their birch forests and interweaving lakes very much like Red Indians. But then came an Englishman, Henry, Bishop of Uppsala, riding beside the conquering foray of King Erik, of Sweden, to incorporate the savages into Christendom and become their Patron Saint. Henry’s mass-baptisms were somewhat later consolidated by the evangelism and administration of a second English churchman, one Thomas. So in-ternationally-minded did his converts become that the Swedish Government only just prevented them from’ declaring Finland a direct territory of the Pope. However, the Swedes gave these newest Europeans full freemen’s rights, Finland becoming in effect a new eastern half to their kingdom. Almost alone among civilised peoples, the Finns can boastand do-that they have never been serfs.

The Russian woodlanders further south and east on the lake-strewn plain, were likewise consolidated into a kingdom by Norsemen. But ever after their development followed a divergent course. Christianity reached them, not from intellectual Rome through the (later Lutheran) North, but from ikonographic Byzantium. Their trade likewise flowed up the Black Sea rivers in Greek and Turkish bottoms, ‘not from the German Baltic. Kalmyk and Mongol invaders hitched Russia for centuries to Asia. And serfdom, of a particularly servile sort, continued right into the nineteenth century. The Finns, on the other hand, living in isolated farmsteads (each with its steam bathhouse) considered themselves to be a complete civilisation removed from the still filthy, press-ganged. Asiatically-dressed serfs who every now and then ravaged Finland ir the course of their Emperor’s struggle with the Swedish monarchy. That war was Darkness against Light, as they saw it, and Finland the Outpost of Europe. Triumph of Darkness Then Darkness triumphed. In 1809 Tsar Alexander finally confined the Swedish Kingdom, which for centuries had sprawled across north-eastern Europe, into its own peninsula. Sweden’s eastern half, Finland, the Tsar made into a personal duchy which he ruled by himself, independent of Russia. The leaders of its three-quarter million peasants on the edge of the Arctic met this catastrophe with characteristic purposiveness. "We have ceased to be Swedes," said one. "It is impossible for us to become Russians. We shall have to be Finns." But you cannot make a nation without a literature. Finland had not one word written in her native tongue. However, school-teachers went among the people writing down old legends and spreading new knowledge. In a brief century the Finns had becomé the world’s greatest consumers of print. By the nineteenthirties not one per cent were illiterate, while the highest percentage in Europe were in secondary schools and the highest in the world at universities-particu-larly good work considering that to-day’s three and three-quarter million, scattered among 60,000 lakes and barelypenetrable forests, included a third-of-a-million Lapp nomads inside the Arctic Circle. In 1905 a National Strike extracted a Constitution from the Russian Government. Votes for all men and women, with equal pay for equal work, came in the following year. Later the Lex Kallio turned the proportion of owner-farmers from 46 per cent in 1920 to 63 per cent in 1930. And from 1940 a Social Security Act was to have operated. Meanwhile, national output, especially of foods, had increased several-fold. Finland’s production remained strictly individualistic. But its marketing was almost as overwhelmingly co-operative. (continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) The State owned 30 per cent of the land, 40 per cent of the forests (Finland’s chief export), and many industrial enterprises. In short, Finland by 1940 had become strikingly like New Zealand -or what New Zealand would be like if four-fifths of our population still lived in the country. Russia Also Reforms Meanwhile, across the border-which, remember, is a real frontier of habits and outlooks-the Russians were also taking giant strides. But their advances clashed with the Finns at nearly every point. Thus it was Russia’s reformist politicians who early in this century attempted to "Russify" Finland as the Tsars had never done. And consequently in the 1914 war Finland stayed neutral as Eire has in this-for Eire’s reasons. Then, with the Bolshevist revolution, Finland’s parliament declared complete independence, and Lenin agreed. But the Russian troops which garrisoned the south coast, unpaid and insubordinate, refused to move out. The city’s workers, deep in the misery of a post-war slump, called on these rioting foreigners to help them establish a Soviet. To the country as a whole this looked like a return to Russian rule. Out marched the farmérs to crush the "Reds" and a thorough job they made of it. Independénce, however, brought separation from the fellow-Finns of East Karelia and from the great timber outlet of Leningrad. The failure of the Soviet to open a chink in the frontier or to implement its undertaking to give the Karelians more than paper autonomy kept feeling alight, until, when Moscow intensified Finland’s 1929 slump by dumping timber under cost price on her foreign markets, it kindled spontaneously into the Lapuan movement. This party succeeded in outlawing all Communist organisations, which it regarded as Russian FifthColumnism. (Later its own activities were prescribed under this law of its own making!) Then, as Finland was returning with prosperity towards its normal social-reformist sanity, the bombshell fell out of the blue. The Ancient enemy demanded Finland’s sole Defence Line, her richest district, her main Naval Base, and military dominance of her only northern port. War had to result. The Case For Russia Of course, Moscow had a case. To safeguard Leningrad by sea the Gulf of

Finland must be closable by battery fire from both coasts. To safeguard it by land the Finnish frontier must be moved further away. And by abolition of serious barriers to invasion from Russia, Finland must be prevented from becoming a base for outflanking attack upon the U.S.S.R. Unfortunately for the Soviet, however, the world was not then in the mood it has since reached where such Power considerations seem reasonable and realistic. Therefore the Kremlin had hastily to think up social and even humanitarian justifications for its action. It set up a "Puppet" (or "Quisling") "Government-in-Exile" for Finland which broadcast a "Nine Point Programme" of libera-tion-obviously intended for export consumption, since the Finns already possessed in substance all the nine advantages it promised (eight-hour day, banking control, etc.). Individual Communists outside Russia rushed into considerable absurdities — representing (for example) the mouse as "conspiring" against the lion; the Lapuans as "Fascists" and even "Nazis"; and Marshal Mannerheim as a "butcher" who invited Germany to take over Finland in the "White Terror" after the Civil War. Actually Mannerheim had resigned rather than agree to German intervention and was not even in the country when the (much exaggerated) Terror occurred. The Lapuans were not Fascists but farmers sore at having their winter jobs in the sawmills shut down by Russian timber. Their leaders, being Lutheran pastors, were as much anti-Nazi as anti-Communist, lumping the two movements together and more concerned with their ideology than with their social effects. And the Farmer-Labour combination which has ruled Finland~most of these last decades had resisted pressure to invade Russia both from British and Poles. : Nevertheless, when all these criticisms of Communist propaganda have been made, the fact remains that the Finnish Army was largely officered by men who, as fanatically patriotic youngsters, had joined the German Army to learn to fight the Tsars. And it was precisely such minor but highly-placed elements that betrayed equally-democratic Norway into becoming a base for Nazi aggressions. Right On Both Sides In short, this second Finnish-Soviet war, in which the Finns fight with Germany, but not-in intention at leastfor her, is an example on a national scale of that clash between personalities and interests which we know only too well in our personal lives-a clash in which right lies on both sides, yet only one can win. When the "personalities" are his-tory-created national outlooks, and the "rights" are the freedom of millions, the impasse is indeed tragic. Therefore, despite the bad company into which the Finns have fallen, the world will sympathise with them in their approaching loss of full sovereignty. But it just as certainly will commend the Russian Government for offering a reasonable rather than a revengeful peace: in other words, for being as realistic in 1944 as it was-in 1940,