Soviets Face Up to an Inglorious War : Pretexts for Striking at Finland Evaporate, Clouding Empire

On Aug. 23, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians will mark the 50th anniversary of the pact by which Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin assigned their countries to the Soviet Union.

A year ago the Soviet press broke a half-century taboo on the subject and now it is being discussed openly in Moscow.

But the same pact’s secret protocols also assigned Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence. On Nov. 30, 1939, the Red Army attacked Finland and seized 22,000 square miles of its eastern-most province of Karelia, including Finland’s second-largest city. Both remain part of the Soviet Union today.

Until now, the official Soviet line has been that Finland committed aggression against the Soviet Union, to which the Red Army responded with a “counterstrike.” In June, however, the reformist journal Ogonyok published an article titled “The Inglorious War,” in which the author, a senior historian named M.I. Semiriaga, shows the process by which the Soviet Union in effect grabbed part of Finland.

Semiriaga notes that the Red Army had carefully prepared its “counterstrike” long before the minor incident that Stalin seized upon to justify his invasion. He shows, too, how Moscow rebuffed the Finns’ proposal to talk following the incident. The Soviet commentator concludes bitterly that war may have been “the last resort of kings but not of statesmen in the civilized 20th Century.”

Why did the Soviet Union beat up on Finland? Semiriaga admits that the Finns could have done more to meet the Soviet’s need to strengthen the security of Leningrad. But he also insists that for the Finns to have accepted the conditions on Leningrad that Moscow had set before them, they would have violated their country’s neutrality and invited intervention from other quarters, notably Germany. The “astonishing and suspicious” manner in which the Red Army attacked Finland and then announced its mission to “free the Finnish people from the whip of capitalists and landlords” shows that Moscow’s real aims went far beyond securing the approaches to Leningrad.

Semiriaga then proceeds to commit the ultimate indiscretion: He decries the “lack of professionalism of the Soviet commanders at all ranks (during the Winter War), their inability to coordinate actions on the battlefields and their unconcern for the life and health of Red Army soldiers.” Military attaches from both Hitler’s Germany and the Western powers did not fail to observe all this, he reports. Naturally, Hitler’s generals concluded that the Soviet Union was “a colossus with feet of clay” and quite unprepared for war. This paved the way forHitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, with all its attendant suffering. Equally serious, the Red Army made such a poor showing against little Finland that Paris and London were convinced that Moscow would be a weak partner in any alliance. Semiriaga in effect argues that any coolness on the part of the West toward helping the Soviet war effort was caused by Stalin’s own foolish assault on Finland, and not by some visceral anti-Russianism on the part of the Allies. So much for Western revisionism!

What are the implications of all this for the present? For Soviet citizens, Ogonyok’s astonishing revelations directly challenge the already weakened myth that their country has always acted as a “progressive” force on the world stage. What Ogonyok describes is a case of naked aggression as cynical as anything Hitler did, and one that cost 200,000 Russian lives besides. Myths are important to the extent that they buttress a government’s sense of legitimacy. To bring the forgotten Winter War from the shadows just as today’s inglorious war in Afghanistan is being debated discredits hallowed traditions of Soviet foreign policy. Anyone in Moscow who absorbs this new information will be sympathetic to those calling for a clean break with the past in Soviet foreign policy and a fresh start.

The international dimensions of the Ogonyok article are yet more intriguing. Its clear implication is that Moscow’s sole claim to those 22,000 square miles in Karelia derives from the fact that it seized them by force in 1939-40 and then managed to pressure the Finns to confirm that seizure through treaties in 1947 and 1948. This being so, should not the Soviet Union give back part or all of this vast territory? And if it does, should it not give back to Hungary, Poland, Romania, Iran and Japan the territories it acquired from them through similar means?

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has made clear that he does not consider the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union as it exists today to be up for negotiation. But should the Soviet government not make at least some gesture to acknowledge this distasteful episode in its relations with a small neutral nation? Maybe, but to do too little is as dangerous as to do too much. It would tell the world, in effect, that “we stole these territories fair and square and refuse to discuss the issue further.” It may not be so easy to stick to this line in an era of domestic and international glasnost.

Whether Moscow chooses to sidestep the issue of Karelia or face up to it, this latest revelation concerning the Hitler-Stalin pact is bound to have consequences that bear watching.