Could a "Finland" status have been attained for some eastern and central European states?

Viewpoint: Yes, some eastern and central European states could have remained neutral like Finland.

Viewpoint: No, Soviet insecurities and historical conditions made it unlikely that the Soviet Union would have agreed to a Finland status for eastern and central European countries.


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Finland became independent from Russia in 1917, but relations with Russia (and its successor, the Soviet Union) remained uneasy. In 1939, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), in which the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were given to the Soviet Union, the Soviets invaded eastern Finland. In the Winter War that ensued, the outnumbered Finns fought courageously, but in March 1940 they were forced to cede a large area of southeastern Finland to the Soviets in the Treaty of Moscow. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Finns resumed hostilities, hoping to reclaim the territory they had lost earlier. Finland also adopted a pro-German foreign policy, and Finnish president Risto Ryti refused to change his position even as the tide of the Second World War turned against Germany.
Finland emerged from the war with its freedom of action in foreign policy and defense matters curtailed. Although independent, Finland was within the Soviet sphere of influence, leading it to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union in which it promised to remain neutral in the struggle between East and West. Finland did not join the European Recovery Plan (the Marshall Plan), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or other initiatives or organizations that the Soviets deemed hostile.
Soviet influence on Finnish foreign and defense policy led to the coining of the term Finlandization, to distinguish such indirect domination from the Red Army's occupation of countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. During the cold war U.S. policymakers often suggested that, if the United States were to waver in its support of countries threatened by the Soviet Union, these countries might decide to "Finlandize," that is, settle for a compromise with the Soviets that would have allowed them to retain their domestic freedoms in exchange for neutrality in foreign policy and defense issues.



Viewpoint: Yes, some eastern and central European states could have remained neutral like Finland.

From the end of the Second World War until the late 1980s six eastern European countries--Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany--were completely dominated by the Soviet Union (as were Yugoslavia until 1948 and Albania until 1968), emulating the Soviet model in their domestic, political, and economic practices. This result was not a foregone conclusion in 1945. At least some of the six Soviet-bloc nations might, under certain circumstances, have struck out in a different direction, one more similar to the path followed by Finland or Austria.

Both Finland and Austria managed to maintain domestic freedom while adhering to a neutral line in foreign policy and did so as a result of Soviet security and political concerns. Annexed (without any meaningful resistance) by Nazi Germany in 1938, Austria was occupied by the Allies in 1945 and divided into four occupational zones. Austria joined the Marshall Plan, but early hopes for an end to the occupation were dashed by the onset of the cold war. After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, the Soviet line on Austria became more flexible. The Soviets watched with increasing alarm the West's plans to admit West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and permit West German rearmament. Probably hoping to forestall both, the Soviets allowed Austria to become a model of a central European nation that was accorded its freedom in a manner Moscow did not view as threatening. Thus, in May 1955 Austria and the Allies signed the Austrian State Treaty, in which Austria pledged its neutrality in world affairs. The treaty ended the occupation of the country, and foreign forces withdrew. While politically neutral, Austria joined Western economic institutions such as the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and later reached a special arrangement with the European Community (EC).

Finland followed a similar course to Austria, with slightly less freedom in its foreign economic policies. The Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939-1940 and the active collaboration of the Finns with the Nazis made the Soviets assert their wishes vis-à-vis Finland firmly and early. In 1947 Finland and the USSR signed a treaty establishing Finland's neutrality in foreign and defense matters. In return, the Soviets abstained from intervening in Finnish domestic affairs. Because of objections from Moscow, Finland did not join the Marshall Plan but was allowed to receive large loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank. This pattern of neutrality on foreign-policy and defense issues, care not to offend Soviet sensibilities, abstention from membership in Western organizations such as NATO or the EC, domestic political freedom, and access to Western markets and technology gave rise to the term Finlandization (which acquired a derogatory connotation in Western political discourse, implying that a state was a "free rider" or a "fence sitter"). Was it reasonable to expect the states of central and eastern Europe to be able to enjoy the status gained by Austria or Finland rather than be subjected to the oppressive Soviet domination?

It is true that there were many conditions that facilitated Soviet penetration and domination of the central and eastern European countries. First, while driving the Nazi forces west, the Red Army came to occupy many of these countries. In 1945 the Soviet Union was in physical control of much of central and eastern Europe. Second, in successive meetings of the leaders of the anti-Nazi alliance--at Moscow and Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945--it became clear that the United States and Britain would demand greater freedom for the central and eastern European states but would not be willing to do much about securing it. As Marc Trachtenberg has noted, the two Western allies were not merely making speeches about freedom in eastern Europe in order to pacify domestic constituencies. They truly hoped for a better deal for eastern Europe, but there was just so much they were willing to do about it. Third, the regimes of some of these countries had lost their legitimacy during the war. They were corrupt and ineffective, and the collaboration of some of them with the Nazi occupiers damaged their nationalist claims or Western support. Fourth, and in contrast, members of the communist movement were central in the underground resistance to the German occupiers. These movements were thus able to portray themselves as truer to national aspirations and honor than the regimes in power. The role of these anti-Nazi partisans in defeating the Nazi armies had been exaggerated (for example, by Josip Tito in Yugoslavia), but the communists did play a part in the anti-Nazi campaign. Fifth, at least initially, the communists in these countries offered policies that enjoyed broad support, especially in light of the corruption and favoritism of the old regimes, which were swept aside after the war. Agrarian reform, changes in the educational and health provision systems, and industrialization were all popular with the masses. In short, as Charles Gati has pointed out, the Soviet Union was able to expand into the territory of eastern Europe because there were no countervailing pressures to make such an expansion too costly or onerous.

There were obstacles--real or perceived--to Soviet domination of eastern Europe. First, Gati notes, as the cold war intensified, it was not clear if the West would accept complete Soviet domination of the region. The West did protest Soviet denial of free elections and democratic procedures in the countries that came under Red Army rule. In February 1947 President Harry S Truman, enunciating what came to be called the Truman Doctrine, committed the United States to supporting "free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Poland and East Germany were the most strategically important countries for the Soviet Union, and it was difficult to see how Stalin would allow for regimes there that would be less than completely obedient to Moscow. Other countries, however, were not as important to the USSR, and there might have been an opportunity for the West to gain greater freedom from Moscow for these countries in exchange for accepting most of the Soviet demands concerning Poland and Germany. Indeed, Gati quotes Zoltán Vas, a former member of the politburo of the Hungarian Communist Party, as stating that, as late as 1946, the leadership of the party was not sure whether or not Stalin "might not let Hungary [and presumably Czechoslovakia] come under the political influence of the [Western] allies in exchange for Soviet demands on Poland and Germany."

With the exception of the Czechoslovakian party, the communist parties in the eastern European states did not enjoy a large following. The Soviet Union thus could not rely on indigenous mass popular movements effectively to govern the countries it wanted to rule. To increase the popularity of the local communist parties Stalin advised them to begin attending to local issues first and to worry about matters pertaining to the international communist movement later. This attention to local issues--and the fact that, for example, Czech communists ruled as Czech first and communist second in this period of "national" communism--created a situation in which the diversity of the region and the differences among its countries increased rather than decreased. To the Soviets' chagrin, in summer 1947 three of those countries--Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary--expressed interest in accepting the U.S. invitation to take part in the Marshall Plan. Stalin had to remind the leaders of these countries that he would allow freedom from Moscow--and the focus on domestic needs--to go just so far.

There was a vivid example in eastern Europe of a communist state that defied Moscow and survived. Tito, the leader of the anti-Nazi Yugoslav partisans and ruler of Yugoslavia after its liberation, was not a man accustomed to taking orders. Although he admired Stalin, he rejected Stalin's advice about how to run Yugoslavian internal affairs. The Soviet Union launched an intense campaign to vilify Tito and undermine his regime, using propaganda, subversion, and even hints of military action against the defiant regime. Stalin misjudged Tito, however; the greater the Soviet pressure and the more intense the anti-Yugoslav campaign, the more determined Tito became. In 1948 he officially broke with the Soviet camp. While loyal to communist doctrines on economics and politics, he charted an independent course in foreign policy between the Western and Eastern blocs. In the mid 1950s he joined with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia to form the nonaligned movement.

The example of Yugoslavia was important for the West and dangerous for Moscow. It proved a point made by George F. Kennan, the author of containment policy, that communism was not a monolithic ideology and that communist rulers would still pursue the national interests of their countries. The United States, Kennan argued, should be willing to overlook the particular nature of a regime and consider its foreign-policy positions. For the Soviets the case of Yugoslavia was threatening because it showed that a country could stand up to Moscow and the pressure it applied and not only survive but gain standing and esteem in world councils. According to Gati, Yugoslavia's ability to withstand Stalin's brutal pressure "revealed for all to see the limits of Stalin's power even in his own backyard. . . . Perhaps most important, Yugoslavia's independence offered an alternative to others in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe." It is fair to say that the example of Yugoslavia inspired attempts by Imre Nagy in Hungary in 1956, Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland in the late 1950s, and Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to reform domestic politics and introduce greater freedoms. Similarly, the success of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania to establish greater freedom for his country in defense and foreign-policy matters (without, however, a corresponding increase in domestic freedoms) probably also owes much to Tito's example.

The potential for different paths for the central and eastern European countries was there, but it was never fully explored. The sorry state of the Western European economies, and the potential for political turmoil there; the civil war in Greece and the difficulties in Turkey and Iran; the civil war in China; and wrangling over the future of Germany all consumed the attention of the Truman administration. Moreover, the developments in central and eastern Europe were taking place while the United States was rapidly demobilizing. (In 1945 the United States had ninety-seven divisions, combat ready and tested; in 1947 it had only twelve, most understrength and tied down in occupation duties.) It is thus not clear that the United States was in a position to demand of Stalin the kind of deal that would have allowed for greater freedom for some of those countries. It was also not clear that the domestic political situation would have allowed the administration much freedom of maneuver: the largest domestic constituency attentive to the affairs of east and central Europe was the Polish American community, but it was probably over Poland that Stalin would have been most intransigent. It would have been difficult to explain a fight for greater freedom for Bulgaria and Hungary while conceding greater Soviet control over Poland. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations thus chose to issue general proclamations about the desirability of greater freedom and independence for the countries that they came to call "captive nations" but not to do much by way of concrete policies. The fight, if there was to be a fight, would have to come another day.

-- Benjamin Frankel, Security Studies


Viewpoint: No, Soviet insecurities and historical conditions made it unlikely that the Soviet Union would have agreed to a Finland status for eastern and central European countries.

At the allied conferences during the Second World War, the Western allies promised Joseph Stalin that the postwar settlement would respect Soviet security interests around the entire periphery of the USSR. Indeed, the conferences at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945 specifically conceded influence over vast stretches of territory bordering on the Soviet Union to Stalin, either directly or indirectly.

In eastern Europe both kinds of concessions were made. First, it was established that the Soviet Union would retain the territories it had acquired as a secret provision of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (or Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact) of 1939 (that is, eastern Poland and the Baltic states) or as a result of its independent military moves against Finland and Romania (parts of Karelia and all of Bessarabia) in 1939-1940. Second, it was acknowledged that states bordering on the Soviet Union should be controlled by what the allies described as "friendly" governments.

The Soviet Union's relationship with Finland was a potential model for what this agreement would mean in practice. Throughout the cold war, Finland retained full independence; yet, its foreign policy of firm nonalignment was one shared by few countries in Europe. It was made even more unusual in noncommunist Europe by its perceivable tilt toward Moscow in nonmilitary relations. Apart from the cold-war superimposition of superpower conflict over much of world diplomacy, there were other reasons why this relationship did not and could not have become the model of Soviet relations with the rest of eastern Europe.

Probably the most important reason is that Finland did not by itself present any significant challenge to Soviet security. Although the Germans had used Finland as a staging ground for an element of their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the difficult logistics of supplying their troops there seriously limited their effectiveness. Neither Leningrad nor the strategic port of Murmansk, where much Allied military support to the Soviet Union arrived by sea, were ever captured by the German and Finnish forces despite the spectacular successes of the German army everywhere else on the eastern front in the early phases of the campaign. For the same reason an attack through Finland would not have been much more of a threat after 1945, even if Finland had joined NATO or otherwise allied itself with the United States. The territorial modifications that were restored and expanded in Soviet favor after Finland surrendered in September 1944 reduced that negligible threat further by giving the Soviets control of strategic territory along the border and of the Finnish naval bases on the Arctic Sea. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, was the historic route for invasions of Russia. Germany had used it twice in twenty-seven years.

Second, for economic reasons it was clearly in the Finns' interest to maintain favorable relations with the Soviet Union. Geographic factors alone predisposed Finland to conduct most of its foreign trade with Moscow. Finland had been an integral part of the Russian Empire for more than a century before it declared its independence in 1917, a fact that had not been without its effect on the country's commercial orientation. These circumstances were patently absent from Soviet relations with the rest of the European countries with which it shared a border. Situated in the center of the continent and enjoying a much more developed infrastructure than could be found on the Soviet-Finnish border or between Finland and the West, these nations were well placed to conduct a high volume of trade with Western Europe. Historically, with the exception of Poland, they had been either entirely or in large part outside the grasp of the Russian Empire. Well before the First World War there was an economic gravitation of these states and of the Hapsburg Empire (from which several states in the region later emerged) toward Germany. The relative instability of the new eastern European states in the interwar period and their general hostility toward the USSR exacerbated that dependence.

Furthermore, immediate security was Joseph Stalin's principal motivation in foreign policy, regardless of whether challenges to it were real or perceived. Mirroring his approach to domestic politics, in which even perfectly loyal and innocent Soviet leaders were subject to ruthless purges simply because of their potential for success should they present a challenge to his leadership, Stalin's approach to international politics attempted to neutralize external situations that had the potential to compromise Soviet security. Stalin had no real reason to fear that Finland's political independence would be a future threat, especially considering the historically close nature of its economic relationship with its eastern neighbor.

For a variety of strategic and historical reasons, Stalin's ideas about eastern Europe were different. Their independence plainly presented the possibility that given the right turn of events, the "friendly" democracies in eastern Europe could turn on the USSR in the future, even if they were economically oriented toward Moscow and officially neutral. The lure of their historically beneficial trade relationships with the West and the prospect of postwar American financial assistance to rebuild their countries were factors Stalin could not ignore. American financing was especially dangerous from his perspective because he quite correctly perceived that it was designed to marginalize political extremes and encourage domestic, political, and economic stability. In any democracy with pretensions to freedom such stability would and did diminish the political influence of communism and consequently blight the disposition of those countries toward the Soviet Union. The popularity of communism in France and Italy, for example, declined after their economies began to boom with the massive infusion of American foreign aid from the Marshall Plan.

From the beginning it was clear that Stalin had no intention of allowing eastern Europe to owe its future stability and prosperity to the United States. Rather, he pursued policies that broadened Soviet influence as extensively as possible. The geographical changes are an important consideration on this point because the retention of eastern Poland and the annexation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia gave the Soviet Union direct frontiers on Czechoslovakia and Hungary, two countries that had no prewar border with the Soviet Union. If Moscow were entitled to "friendly" governments in neighboring countries, those two could now be added to the list.

Although the West had extracted promises from Stalin that these "friendly" governments would provisionally include noncommunist elements and then hold free and democratic elections, the reality was quite different. The presence of the Red Army throughout the region gave Stalin enormous power to influence the provisional political complexion of those countries. In every case parties of the moderate right, and sometimes even the political center, were dissolved or outlawed on the grounds that their philosophical opposition to communism, their legality during the war, or the interests they were said to represent made them "fascist" or "reactionary." Legal noncommunist parties were customarily given a disproportionately small amount of the political resources administered by the Red Army in liberated countries.

The Soviets also distorted the composition of the provisional governments so that communists were disproportionately given control of key ministries such as information (which controlled the media) and interior (which controlled the police). The communists of the region were themselves beholden to Stalin as many of them had spent years before and during the war in Moscow. The especially ruthless and capricious victimization of foreign communists in the Soviet purges left those who survived under no uncertain impression of Stalin when they returned to eastern Europe in the train of the Red Army.

The "democratic" elections that were held in these countries made it illegal for a large part of the electorate to express itself politically and biased the outcome of what competition remained by placing a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the communists. Within a short period of time, all of the countries in eastern Europe that had been occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war became monolithically communist states. The remaining noncommunist parties were outlawed, forcibly assimilated by the communist parties, or reduced to purely nominal independence. Independent economic and social institutions were quickly brought under control.

It is possible that Stalin wished for the transition to communism to come without direct coercion. The advantages enjoyed by the communist parties did allow them to receive large percentages of the vote in what seemed to be freely contested elections. Even though it would have been a legal fiction, communist parliamentary majorities were not beyond the realm of possibility and even had a serious chance of independent success. Ultimately, however, drastic measures were taken to accelerate the effects of that predisposition.

Scholars who tend to blame the United States for the origins of the cold war argue that Western misperceptions of Soviet activity reinforced Stalin's misinterpretation of Western intentions and pushed him into communizing eastern Europe. This argument is fundamentally flawed because it fails to address what Stalin was doing elsewhere. Much of the scholarship on postwar eastern Europe does not consider that well before the announcement of the Marshall Plan and the economic consolidation of the Western allies' occupation zones of Germany, the Soviet dictator had been testing how far he could push the limitations of the wartime agreements. In 1946 Stalin attempted to extract territorial concessions from Iran and military-base rights from Turkey, two countries that had remained benevolently neutral during the Second World War and whose futures had not been the subject of negotiations during the wartime conferences. President Harry S Truman's response in both cases was firm, and the Soviets were forced to withdraw their demands. That same year Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov presented a Soviet demand for four-power occupation of Germany's industrial Ruhr region in order to give the Soviets partial control over West German productive capacity. In addition to prompting a curt refusal, Molotov's approach actually contributed to their decision to combine their occupation zones into a single economic unit that excluded Soviet influence over occupation policy for West Germany. In that sense Stalin reacted to Western resolve in his policy toward eastern Europe, but it is important to realize that the collapse of the cooperative relationship that had existed during the war was owing in large part to his skirting the spirit of the wartime agreements about the future of the region and the expansionist pressure he applied elsewhere in the world.

The dispatch with which that resolve was presented made the Soviet leader realize that his security interests were better served by consolidating control over what was already in his possession. A gradual communist takeover that was legal at least in form could not be reconciled with that goal. The firm communist consolidation in eastern Europe in late 1947 and early 1948 dovetailed with Stalin's changing approach to international politics. After following his instructions not to participate in the Marshall Plan, which even countries not yet dominated by communism were diplomatically compelled to obey, the national communist parties of the region were organized under the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). Its purpose closely resembled that of the Communist International (Comintern), which had coordinated the policies of foreign communist parties under Moscow's direction before Stalin ordered its dissolution, ironically as a goodwill gesture to the West, in 1943. "Nationalist" deviations from a pro-Moscow orientation, like that of the Yugoslavian communists under Josip Tito, were regarded as treason. While Belgrade and Moscow entered a period of estrangement, the eastern European countries under closer Soviet control purged Communist Party members who were not unswervingly loyal to the Soviet Union and its aims.

Even though growing superpower tension clouded the development of the issue, there is no doubt that Stalin associated the vital security interests of his country with his ability to control eastern Europe. The obvious strategic factors that made hegemonic domination of that region essential for the Soviet leader's concept of security rendered the Finland model an impossible option. The great pains to which Stalin went to justify the expansion of his influence in the region before superpower cooperation became a lost cause laid the groundwork for its full communization. Despite his bestowal of tremendous domestic-political advantages on national communist parties, the "natural" development (given the immediate postwar political conditions) of communist governments elected in biased, yet ostensibly democratic, political systems was disturbed by the rapidity of the strategic partnership's decline. Although the consolidation of eastern Europe under communist leadership had to be accelerated and effected forcefully, these factors did not change the illusory nature of the alternative of a "Finlandized" eastern Europe.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, George Washington University

FURTHER READINGS

References

Lynn Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974);

John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);

Charles Gati, The Bloc that Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990);

Beatrice Heuser, Western "Containment" Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948-53 (London & New York: Routledge, 1989);

Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1996, eighth edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997);

Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);

Robert Reinhart, ed., Finland and the United States: Diplomatic Relations through Seventy Years (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, 1993);

Bruce Olav Solheim, The Nordic Nexus: A Lesson in Peaceful Security (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994);

Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).