Diplomatic Deceptions: Anglo-Soviet Relations and the Fate of Finland, 1944–1948, by Helena P. Evans

Abstract

In the early months of the Second World War, the Soviet–Finnish ‘Winter War’ enthralled many in the English-speaking world. The British War Illustrated (16 Dec. 1939), for example, described how Stalin was making ‘foul war on gallant Finland’, bemoaning the ‘march of the steam-roller of the new Russian imperialism’. The New York Times, likewise, claimed that Soviet ‘invective’ was ‘even cheaper than the German brand … poured with a ladle on the heads of the Finnish Government out of the apparently inexhaustible sewers of the Kremlin’. Viewers of the Gaumont British News in 1940 (15 Feb. 1940) heard that Stalin’s ‘wicked and futile’ invasion of Finland, a display of ‘unthinkable barbarism and savagery’, had set back human society by ‘about three thousand years’. Such rhetoric over Finland was bolstered by the instinctive Russophobia of British foreign policy, so attitudes changed rather quickly when Britain and the Soviet Union formed an alliance against Nazi Germany in 1941. The ‘Winter War’ might have been constructed as a modern-day version of the Battle of Thermopylae, but when the Finns instigated a ‘Continuation War’, aimed at recovering the lost territories and with German assistance, Churchill wrote to Mannerheim (29 Nov. 1941) explaining that he would be forced to declare war on Finland ‘out of loyalty to our ally Russia’. By the time Molotov and Eden had concluded the Anglo–Soviet Treaty in May 1942, the fate of the Finns had become a much less public concern. These machinations form the background to the present book by Helena P. Evans, which charts in great detail the difficulties faced by British diplomats in the mid-1940s, as they strove both to maintain a strong relationship with the Soviet Union, and prevent the westward spread of Communism in Europe. The book makes a valuable contribution to a historiography that Evans contends, correctly, has hitherto been Finnocentric (p. 11)—although an English-language account of the same period from a Russian perspective would provide a fascinating companion volume. She argues convincingly that, in the 1940s, ‘Finland was put up for sacrifice by Britain not once, but twice: once in the name of furthering the Anglo-Soviet relationship, and once in the name of retaining the balance of power in the emerging Cold War World’ (p. 12).