The Silent Soviet Vote in Finnish Politics

Abstract

is now almost two decades since Finland, defeated but unoccupied, faced her postwar struggle for independent survival under highly unfavourable circumstances. Exhausted, flooded with refugees, stripped of some of its richest territory, the country no longer possessed the capacity to resist its giant eastern neighbour as it had in 1939-1944. Moreover, there existed no basis for redressing this unfavourable power relationship through alignment with an outside source of Soviet power, since such violation of neutrality commitments to the U.SJS.R. would have invited prompt Soviet intervention. Yet, as time revealed, Moscow did not reduce Finland to a satellite in the Polish sense. Instead, it adopted a more subtle and restrained policy of conceding the Finns a large measure of independence while at the same time sharply watching and emphatically influencing Finnish foreign relations. This policy is most obvious in the Soviet technique of casting silent, but influential, votes in Finnish elections. Most Finns have become adjusted, however unhappily, to this technique because thus far this has been the price they have had to pay for continued existence as the only western democracy sharing an extended land frontier with the Soviet Union.