The Soviet Interest in Finnish Internal Affairs

Abstract

The success of the policy of coexistence which has developed between Finland and her great power neighbour ultimately has to be measured against the respect shown for the principle contained in Article 6 of the 1948 FCMA-Treaty. This article, which expresses a classic norm of international law, pledges the parties to the treaty to observe the principle of ‘the mutual respect of sovereignty and integrity and that of the non-interference in the internal affairs of the other state’. Some of the gravest doubts in Western minds about the character of post-war Finnish-Soviet relations have arisen in just this area. The Soviet understanding of this principle has not exactly coincided with Western views. In addition, Article 6 of the Finnish treaty has not remained comparable with similarly phrased articles in the Soviet FCMA-treaties with the Eastern bloc countries, since the latter articles were qualified by the Soviet pronouncements regarding the ‘socialist commonwealth’ towards the end of the 1960s. This thesis, which was popularised in the West as the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, gave the notion of ‘socialist unity’ priority over the principle of noninterference in internal affairs, but bypassed Finland which clearly lay outside the ‘socialist commonwealth’.