Historical Events
Finland · Events 6
Baltic wars of independence and border settlements
After Germany's collapse in November 1918 the new governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had to build states between three forces: the Red Army, the Russian Whites and the German Freikorps. Estonia, backed by the British fleet and Finnish volunteers and having won its peasants with land reform, drove out the Red Army in early 1919; when Yudenich's Northwestern Army, launched from Estonian soil, broke before Petrograd, Estonia disarmed it and in February 1920 signed at Tartu Soviet Russia's first treaty recognizing a state's independence. Latvia defeated in turn Stučka's Soviet government, von der Goltz's German troops and Niedra's pro-German government, and Bermondt-Avalov's attack on Riga; Lithuania saw off Litbel but lost Vilnius to Poland. The treaties of Tartu, Moscow, Riga and Tartu (Finland), all signed in 1920, drew Soviet Russia's north-western frontier, but the Polish-Lithuanian dispute remained.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Partition of Eastern Europe
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on the night of 23 August 1939 in the Moscow Kremlin by Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Alongside public non-aggression clauses, it contained a secret additional protocol carving Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. With Anglo-French collective-security talks deadlocked by Poland's refusal to admit Soviet troops, Stalin chose the German option. Germany invaded Poland a week later; on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. On 28 September the two powers sealed the partition with the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, revising the secret protocol to transfer Lithuania to the Soviet sphere in exchange for handing Lublin and parts of Warsaw to Germany. The pact served as the platform for the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, the Winter War against Finland, and the seizure of Bessarabia, remaining in force until Germany tore it up on 22 June 1941.
The Winter War
The Winter War was the 105-day Soviet-Finnish war that began with the Soviet invasion of 30 November 1939 and ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940. Having placed Finland in its sphere under the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Soviet Union demanded a shift of the Karelian Isthmus border and a lease on the Hanko peninsula in the name of defending Leningrad; when Finland refused, it attacked, using the shelling at Mainila as a pretext. The Red Army was overwhelmingly superior in men and equipment, but its command had been gutted by the Great Purge and it was unprepared for winter forest warfare — whole divisions were encircled and destroyed at Suomussalmi, and the advance stalled before the Mannerheim Line.
The Great Patriotic War
The Great Patriotic War, opened by Nazi Germany with a surprise invasion in June 1941, was the largest land war in human history. Recovering from the catastrophic losses of the first year, the Soviet Union moved its industrial base bodily eastward and rearmed, reversed the tide at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, and drove on to Berlin in 1945 to bring down Nazi Germany. Roughly 80 percent of the ground combat power of the Wehrmacht was destroyed on the Eastern Front, and it was the multinational Soviet people who bore the overwhelming burden of defeating fascism.
Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad was the German and Finnish land encirclement, bombardment, and blockade of the Soviet city from September 8, 1941, to January 27, 1944. Germany's Operation Barbarossa aimed to seize the city and remove a major industrial and naval base on the Baltic, while Finnish advances pressed it from the north. The Leningrad Front, the Baltic Fleet, the city party organisation, and residents improvised defences and kept factories and military units operating, but food and fuel ran short, producing mass starvation and disease during the winter of 1941–42. Lake Ladoga shipping and the winter ice road became the city's only lifeline. Soviet forces opened a narrow land corridor on January 18, 1943, then drove German forces away in the Leningrad-Novgorod Offensive in January 1944, ending the siege.
The Helsinki Accords
The Helsinki Accords (August 1, 1975) were the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), signed by 35 states: 33 European nations plus the United States and Canada, in Helsinki, Finland. The Soviet Union had pursued a European security conference since 1954, seeking formal recognition of postwar borders, and the détente of the early 1970s finally brought the West to the table. After preliminary consultations in 1972 and two years of substantive negotiations in Geneva (1973 to 1975), heads of state gathered in Helsinki. The Final Act was organized into three 'baskets': political-military security (Basket I), economic and scientific cooperation (Basket II), and human rights and humanitarian cooperation (Basket III). Brezhnev believed he had secured the inviolability of frontiers, but the human rights provisions of Basket III gave dissidents across the Soviet bloc a platform grounded in commitments their own governments had signed.