Studia Historica Septentrionalia 43
Sinikka Wunsch, Punainen uhka. Neuvostoliiton kuva johtavassa suomalaisessa sanomalehdistössä maaliskuusta 1938 talvisodan päättymiseen maaliskuussa 1940. Pohjois-Suomen Historiallinen Yhdistys, Rovaniemi 2004. 381 pages.

With english summary:
The Red Threat: The Image of the Soviet Union in Leading Finnish Newspapers from March 1938 until the End of the Winter War in March 1940.

This dissertation investigates how the leading Finnish newspapers represented the Soviet Union between March 1938 and March 1940. The newspapers include, first, the two Finnish papers with the widest circulation and, second, the papers of the main political parties. The former are the politically independent Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet and the latter former are Ajan Suunta, the organ of the right-wing Patriotic People’s Front (Isänmaallinen kansanliike), Uusi Suomi, the representative of the National Coalition Party (Kansallinen Kokoomus), Ilkka, the organ of the Agrarian Union (Maalaisliitto), Turun Sanomat, the representative of the National Progressive Party (Kansallinen Edistyspuolue) and Suomen Sosialidemokraatti, the organ of the Social Democratic Party (Sosialidemokraattinen puolue). In order to see whether there are any specifically Finnish features in the image that these papers created and sustained of the Soviet Union they are compared with two foreign papers. Both Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) and the New York Times (the United States) were quality papers with fine international reputation. Both were published in countries which were neutral at the time and therefore not subject to war-time censorship.

The central concepts in the study are “image” and “opinion”. In historical image research, “image” refers to a comprehensive conception which is based on a person’s own set of values and comprises the subject as a whole. A human being uses images to structure his or her world and reality, while an opinion pertains to an individual event to which the person can take a stand regardless of his or her values and world views.

The study falls into two main parts: The first comprises the pre-war period from the beginning of March 1938 to October 6, 1939. The second period starts in October 7, 1939, and ends right after the termination of the Winter War in March 1940. The circumstances under which Finnish journalists worked changed drastically after the Soviet Union called the representatives of the Finnish Government to Moscow for negotiations at the beginning of October 1939. A similar invitation had recently been issued to the three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had quickly agreed to enter into alliance with and to ceded military bases to the Soviet Union. In Finland, the Soviet demands met with severe opposition. There was no intention of entering the alliance. Although there was no censorship as yet, the state and official propaganda organizations already exerted influence on the newspapers.

The first chapter of the study deals with the historical image of Russia and the Soviet Union in the West and in Finland. The focus then shifts to the image of the Soviet Union as it was manifested in Finnish newspapers in 1938 and 1939. In analyzing the way that the Finnish papers represented the domestic affairs of the Soviet Union I focus have focused on the following variables: Soviet society and the communist system, the standard of living in the Soviet Union, the Red Army, the leadership and the people. The next chapter s is discusses the image that the Finnish papers created of Soviet foreign politics and its changes during 1938 and 1939. The chapter proceeds chronologically, because the papers’ image reacted to changes in the international position of the Soviet Union, which was weak and isolated in 1938 but grew constantly stronger after that. A major change took place in the way that the Soviet Union was represented during the Moscow negotiations in October and November 1939. During less than two months, the Finnish image of the Soviet Union increasingly became the image of an enemy.
In the section dealing with the time of the Winter War I pay have paid attention to the same variables that I usedd in examining the pre-war image of the Soviet Union. However, the Finnish papers were no longer interested in Soviet foreign politics in the more general sense after the Soviet attack on Finland and the outbreak of the war. The other features – Soviet society, the standard of living in the Soviet Union, its leaders and its people – were still discussed. The views of the Finnish newspapers of the Red Army were those of a country engaged in defensive warfare of defense. They naturally made use of the experiences that had been acquired on the front and on the home front (in the civilian areas that were bombed by the Soviets).

During the whole period under study, the Finnish newspapers’ image of the Soviet Union was colored both by their own ideological commitments and by the narrative traditions that had been formed during the long, conflict-ridden history of Finland and Russia. The pieces published in Ajan Suunta, Uusi Suomi and Ilkka were marked by the papers’ right-wing ideology already before the war, particularly when they described the internal conditions in the Soviet Union, while socialist ideology influenced the way that Suomen Sosialidemokraatti described the Soviet Union was described in Suomen Sosialidemokraatti. The image that different newspapers had of the Soviet Union thus had somewhat different roots. This is also true for their war-time writing, although the fact that the Soviet Union was now the common enemy brought the papers closer to each other. The image of the Soviet Union became more uniformly negative when many of the black-and-white stereotypes formerly cultivated only in the right-wing papers were adopted by the politically neutral and left-wing newspapers as well.

By and large, it can be said that the Finnish newspapers’ image of Russia and the Soviet Union became more openly ideological, the tenser the situation became in Europe and the more the newspapers resented Soviet foreign politics. The papers’ opinion of the internal affairs of the Soviet Union also influenced the overall image. For instance, the Finnish newspapers took a very negative view on the Moscow show trials in 1938 and resented the fact that the Soviet Union chose to regard Finland as one of the Baltic states in 1939, and the way they represented the Soviet Union became more negative as a result.

During the pre-war period, bourgeois papers used the Soviet Union and its social chaos to illustrate what would await socialist society in Finland, too. Papers on the left could also see some positive, genuinely socialist features in the development of Soviet society. When Finnish journalists were describing e.g. Soviet terror, the position of the Soviet citizen, or the standard of living or forms of land ownership in the Soviet Union, they were, in an inverse image as it were, also praising the democracy and welfare at home. Occasionally, for instance when Ajan Suunta, Uusi Suomi and Ilkka represented the Soviet collectivized agriculture in an extremely dismal light, Suomen Sosialidemokraatti criticized them for vilifying the Soviet Union. The views of the politically neutral papers Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet, as well as the liberal Turun Sanomat, did not essentially differ from those of the above-mentioned right-wing papers, although they avoided the most poignant linguistic expressions when they wrote about the Soviet Union.

Since 1934, the Soviet Union had hinted at the possibility of attacking Finland if a third party, Germany for instance, used would use Finnish territory to threaten the Soviet Union. Against this background, it is easy to see why Finnish newspapers were interested in Soviet domesticinternal and foreign affairs during the whole period under study. For instance, the great purge of the Red Army was seen in Finland as a sign of the disintegration and weakness of the Soviet armed forces, and a military insurrection was regarded as possible, or even probable, in 1938. Events like this gave birth rise to wishful images of generals raising against Stalin. Since such images are absent from the New York Times and Dagens Nyheter, they must be firmly rooted in Finnish hopes and wishes.

In 1938, the international position of the Soviet Union was weak. It was not regarded as a major military power or otherwise a significant player in European politics, partly because it was handicapped by its domestic problems. The great willingness of the Finnish bourgeois papers to dwell on these problems betrays their negative image of the Soviet Union. Problems were taken as signs of the hoped-for result: the breakdown of the Soviet Union. In the New York Times and Dagens Nyheter the political isolation of the Soviet Union is indicated above all by the scarcity of writing on it. When these papers analyzed the political development of Europe, particularly after the Munich crisis in the latter part of the 1938, they often overlooked the Soviet Union altogether. They became interested in the Soviet Union only after Germany had German occupied ation all of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 and Britain, France and the Soviet Union had entered into negotiations to prevent further German expansion in Europe.
Although foreign newspapers, too, wrote about the problems and weaknesses of Soviet society and army, particularly before the spring of 1939, they were not as exclusively concerned with them as the Finnish papers. For instance, they noted that the Soviet army was constantly increasing its supply of men and arms. The Finns started to did not start to pay attention to such things only in until 1939, when war was already imminent in Europe. Even then, their interest was motivated above all by domestic affairs: the bourgeois papers used the image of the increasingly powerful Red Army that was gaining strength as an argument for quickly enlarging the military budget. This argument was absent from the workers’ paper, because the Social Democratic Party was strongly against increasing military expenditure.

The way that the Finnish newspapers represented the ’ representations of the Soviet Union not only reflected their own conceptions and ideologies, but these representations could also be politically useful. y could also be used in political debates. The clearest example of such political uses can be found in the way that Eljas Erkko, the owner and editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat, used his paper in the debate on Finnish foreign politics in 1938 and 1939. In this debate, the paper used the current image of the Soviet Union to emphasize the dangers constituted first by the League of Nations and later by the various guarantees that were demanded by the Soviet Union. Erkko, who was a member of the liberal Progressive Party, also employed used the image of the Soviet Union in his personal campaign for the post of Foreign Minister. After Erkko had won the post, the representatives of the Soviet Union could often read about the views of the Finnish Government from the pages of Helsingin Sanomat. The paper was not just a source of information but also a political tool and an agent of power.
Parts of the Finnish press were thus active in their relationship to the Soviet Union during the pre-war period. Helsingin Sanomat assumed the key role already in the spring of 1938, when Finland dissociated itself from certain regulations enacted by the League of Nations. During Erkko’s time as Foreign Minister its role was further accentuated as “the voice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Other papers followed its lead so closely that the ideological differences between the papers became mere differences of tone. With the growing tension between Finland and the Soviet Union grew, some of the papers started to write to two different target groups. On the one hand, they papers aaddressed their own readers. On the other hand, Helsingin Sanomat also wrote to foreign, especially to Soviet audiences, and Suomen Sosialidemokraatti, too, also occasionally furnished the Soviet Union with information about the morale of the Finnish working people.

Already during the summer of 1939, a more threatening image of the Soviet Union had emerged in the Finnish printed media. The image reflects the concern that was caused by the fact that the Soviet Foreign Minister Vjatseslav Molotov treated Finland as one of the Baltic countries. Molotov ignored Finnish claims to neutrality. The Finns became even more worried when after the German-Soviet nonaggression pact was signed in August, and Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them. The fate of the Baltic countries at the end of September and the beginning of October further emphasized the Soviet menace and accentuated the threatening and negative features in the Finns’ image of the Soviet Union. Helsingin Sanomat, the spokesman of the Government, or at least of the Foreign Minister, was already speaking about “Russian imperialism.”
In October and November the way that the newspapers wrote about the Soviet Union became more closely regulated, due to thanks to discreet official interventionvolvement. Finnish propaganda organizations had been on the making since 1937, and they started to operate with full force in the autumn of 1939, when the Moscow negociations were under way and the Finnish Army was being mobilized.

As soon as the crisis broke out, Army information officers and organs started to supply the papers with instructions on what and how to write, as well as with ready-made pieces to publish. Before mid-October, the representatives of the press were already regularly informed what it was desirable for them to write and not write about. Even before the war, the papers followed these instructions closely. In fact Tthey had little choice, because emergency laws and acts allowed the Government to suppress any piece of writing it found harmful. Regular war censorship was introduced only in December 5, when the war that would later become known as the Winter War had already been waged for several days (the Soviet Union had attacked Finland on November 30th).

There is no sign that the press was reluctant to follow the instructions. It considered itself as part of the warring nation from the start. It attacked the enemy with words and dutifully followed the instructions it had received. It can thus be said that Finland not only fought successfully on the front but was also mentally well prepared for the propaganda war.

For someone interest in the study of image of the enemy, the Winter War is an ideal case. It was triggered off by a unilateral attack, it was intensive and, lasting only 105 days, it was too short for a opposition to emerge or for war fatigue to set in. The way that the enemy was represented during the war was stereotyped, but expressive and suggestive, and that image was willingly adopted by the people that was engaged in a defensive war.
The Soviet Union, whose dogmatically ideological propaganda made few concessions to reality, made it easier for Finnish papers to construct and to sustain hold on to their stereotyped image of the enemy. The information provided by the Soviets did not adapt to the changing circumstances but followed a ready-made formula. The Red Amy had been instructed to take Finland in two weeks. Although their attack was not successful, the Soviet propaganda stubbornly insisted that the Red Army was triumphantly liberating Finnish workers and peasants. When the attack was repelled by Finnish forces, Soviet propaganda seemed ridiculous and thereby ended up serving Finnish rather than its own purposes.
Together with the major ground attack, the Soviet Union also launched an a aerial attack against civilian targets. In late 1939 and early 1940, large-scale airstrikes on civilians were still so new in European warfare that Finnish propaganda was able to present them as terrorist acts directed at civilians. Civilized nations, the Finns said, could never commit such acts. This claim became part of the Finnish image of the enemy, and it found support in the conflict-ridden history of the two countries. In Finnish propaganda, Russia / Soviet Union was established as the arch-enemy, who had during centuries taken every opportunity to attack Finland for centuries. The bourgeois press in particular liked to remind its readers of the period known as the Great Hate (1713-1721), when Russian soldiers had occupied Finland and subjected the civilian population to violent and arbitrary treatment.

The Finnish image of the enemy became more unrealistic in the course of the war. Neither the press nor the readers wanted to face the facts about the SSoviet resources. The Soviet Union had been prepared to fight a war which lasts a couple of weeks at the most. However, Finland surprised the world with its military prowess and caused much damage to the great power. The Finns consequently held regard the Red Army in very low regard. A few weeks into the war, the press started to conjecture that it will be the Soviet Union, not Finland, that will loose the war. When the battle of Suomussalmi ended in Soviet defeat in January, belief in the Finnish military superiority became unshakeable.

The way that Soviet society, its leaders and its people were represented after the outbreak of the war was based on the negative image that had been created before the war, most importantly in 1938, the year of terror in the Soviet Union. During the three war months, it was elaborated into an image where everything pointed towards the same direction: the enemy is indeed weak and can be defeated.
Although the New York Times and Dagens Nyheter also wrote about the weak points of Soviet society and military apparatus, they also gave more objective appraisals of the effect that the differences in size and resources between the two countries would have on the outcome of the war. There were moments when their admiration for the Finnish soldier made these papers anticipate Soviet defeat, but, once the Soviet Union had launched a full-scale attack on Finland in February, they were able to see how the war would end.

The way that the foreign papers represented the situation remained essentially the same in 1939 and 1940: according to this view, the predatory politics of the great powers would eventually lead to the destruction of small countries. One of the victims, the one that received the most attention, was Finland. In Finland, the war changed the way that the Soviet Union was represented into a full-blown enemy image, and all available means were used to boost the people’s will to defend itself.

When one studies the image that the Finnish press created of the Soviet Union one also has to consider an accusation that has often been made against Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko. Are we dealing with, as some people have claimed, with “Erkko’s war?” If we focus exclusively on the bilateral relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union, the war is indeed “Erkko’s war.” Finland could have avoided the Winter War if it had given into Soviet demands in the autumn of 1939. However, Foreign Minister Erkko chose not to yield an inch. He forcefully used his paper Helsingin Sanomat to advance his views and also indirectly influenced the other papers, which tended to follow the lead of Helsingin Sanomat. Erkko and the rest of the Finnish Government believed that the Soviet Union was only trying to pressurise Finland and that it would not start a war in the middle of the winter. However, things took a different turn and, in December 1939, Finland was at war with the Soviet Union in December 1939. . When new government was formed Finland got a new government after the outbreak of the war, Erkko was no longer part of it. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Finland was never occupied by the Soviet Union, while the Baltic countries which had given in to the Soviet Union were occupied already in the summer of 1940.

After the beginning of the war, the Finnish propaganda organizations carried on their work more intensively than ever. The media received ready-made pieces to publish throughout the war. In addition, they were given instructions in which they were encouraged to write about some issues and to avoid others. The public image of the war was dominated by current events and by the old image of Russia and the hated Russians. During the Winter War, the newspapers created and sustained a clear-cut, strong and emotionally appealing image of the enemy. The image derived its force from the historical conflicts between Finland and the Soviet Union and from the hardships of the current struggle between the two. The negative features attributed to the enemy clearly served Finnish national purposes.

However, the Finnish war-time propaganda cannot be regarded as emphatically right-wing. That the extreme right did not thrive during the war is indicated by the fact that the Patriotic People’s Front (Isänmaallinen Kansanliike), the party of the extreme right, had to close down its other papers in the autumn of 1939 and Ajan Suunta at the end of the year, owing to financial difficulties. It should also be noted that the Finnish propaganda during the Winter War was not modelled on German propaganda or dictated by National Socialist ideology during the Winter War. Its models are rather to be found in the Anglo-Saxon world. Finns had been introduced acquainted withto Anglo-Saxon propaganda work in training courses that had been had been organized as a form of crisis preparation since the late 1930s.

Official information agencies and the press worked hand in hand during the war, because the press, too, felt that it was fighting against thea common enemy. The problematic features of the image that they had created became apparent only when the peace was made in March 13, 1940. These problems are partly due to the fact that the Finnish press had been so effective and unanimous in representing the way it represented the enemy. The press and the information organizations had not prepared the people for a peace in which Finland would loose a large part of its territory, including loose areas that which the Soviet Union had not demanded before the war and that which it had not been able to take over during the war. More than 400 000 people also lost their homes, which meant that about a tenth of the population had to be was evacuated in a short period of time. In addition, Finland had to cede the Hanko area to the Soviet Union, which had already demanded the area before the war in order to establish a military base there.

The Finnish press was engaged in wishful thinking concerning the Soviet Union both before and during the war. In peacetime, it emphasized the weaknesses of the feared neighbouring country. During the war, wishful thinking was so forceful that the peace and its terms came as a shock even to well-informed journalists. The image of the enemy that the press conceived was had been instrumental in creating unrealistic expectations concerning the war effort and the ability of the Finns to cope with a Soviet attack.

Takaisin Studia Historica Septentrionalia 43