Russia at war 1941-1945

against Leningrad. Mannerheim appears to have refused. At the trial of the pro-German Ryti after the war, the former head of the Finnish Government even argued that the Finns had really "saved" Leningrad:

On August 24, 1941, I visited Marshal Mannerheim's headquarters. The Germans

had been pressing us to advance on Leningrad, after crossing the old frontier. I said that the conquest of Leningrad was not our object, and that we should not take part in it. Mannerheim and War Minister Waiden agreed with me, and rejected the

German proposal. As a result, there arose the paradoxical situation in which the

Germans were unable to advance on Leningrad from the north; in this way, the

Finns defended Leningrad from the north.

[See C. Leonard Lundin, Finland in the Second World War (New York, 1957).]

For all that, the Finns did take part in the encirclement of Leningrad; also, according to the German historian Walter Görlitz, the Finns would have attacked Leningrad had there been a final German onslaught on the city from the south; but this never took place.

[Walter Görlitz, Paulus and Stalingrad (London, 1963), p. 128.]

They occupied considerable stretches of Soviet territory which had never belonged to them, notably east of Lake Ladoga. But although, as is evident from the Soviet armistice conditions presented to the Finns in 1944, there were some German troops stationed in Finland, there appears to be no evidence that they were ever used against Leningrad from Finnish territory. Whether Leningrad was ever shelled or bombed from Finnish territory is perhaps more doubtful; in 1943 I was shown one or two shell-holes on the north side of buildings in Leningrad, which suggested that some shells had been fired from Finnish territory. But even if these one or two shell-holes were genuine, there was certainly no regular shelling of Leningrad from the north. Notices in the streets of Leningrad declaring the southern "sheltered" side of the streets much safer than the north side, clearly implied that the shelling was all assumed to come from the south, i.e. from the Germans.

It is certain that any major offensive from the Finnish side during the most critical months of the Leningrad blockade, and heavy shelling from the north would have greatly added to Leningrad's troubles. That the Finns did not attack at that critical time was due to a number of factors: a certain distaste of many Finns at being allied to Hitler, who had ruthlessly invaded Denmark and Norway; the fact that Britain and, later, the United

States, were allied with the Soviet Union; and a perhaps genuine reluctance on

Mannerheim's part to take part in the conquest and destruction of Leningrad.

This does not mean that the Finnish bourgeoisie was not violently anti-Russian, as it had been ever since 1918, and even more since the Winter War of 1939-40. But grandiose

ideas of a "Great Finland" stretching, according to some of the more absurd blueprints, as far as Moscow ("an old Finnish city, as its very name indicates") seem to have been limited to the lunatic fringe. Nevertheless, there were at least a small number of select Finnish troops which took part in the German operations against Russia proper, and,

according to numerous testimonies I heard both during and after the war, particularly in the Smolensk and Tula areas, many of these Finnish soldiers behaved particularly

brutally to the Russian civilian population—especially to girls and women—"worse even than the Germans".

As far as the military and political leadership of Leningrad were concerned, there seems, however, little doubt that they were conscious of a certain negative value of the role played by the Finns in the tragedy of Leningrad. When, after the Soviet-Finnish

armistice, Zhdanov travelled to Helsinki, he had long and pointedly courteous

conversations with Mannerheim and, as we know, the armistice terms finally agreed to, leaving nearly the whole of Finland unoccupied by Soviet troops, were much milder than might have been expected. With an eye on future relations with the Scandinavian

countries, and no doubt remembering the fiasco of Kuusinen's "Terijoki Government" of 1939-40, the Russians made no attempt, either then or later, to turn Finland into a

People's Democracy.

PART FOUR The Black Summer of 1942

Chapter I CLOSE-UP: MOSCOW IN JUNE 1942