Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter offers a rigorous Marxist assessment of the Soviet-Finnish War (1939–40), situating it within the broader imperialist dynamics of the Second World War. The core argument is that the Kremlin’s alliance with Hitler was never an ideological pact but a calculated strategic manoeuvre. Stalin broke off negotiations with the Anglo-French delegation in the summer of 1939 precisely because they refused him military control over the Baltic states; an agreement with Hitler, by contrast, secured this objective. The subsequent partition of Poland created a common frontier with Germany, paradoxically increasing Stalin’s dependence on Hitler. When Hitler’s plans to seize Scandinavia threatened Leningrad, Stalin sought guarantees in Finland but met resistance. Hitler, however, demanded an early peace, forcing Stalin to renounce any plan to sovietise Finland.
The chapter insists that under world war conditions, small states are mere pawns of great powers. Norwegian and Finnish resistance was not an expression of independent national defence but was subordinated to the clash of imperialist camps; the Fourth International supports neither camp. The forceful sovietisation of Georgia in 1921 is presented as an historical analogy to the invasion of Finland, but the critical difference is that the present USSR has lost its attractive power for the world working class. Stalin’s plan to sovietise Finland was abandoned not out of principle but because of Allied threats and Hitler’s timetable. The prognosis of a civil war in Finland was always conditional; changed conditions meant it did not occur.
The chapter concludes with a crucial polemical point: the workers’ state must be accepted as it actually emerged from history, not as an idealised construct. Despite the bureaucracy’s crimes, the USSR must be defended as a workers’ state because its social foundations can still ensure progress, while capitalism offers only decay. Revolutionists have a duty to defend every working-class conquest, even when distorted by hostile pressures. Those unable to defend old positions, the text warns, will never win new ones.