ABSTRACT
After the failure of the St Petersburg plan, Churchill was never again to regard Finland as temporarily the most important foreign ally to him, which it briefly was in 1919. In the interwar years Churchill was in any case mostly out of touch with British decision-making regarding Finland; he was out of decision-making in general, and showed no real interest in Finland. Apart from the six years when he served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-1929), before the outbreak of the Second World War he concentrated on literary pursuits and later, in the 1930s, on obstructing the Indian independence process and critiquing the policies of appeasement. Inasmuch as Finland impacted on Churchill’s thought or activities in these years, this was evident only in retrospect, after Great Britain had joined the Second World War and Churchill had become Prime Minister. A certain cumulative mass of interwar impressions did then help to shape his views on Finland’s meaning in the contexts of the war, anticommunism and building a new world order.
