ABSTRACT
When Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, they acted in fulfilment of the terms of the guarantee which had been provided to Poland the previous March. Other states in Europe-Romania, Greece and Turkey among them-had been given similar Anglo-French pledges of allied assistance. Finland, however, received no such guarantee from Britain, France, or, indeed, any other power, although Britain was asked by the Soviet Government during the Moscow talks to include Finland within the states it guaranteed against aggression. This chapter demonstrates the problems which were thrown up by this request. Finnish reluctance to accept an unwanted guarantee from the USSR, with Britain and France as additional signatories, was to prove a major stumbling block when the Allies attempted to engage Moscow in an alliance agreement aimed against Germany in the spring and summer months of 1939. The many obstacles to a successful conclusion of the talks have been well discussed, debated and disputed over the years but it is the Finnish aspect to the so-called Moscow negotiations involving the Western powers and the Soviet Union, rather than the talks as a holistic entity which will be considered in this chapter. The chapter also investigates the problems which British negotiators faced in attempting to reconcile Finnish amour propre with Soviet security demands. The difference in interpretation of the Soviet Union by the Northern Department as opposed to other elements of the British policy-making establishment is something which is highlighted when looking at the Finnish angle, which was of some importance to Collier and his colleagues. Neville Chamberlain had confided to his diary on 26 March that he felt a ‘profound distrust of Russia’, doubting its military capabilities, distrusting its motives which seemed ‘to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears’ and focusing on the suspicion felt by small states which bordered the USSR, including Finland.1 While Neville Chamberlain and the Cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee debated the pros and cons of effecting an alliance with Soviet Russia, Laurence Collier never doubted that an association with the Soviet Union was a desirable objective. Indeed, Collier’s understanding of the necessity of allaying Russian doubts, and of the need to avoid any situation whereby Moscow felt its security threatened has been demonstrated earlier in this study. Although uninvolved with the face-to-face discussions in Moscow, Collier attempted to do all he could to make the talks successful. It has become an almost accepted tenet of British historiography that while influential people such as Churchill were urging that an agreement with Moscow be reached, those
people actually charged with the implementation of policy were never too keen on this option. This chapter demonstrates how the policy of Collier, a senior official at the Foreign Office, towards Finland, adhered to this aim, and that the desire for an alliance with the USSR was held by British policy-makers, that is to say Collier, and not just opposition figures such as Churchill and Eden.
