ABSTRACT
Finland could never be looked on as any ordinary nation-state, for Finland was historically the favorite garden of the marauding Russian Bear. The country fought bravely, but inevitably lost 25,000 lives and a tenth of its territory in 1939 in the bitter “Winter War” with the Soviets. Indeed, it was in the period afterward that the modish term “Finlandization” came to represent in European eyes the effective neutralization by communist power of this once-proud and independent country of 5 million people. It was in those years, too, that the Finns, forced to pay huge amounts in “war reparations” to Moscow, learned just how far they could really go with their neighbors. In the World War II years, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov told the Lithuanian foreign minister, in what seemed then to be the final epitaph for Finnish independence: “The time of small nations has passed.”.
