ABSTRACT
There was very little that Britain could do in response to the Soviet invasion of Finland. Indeed, Neville Chamberlain privately thought that the invasion was not such a serious matter at all.1 Collier, on the other hand, was aware of the urgency of Finnish needs and the opportunities for the British which the Soviet action had opened. For some time he had been arguing that the Baltic could be the region which could lead to disagreement between Germany and Russia, and any military disturbances in the area were, he thought, likely to occasion such an eventuality. He had been urging the service departments for some time to meet requests from the Finnish armed forces, but even he realised that there was a limit to what could be supplied to a rather distant country at a time when the survival of the British Empire was at stake. The options which were open ranged from an outright acceptance of the Soviet action along with recognition of the Kuusinen ‘government’ to the more drastic option of military intervention against the Red Army. In between these poles lay less extreme forms of protest, such as the continued supply of military equipment to the Finnish armed forces and the raising of the issue at the League of Nations. These latter options were followed by the British Government in the days following the invasion (albeit reluctantly in the case of bringing the issue before the League).
