There’s been some talk that one possible way to resolve the crisis “caused” by Ukraine’s insistence that it should run its own affairs is that the country should operate under a regime similar to the one subtly and not so subtly imposed on Finland by the victorious Soviets in the decades after the Second World War (including, it should be noted, accepting the loss of a large slice of territory).
Essentially, Finland was able to preserve a market economy and (although saying anything too rude in public about the USSR was “discouraged”) its democracy. Where foreign policy was concerned, Finland was expected to remain neutral, with occasional nods in Moscow’s direction, and it maintained a close trading relationship with the Soviet Union. It was, in a sense, a curated independence.
Writing in the New York Times, Jason Horowitz examines Finnish attitudes to “Finlandization” — a term that never went down well in Helsinki — and how it might apply to Ukraine. The whole piece is well worth reading, but here’s an extract:
Finns said that model rewarded politicians who did Russia’s bidding, ostracized those who balked at Russian influence, and introduced a crop of Soviet secret operatives in the country who worked closely with the Finnish elite.
Mr. Hjerppe, a retired librarian, said the term also made him ‘‘a little bit afraid,” explaining how during the Cold War, self-censorship extended from the corridors of power to the family living room.
Then again, his father was a communist government minister in (judging by the article) the 1960s. By the early 1980s, when I started going to Finland, things had eased up, and, in private at least, people were not shy about sharing their views on the Soviets (the Finns I met were not fans).
The NYT (my emphasis added):
[Mika Aaltola, the director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs] did not think Finlandization was good for Ukraine, or Finland either, and while he said the period was firmly in the country’s history, reintroducing it in another Russian border state could only hasten its return here.
“Finns understand what happens in Ukraine doesn’t stay in Ukraine,” he said.
The danger of appeasing Mr. Putin comes up often in Finland, and in fact, Finns argue that their independence and inoculation to a renewed round of Finlandization flows from Mr. Putin’s respect for their tradition of military prowess and willingness to take up arms. . . .
Unlike Sweden, which has largely disarmed, Finland remains well armed, recently ordering 64 F-35 fighter jets from the United States. It has an army 180,000 strong, and a powerful national resolve to defend itself. . . .
As onerous and intrusive as Finlandization was (particularly in its earlier years), the idea that Putin would treat a nominally “Finlandized” Ukraine, a nation with a distinct identity that he refuses to accept, in the same relatively hands-off way is a stretch. The Kremlin could feel confident that allowing the Finns, a small, emphatically non-Russian people, to stick with democracy represented no conceivable threat to the domestic Soviet order. Putin, on the other hand, knows that the existence of a large Slavic democracy (with a substantial Russian minority and a lengthy intertwined history with Russia) on Russia’s doorstep, could, if only by example, pose a dangerous threat, not to Russia, but to his rule. As a result, the Finlandization of Ukraine would only be the first step in an infinitely more sinister rearrangement of what remained of its independence and its democracy, leaving it, probably, as a bigger, more valuable Belarus, free for Russia to use as it wished.