Fears of Soviet invasion in August and September 1968

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By Ilkka Malmberg
     
      In the stands at the Olympic Stadium, during the annual Finnkampen athletics meet between Finland and Sweden, the rumour started to go around: hundreds of Soviet tanks had appeared behind the border, ready to attack.
      The Kymi Jaegers were in position to the east of Hamina ready to repulse an assault.
      In Lappeenranta, Finland’s own tanks had been moved up to the border zone.
     
It was the last week of August in 1968. Czechoslovakia had been invaded and occupied just over a week earlier.
      The news from Prague unsettled the Finns mightily.
      The eternal fear raised its head once more.
     
For the past few days, there had been large demonstrations outside the Soviet Embassy on Tehtaankatu in the Finnish capital, with as many as 2,000 people milling around in the street.
      A couple of smoke-bombs were thrown, some stones and bottles were tossed through the steel fence.
      A few windows were smashed, and as collateral damage, some cars and trams were dented.
      The police took out their batons.
      Some sixty people were arrested.
     
The late-edition tabloid Ilta-Sanomat reported how sweating policemen, their hats knocked off in the fracas, sought to hold back the demonstrators.
      Out of the throng emerged weeping, shoeless women, and men making their escape at a brisk gallop.
      Those who were caught were bundled into police vans.
      A hypnotic chant of Dub-cek, Dub-cek bounced off the walls of the city blocks.
      The former Czech leader and First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, who had been whisked off to face his masters in Moscow, had a splendid name for the crowds to shout.
      As did the Czech President Ludvik Svoboda: Svo-bo-da!
     
But the biggest kick of all was the place itself: the Soviet Embassy was a long and forbidding granite edifice whose closed garden was surrounded by a high steel fence.
      To think, finally people dared to go down there and show those inside what they thought of them.
     
The Czechs were of course known to the Finns, above all for ice hockey, for Helsinki Olympics triple gold-medallist Emil Zatopek, and for the good soldier Svejk, as made famous in Jaroslav Hasek’s novel of the same name.
      Everything Czech had the sympathy of the Finns. It is said that Alko ran dry of Czech wines. Then again, there cannot have been many of them to choose from.
      Back in those days, Czech beer was not something you bumped into in Finland, or it would certainly have been drunk heartily.
     
At the same time as Helsinki was protesting vigorously at the occupation and the suffocation of the Prague Spring, some way to the east in Kotka, or more precisely on an island just off the coast, Finnish military personnel at the coastal battery on Kirkonmaa got news of a large Soviet naval flotilla heading for Kotka.
      The only thing in the way was Kirkonmaa. The fort’s commanding officer himself climbed up into the wooden fire control tower to await the appearance of the ships over the horizon.
      A total of 63 of them hove into sight.
     
Back in Helsinki, the ship of state tried to hold its course. The government expressed its sadness at the occupation of Czechoslovakia and hoped for a peaceful outcome. It promised to monitor developments carefully. There was no overt criticism of the Soviet moves.
      Deep depression had overtaken President Urho Kekkonen.
      ”Why the hell did I have to go and agree to stand for re-election? Now I’d be a free man to say what I think”, Kekkonen wrote in his diary.
     
The President pondered resignation and withdrawal from political life. He felt as if his bowstring had been cut, as if a trapdoor had suddenly opened under his feet. “I walk around in the [Presidential] Palace, where I’ve been living since the end of the summer, depressed and not knowing what to do.”
      The head of state’s official residence Tamminiemi was being renovated, and Kekkonen was “in exile” in the Palace down by the South Harbour.
      This was one reason, too, why the Soviet Ambassador Andrei Kovalev had not had a chance to warn Kekkonen about the occupation in time.
     
The evening before the tanks received the order to roll into Prague, Kekkonen had been out duck-shooting with a party of businessmen in Hollola, near Lahti.
      He had bagged two wild duck while the armoured columns were warming up their diesel at the border, ready for the off.
      Kekkonen had returned to Helsinki only after midnight. Ambassador Kovalev had tried to call to warn him before the news hit the wires, but this was not the mobile-phone era, and at that time the Foreign Ministry did not even have a round-the-clock duty roster, so there was nobody to pass on the message.
      Kovalev had apparently also tried to reach Kekkonen at Tamminiemi, but as we have seen, the President had the builders in and was living downtown instead.
     
The upshot of all this was that Kovalev did not manage to contact Kekkonen before morning.
      ”Sylvi [Kekkonen’s wife] came to wake me at half past six. Kovalev wanted an audience.”
      By then, the news from Prague had come through.
      Even that hard-bitten warhorse Eino S. Repo, then the Director-General of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), was in a blind funk.
      He had heard a rumour that the Soviet Union intended to carry out a naval visit to Helsinki.
      The rumour was in fact true: just a day before the invasion, the Soviets had made enquiries about a possible fleet visit.
      When Kekkonen heard of this, he vehemently refused to agree to the proposal.
     
On the coastal fort island of Kirkonmaa, look-outs anxiously scanned the horizon.
      The Soviet warships steamed closer.
      The retired coastal artillery officer Lt. Col. Heikki Tiilikainen was at that time head of the garrison on the island.
      He recalls the incident in a book of memoirs from 2003.
      The battery had been given orders not to raise the level of readiness, and those who were up for leave were to be permitted to go.
      Over the weekend of the 24th and 25th of August, there were just 27 men in uniform left on the island. Without any great fuss, Tiilikainen ordered the heaviest guns to be made ready for firing.
     
The heavy coastal artillery guns had few shells ready to hand, and more had to be brought up from the underground ammunition depot.
      Since there was a chronic shortage of men, Tiilikainen ordered the wives of the serving members of the Finnish Defence Forces stationed there to help in moving the 50-kilo mortar shells.
      Contingency plans were made ready to hustle any children on the site to safety on the north side of the island.
     
If push came to shove, it was necessary to be able to get off at least one shot against the invaders.
      More than one might have been a bit of a stretch.
      Tiilikainen was concerned that the less experienced conscripts at the fort would lose it if things got serious.
      He ordered the record player and loudspeakers of the garrison’s P.A. system to be set up by the gun battery.
      A recording of the stirring Porilaisten marssi (see link below for audio clip) was readied on the turntable, and the island’s large military flag was brought to the foot of the flagpole so it could be hoisted without delay.
      “The idea was that when the first incoming rocket was sent off, Porilaisten marssi would blare out from the firing stations and the blue-and-white flag with the lion insignia would be run up the mast”, writes Tiilikainen.
     
The Soviet flotilla steamed purposefully towards the edge of Finnish territorial waters - and then abruptly turned west.
      The Gulf of Finland was choc-a-bloc with warships and other hardware at the back end of August 1968.
      Kekkonen notes in his diary entry for September 4th that the Soviet Navy was very active at the eastern end of the Gulf: ”Forty ships on the move. Why?”
      At the same time, the Finns were running marine surveillance manoeuvres.
      The Finnish Air Force, too, had just begun a marine and air reconnaisance exercise.
      On top of that, at the beginning of September there was a Finnish coastal defence exercise in progress, involving an amphibious invasion and an air-drop of troops on the Hanko Peninsula west of Helsinki.
      The exercises had been decided on a good while earlier, of course, but now suddenly there seemed to be soldiers everywhere in full battle-gear.
      It is hardly any wonder that the rumour-mills creaked into action.
     
Pilots in the air at the time spoke of four Russian hydrofoils that had steamed at full speed towards Finnish waters and then abruptly wheeled away at the last moment.
      In the capital, there was a rumour that Russian torpedo boats had done a quick circuit around the Harmaja lighthouse and pilot station, located on an island just outside Helsinki.
     
And what about the rumours coming in from the eastern border?
      Well, it was true that there were tanks rumbling in the vicinity of Lappeenranta, though they were not exactly front-line Soviet vehicles.
      The tanks in question were old and harmless British-built Comet Mk1s belonging to the officer training school, in which young troop leaders had been given permission to train.
      “The lieutenants were rampaging about in their tanks with youthful enthusiasm outside Lappeenranta, and the word began to get passed around”, says Tiilikainen in his book.
     
But that was not all. An anti-aircraft battery from around Lahti had been seen heading east, and the Kymi Jaeger Battalion was ordered to train near Miehikkälä, close to the border.
      Those on the Jaeger exercise were carrying live rounds on them, even though it was not permitted to break open the ammunition packages.
      Assault rifles were distributed among the men and they were taught how to use them.
     
No obvious indication was to be given of any increase in Finnish military readiness, and national service conscripts had to be allowed to go on leave as per normal.
      Coastal defence fortresses were given strict orders not to be provoked, if provocation came their way.
      Heikki Tiilikainen later interviewed Staff Sergeant Yrjö Lehtinen, who had been serving with the Transport Squadron at Utti, near Valkeala. The squadron was put onto a heightened alert in mid-August.
      It was no longer permitted to leave the hangar area, and personnel slept and ate there.
      “At certain times we were even on cockpit readiness, or in other words crews were sitting in the planes ready for immediate scramble. The orders came down directly from the General Staff”, Lehtinen recalled.
     
On August 20th, the day before the Czech occupation, a Finnish air surveillance plane had had to abort its mission because of an extremely aggressive response from a Soviet MiG-21 interceptor.
      “The open sea out in the Gulf was clearly reserved as the playground for the Soviet fleet.”
      “The movements of the warships were rather jittery. Several navy vessels anchored close to the Helsinki Caisson Lighthouse (located about 22km south of Helsinki). One was also anchored on the fairway leading in to Porvoo, though still in international waters. In front of Kotka, the ships approached the edge of Finnish territorial waters as if to provoke a reaction.”
      The barrels of the deck guns on the Soviet warships followed reconnaisance aircraft as they flew in the vicinity.
      The situation continued for three days.
     
“At about the same time, we were getting snippets of information about extensive tank formations and troop movements on the Karelian Isthmus [the narrow strip of land between the border and St. Peterburg, separating the Gulf of Finland from Lake Ladoga].”
      After the Warsaw Pact troops rolled into Czechoslovakia, the Finnish planes received an order to stay on full alert but firmly on the ground, so as not to cause any provocation.
      When the rumours of armoured concentrations began to grow in volume, the squadron’s commanding officer himself flew up from Virolahti on the south coast as far as Joensuu, and he tried to observe movement on the roads in the Isthmus.
      Nothing untoward was spotted.
     
History researcher Juha Pohjonen has written a history of the Finnish Border guard and has also been given access to the Guard’s classified documents.
      He says that this kind of psy-war showing of muscle was and is common on the eastern border.
      “Always when there was something bigger going on. For instance during the “Nightfrost” crisis of 1958 and at the time of the Berlin Crisis, when the Wall was going up.”
      One common tactic at times like these was to head purposefully towards territorial waters and turn away at the last moment.
      “At moments like that there is more of everything going on. New troops brought up, changes in military focus and placements. In 1968 it was all go on that front. But that’s not to say it came as any kind of shock to the people in the Border Guard.”
     
Pohjonen has a simple explaination: in a time of crisis, every watchtower is occupied on both sides of the frontier zone.
      People are listening and watching. With more pairs of eyes and ears on the job, more gets noticed.
     
In any event, the rumour-mill had to be stopped somehow.
      The then Prime Minister Mauno Koivisto and his Foreign Minister Ahti Karjalainen called in the editors-in-chief of the largest daily newspapers and warned them against jumping to overly hasty conclusions.
      Karjalainen stressed that the occupation in Czechoslovakia was not having an effect on bilateral relations with the eastern neighbour, and he warned against stirring things up on the foreign policy front.
      YLE was on its toes. The drama of the days and nights in Prague brought an increase in live news bulletins and stand-up reports, which were not particularly common or familiar at that time.
      During the evening news, everyone hunkered down and listened to YLE’s correspondent Lieko Zachovalová’s commentaries and the pithy audio-landscape she presented from Prague.
     
Another who learnt at the time that one did not go antagonising a superpower just like that was a 21-year-old summer reporter with YLE named Paavo Väyrynen (yes, that Väyrynen, later the chairman of the Centre Party and long-serving Foreign Minister).
      Väyrynen had been making a radio report of the demonstrations outside the Soviet Embassy on Tehtaankatu, and had interviewed people taking part in the protest.
      But the piece was never aired.
      “There was talk that the Ministry of the Interior had phoned the newsdesk”, recalls Väyrynen with some ironic amusement.
      “They probably didn’t want to have it told just how large the demonstration was. Or what the mood on the street was like.”
     
If Finland was able to keep a lid on such matters, the press in Western countries began to undermine this, with articles appearing during the autumn that claimed the Soviet Union was also operating in Finland - particularly after the surprise October visit to Helsinki by the Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.
      Frankfurter Allgemeine reached the conclusion that the Soviets were placing observers in ports in Western Finland.
      Le Figaro believed that Kosygin had presented Kekkonen with demands for Soviet bases on Finnish soil.
      The Washington Post went further, and reported that a large number of Russian “visitors” had crossed the border in Karelia and that restrictions had been placed on railway traffic.
      The information came from the paper’s Scandinavian correspondent, based in Stockholm.
     
When diplomat Joel Pekuri went and asked the journalist bluntly for an explanation, he was told further that according to the latest information, 300 Russian officers were arriving in Lappeenranta every day via the Saimaa Canal.
      This bit of news also found its way into the Washington Post and was then carried by other American newspapers.
      The Finns were piqued and unsettled by the writings across the Atlantic: this last one was definitely pure fiction.
     
The “he said, she said” debate with the prestigious American broadsheet culminated in an incident where the then editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat Aatos Erkko called up Philip Foisie, the head of the foreign desk at the Post. Erkko flew Foisie in a private plane to Lappeenranta, from where they tramped in frosty conditions right up to the border zone, in order that Foisie could see for himself that there were no Russians about.
      On the way back, Erkko offered Foisie a bite to eat. Over dinner, the American admitted that the Finns were right after all.
     
Around a year later, the writer, journalist and celebrated dissident of the Kekkonen era Kauko Kare wrote in his periodical Nootti that Soviet troops had in fact crossed the Finnish border on the day of the Prague action, somewhere near Kuusamo.
      He even claimed there had been sporadic shots exchanged, but that the matter had been hushed up by Helsinki.
      The claim had troubled the Helsingin Sanomat deputy editor-in-chief Heikki Tikkanen, for there had been a few additional hints emanating from the border region that something had happened that day.
      Tikkanen sent Jorma Korhonen, a journalist from the paper’s Oulu regional office, on a fact-finding mission to the border.
     
Korhonen’s task was kept very much under wraps: “He wasn’t even allowed to tell his family what he was up to.”
      The Finnish authorities had also investigated the claims, but there was reason to believe that even if there had been fire behind the smoke, they might have seen fit not to publish the results.
      Korhonen’s brief was to travel up the border area from Suomussalmi northwards and to chat to the locals, the Border Guard officers, and police.
      Had anything unusual happened on the border in these parts last autumn?
     
Korhonen knew the area well. He spent a week or so going from house to house and wrote up a lengthy report for the paper’s Helsinki office.
      Nothing was ever heard of it again.
      What did the report have to say?
      People living close to the border spoke of muscle-flexing from the neighbours’ side, says Korhonen, now retired.
      “People had been a bit scared and skittish, and even at that time they were very careful about what they said to me. Many swore that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.”
      “Then again, they didn’t express any surprise that it might have been true. This sort of thing does happen in border areas.”
     
Many recalled that August night for the fact that it was the first day of the duck-hunting season.
      A good few had been out with their shotguns, just like Urho Kekkonen.
      But one experience from August 1968 was exceptional, and very dramatic.
      A member of the Border Guard - a perfectly typical middle-aged local man, according to Korhonen - had said he was alone in a watch tower close to the Kuusamo border station.
      In the darkness there were the sounds of motors being powered up, and suddenly the entire frontier zone was bathed in bright light.
      “It was like the sun had just come up”, he described the effect of the floodlights.
     
Three tanks in line abreast were ploughing towards the frontier zone.
      The man had been badly shocked at what he saw.
      The tanks stopped just short of the border markers, reversed back - and then made another run forward to do the same again.
      The retired Helsingin Sanomat editor-in-chief Heikki Tikkanen no longer remembers Korhonen’s report from the front line. But he admits such missions were occasionally given to journalists.
      “On a couple of occasions I gave instructions that someone should go and listen to what ordinary people living in the frontier zone had to say.”
     
The mood in those days was pretty heavy, recalls Tikkanen.
      “We felt a great sense of mistrust towards what we were getting in statements from the Finnish Security Police. We would ask and they would always deny it.”
      The reason why Korhonen’s story was buried and never appeared in the paper is not known.
      It may have been that the recollections of the man spoken to were considered unreliable.
      No other witnesses to the alleged incident were found.
     
Historian Juha Pohjonen is confused at the border guard’s story.
      “It makes no sense, really. How the devil would tanks have got into a place like that, and where did they think they would be going?”
      Pohjonen has at his disposal some “fairly secret material” from the border zone.
      The way he tells it, there were Soviet soldiers at large in the Kuusamo area, but not more than around fifty or so, and they did not come right up to the border.
     
In his view the "tanks" described above were more likely to have been tracked bulldozers, which were in extensive use at that time in Russian Karelia, since there was a good deal of fortification work going on there.
      There was a long list of reports of explosions, presumably from blasting.
      Pohjonen emphasises that at the time the Soviets were preparing themselves above all for a Western attack.
      It was important for them to keep the Finnish border under tight control, while their operations in Central Europe were in full swing.
     
The dramatic autumn trundled on towards Christmas 1968.
      Kekkonen, too, had more problems to occupy his mind.
      Sylvi Kekkonen was diagnosed with a tumour in her oesophagus.
      Lieko Zachovalová’s reports from Czechoslovakia continued to be heard on the airwaves for some time.
      Her voice was every bit as much “the sound of autumn 1968" as The Beatles’ Hey Jude, released in late August and listed among the rock classics of that year performed in the Senate Square last week at a free concert during the Helsinki Festival’s Night of the Arts.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.8.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  COMMENTARY: The international emergency number is 56-68-79-08 (19.8.2008)

Links:
  Porilaisten Marssi / The Pori March

ILKKA MALMBERG / Helsingin Sanomat
ilkka.malmberg@hs.fi