Finland has often been portrayed as rabidly anti-communist country simply because it fought rather successfully against communist Soviet Union, but the reality is quite different.

In fact, just 20 years before the Winter War (and 100 years ago today!), the country had fought a short but extremely brutal civil war between conservative Whites and radical socialist Reds. The war and reprisals that followed - including widespread summary executions of people simply suspected of "Red" leanings and what was probably the first use of concentration camps in Europe - left the society deeply divided. Fortunately for Finland, the most conservative Whites did not end up in power, and many if not most of the demands the Reds had made before the civil war were eventually granted. More moderate socialists, the social democrats, were readmitted to the government, and in 1919, in the very first general elections since the war, they gained 80 of the 200 seats.

In the next elections three years later, a more radical socialist party, that was then permitted to run got 27 seats (mostly winning voters from the social democrats). This party, variously known e.g. as Finnish Socialist Labor Party or Finnish Labor Party, included members of the outlawed, underground Finnish Communist party and was to a large extent controlled by communists and their sympathisers. This party, and most other organisations controlled by the far-left, were banned in 1930, but the circumstances that made people support such parties did not vanish.

It's important to realise that 1930s Finland was what we'd call a poor or developing country these days. All in all, the country was exceedingly poor, and even in larger cities, poverty ranged from occasional to abject. Particularly in the poorest regions of the country, and among the industrial workers, the Communist message found many eager listeners.

However, being a socialist or even a Communist did not mean unquestioning obedience to commands emanating from Moscow, even though the "official line" of the underground Communist party emphasised the need to toe the party line. Finnish socialists, both moderate and more radical, generally believed that Finland should be independent, and at least tended to agree that larger countries should not simply gobble up smaller countries.

The last straw to many was when Stalin and Hitler signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939; many people guessed correctly that the pact would divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, and many dedicated Communists were shaken that Stalin would so eagerly sign a treaty with the Fascists. Many Finnish Communists in exile simply refused to go along with Stalin's plans to conquer Finland, and even condemned the attack publicly. For example, Arvo "Poika" Tuominen, a leader of the Finnish Communist party who had been imprisoned for his political leanings and who in 1939 had been offered a premiership in the so-called Terijoki puppet government the Soviets planned to install in Helsinki, refused to have anything to do with such plans and even wrote an open letter to Finnish communists, urging them to fight in the "just war."

Most of them did, particularly in the Winter War: even many former Red Guards, many of whom had been imprisoned and close to execution in 1918, tried to volunteer for the front. Things got more murky in the Continuation War (1941-44), when Finland de facto allied with Nazi Germany to reclaim lands lost during the Winter War. Particularly as the war plodded on - it had been sold to the troops as a short war, "to be over by Christmas" - left-leaning men were disproportionately represented among the deserters.

Thus, when the Communist Party was again able to operate legally in 1944, there was already a strong base of support for it. Many people had simply become disillusioned by the war and wanted political leadership and other things to change; others felt that the common people ought to benefit from the sacrifices made during the wartime. As a result, the big winner of the first post-war elections in 1945 was the League of Finnish People's Democrats (SKDL), an umbrella organisation that included the Communists and other more radical socialists who didn't fit to the rolls of the Social Democratic party.

For few years post-war, there was a real fear that the Communists would use this platform as a base for a coup d'etat, much in a same way as they did in Czhechoslovakia in 1948. However, Finnish Communist party suffered from organisational problems, and post-Cold War research has all but confirmed that Stalin refused to help the Finnish Communists to power: he would be happy to secure their power if they managed to seize it, but they had to manage the first steps themselves. Probably the major reasons for Stalin's reluctance were the understanding that Communist Finland would inevitably mean that Sweden would declare for the Western Allies, as well as the realisation that Finns would be likely to fight a Communist takeover and they would most certainly fight another invasion.

Behind the scenes, the post-war years saw an epic political fight in all sorts of labor unions and other organisations, as Social Democrats and Communists fought for power. This struggle, where the Soviet Union funded the Communists and United States and Britain the Social Democrats, ended in a victory for the Social Democrats, although many organisations ended up in the hands of the Communists. The end result, that lasted until the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist party (ironically, largely as a result of real estate speculation during the 1980s, which bankrupted the party in the early 1990s), was that the far Left remained a powerful force in the Finnish politics, but one that increasingly took a separate line from the Soviet Union - just as most other Western European "Euro" Communist parties.

In fact, to its eternal credit, the far left SKDL was the only party that emphatically condemned the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czhechoslovakia, as by that time all the other parties had acquiesced to the need to "maintain good foreign relations" i.e. to suck up to the Soviet Union. Memoirs of the last Cold War president of Finland, Mauno Koivisto, actually hint that this was the role expected from the SKDL: they were accepted to the government only when they made a very clear distinction to the political aims of the Soviet Union, and were sometimes (as in 1968) actually used to voice Finnish unofficial policy when other parties could not do so for fear of angering the Soviets.