Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 15 – No one who has
spent time in Estonia or Finland will have failed to take note of what is one
of the most remarkable demonstrations of cooperation of international cooperation
between the two, the presence in Finnish military cemeteries of the graves of
Estonians who came to fight against Soviet aggression against Finland in
1939-1940.
On the gravestones of these Estonian
soldiers are the words “For the independence of Finland and the honor of
Estonia,” the kind of thing one might have assumed Moscow would have demanded
be removed but that even during the period of “Finlandization,” Helsinki
carefully maintained.
Now, two Ukrainian historians, Denis
Kovalov and Yury Yakuba, have told the much less well-known story of Ukrainians
who came to the aid of Finland and efforts to memorialize them (sichovyk.com.ua/istorichna-slava/619-jurij-horlis-horskij-talvisodassa
and. in Russian, rufabula.com/articles/2016/05/13/ukrainians-on-the-protection-of-finland).
They tell the story of Yury
Gorliss-Gorsky, a Ukrainian ataman who resisted the Bolsheviks in his homeland
and then travelled to Helsinki at the time of the Soviet invasion in 1939 and
organized a regiment consisting of emigres and Ukrainian soldiers who deserted
from Soviet units.
Moscow has thrown the 44th
Kyiv Rifleman’s Division against Finland without providing its soldiers with
adequate clothing for the extreme cold. Many froze to death. Others were killed
in the forests by Finnish units, and some, many of whom were ethnic Ukrainians,
crossed over to the Finnish side and jointed the former ataman in fighting the
Soviets.
Red Army commanders admitted as much
in their dispatches to Moscow. One noted that “there is information about the
recruitment of Ukrainian Red Army men by White Finnish spies,” and another said
that Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists and the agents of a certain
Gorlis-Gorsky” were playing a key role in this.
And Finnish commanders not only
recognized the importance of these Ukrainian units but detailed in their
despatches “the resoluteness of soldiers from Ukraine taken prisoner,” a quality
that set them apart from “the residents of Soviet Russia which were
ideologically dominated by Bolshevism and rotting imperial chauvinism.”
Historians confirm this and found
that Ukrainians who went over to the Finnish side frequently said they did not
understand why Moscow was invading Finland and expressed their desire to fight
for Finland as a way of fighting for the ultimate independence of their own
country (istpravda.com.ua/articles/2010/11/30/6773/).
The forces of Gorlis-Gorsky which
were formally established at the end of January 1940 grew rapidly from 450
officers and men to 850 by the beginning of March of that year. They won
victories along the front, they suffered one disappointment. Helsinki didn’t
agree to their wearing yellow and blue insignia because that had already been
assigned to Swedish units there.
In Soviet times, Moscow largely suppressed discussion of
the heroics of Ukrainian fighters in Finland. A rare exception was in the
memoirs of Soviet commander Kirill Meretskov in 1968 when he admitted that it had
turned out that “the Ukrainians did not want to fight for our Soviet Russia and
therefore massively surrendered to the Finns.”
Kovalov
and Yakuba point out that the Winter War created “a unique situation,” one in
which “Ukrainians were on both sides of the front.” And the willingness of Ukrainian soldiers to
leave their Soviet units and fight for the Finns created a serious threat to
Moscow, one that they believe played a key role in Stalin’s decision to end the
war when he did.
“The
Ukrainian factor,” they argue, “created the risk of the complete demoralization
of Soviet forces in Finland” because it threatened to spread to other
non-Russians in the ranks and thus undermine Moscow’s control of the non-Russian
republics. That makes them worthy of
being remembered not only by Ukrainians and Finns but by many others.
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