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towards the Allies were engendered, all the deeper if.Moscow, with her memories of 1918, was convinced thatsooner or later Finland would, willingly or unwillingly,open her ports to Hitler. On the Finnish side, exhaustionand recrimination did not oust the fixed resentment feltby so many Finns against the Soviet Union, whetherfeared as the old Russia in thin disguise or as well as thepropagator of social revolution. Additional fears werearoused now that (March 1940) the Karelian autonomousrepublic was enlarged to include. Viborg and raised tothe status of a constituent republic of the Union withthe ominous title of Karelian-Finnish Soviet SocialistRepublic (see map 1) and with a government headed byFinnish Red refugees from the civil war period. TheGerman conquest of all Norway (April-June 1940)completed the isolation of Finland and gave yet furtheropportunity for Germany to assume again, as in 1918,the role of saviour of Finnish independence. She didso with only too much effect fifteen months after thefirst Soviet-Finnish war, when in June 1941 Finlandjoined with her in "a holy war against our nationalenemy'' (Mannerheim).Both Finland and the Baltic states, so intimatelybound up with the Russo-German struggle of the twoWorld Wars of this century, had come to be underRussia as a result of another struggle for the Baltic,that between Russia and Sweden. This reached itsmaximum intensity in the Great Northern War (1700-21),when Peter the Great won the coastlands from Viborground to Riga. It was finally concluded in 1809 whenAlexander I conquered and retained the whole ofFinland. The struggle with Sweden in turn was theprotracted climax of seven centuries of intermittent,unsuccessful Russian efforts to secure or enlarge anoutlet to the Baltic in opposition to Swedes, Poles, orGermans.The Baltic was of continuous trading importance tothe eastern Slavs for at least a thousand years before1700. The Varangian Vikings coming across fromScandinavia in the eight and ninth centuries, whiletheir kinsmen were overrunning western Europe and256