> Finland, you had Kekkonen because he was seen as a safe and strong option for standing up to the USSR...That said, I know little about Finnish politics. The

> Finland, you had Kekkonen because he was seen as a safe and strong option for standing up to the USSR...That said, I know little about Finnish politics. The last statement is correct. For the most part, Kekkonen did whatever the USSR wanted. He was the architect of Finlandization. The USSR was in a totally different state in 1945 than during the Winter War. It could have rolled into Finland at the end of the Nazi funded Continuation War, reinstated as the government the losing side from among the worker parties of the Finnish Civil War, and Finland would have been another Warsaw Pact Comecon country. But the USSR did not. Because Germany and the buffer states between were seen as a possible threat but Finland was not. Finland had no means of standing up to the USSR, and Kekkonen did the opposite.