If the Soviets Invaded : Sweden's Secret Underground Resistance Plan

Johan Wennström (0:01)

We had throughout the 1980s, at least, regular submarine incursions in the Swedish archipelagos, which were in fact rehearsals for an attack on Sweden.

Ian Sanders (0:17)

For decades, ordinary Swedes secretly prepared for the day Soviet forces might occupy their country. Farmers, factory workers, gamekeepers and travelling salesmen were recruited into a clandestine resistance network, trained to operate radios, use dead drops, scout escape routes and, if necessary, sabotage an invading army. Historian Johan Wennström joins me to reveal the extraordinary story behind Sweden's Stay Behind organisation. He explains why officially neutral Sweden quietly collaborated with MI6, the CIA and NATO, how the organisation preserved its secrecy and why the royal family and government might have fled to Britain. It's a gripping account of patriotism, secrecy, sacrifice and of hundreds of civilian volunteers who carried the burden of a war that thankfully never came to Sweden.

I'm delighted to welcome Johan Wennström to our Cold War Conversation.

Johan Wennström (1:21)

Sweden during the Cold War is often perceived as this vaguely left-wing pacifist country that couldn't really decide between NATO and the Soviet Union. But in fact, we abstained from joining NATO in 49 in order to protect our neighbor Finland from complete Soviet annexation. And instead, we collaborated in secret with the NATO powers. And the image of Sweden as this sort of third-way country was very much for show in order to protect our national interests and our national security and to protect this clandestine collaboration with NATO. And we also set up this clandestine resistance movement that I'm detailing in the Stay Behinds.

So it was very much a sort of realist Western, aligned country well before its accession to NATO in 2024

Ian Sanders (2:26)

And one of the many sections I enjoyed in the book is early on in the book, you set the scene with a scenario of what a Soviet invasion of Sweden might have looked like. Could you describe that scenario? Yes.

Johan Wennström (2:44)

It's easy to think that a clandestine resistance organization was set up to fight a Soviet occupation, an expression of paranoia. But in fact, Sweden was very much exposed to the Soviet invasion threat throughout the Cold War, but certainly in the 50s and 60s. In the late 70s, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the invasion scenario that was anticipated in Sweden looked very much like those invasions, and also what we saw in Ukraine in February 2022, with a preceding wave of infiltration and sabotage and murders by Spetsnaz forces and Russian illegals, followed by a full-on land invasion.

And indeed, we had throughout the 1980s at least regular submarine incursions in the Swedish archipelagos, which were in fact rehearsals for an attack on Sweden. And those in the know, some of whom I interview in the book, certainly anticipated this happening as late as the 1980s. And one of them says in the book that we were simply saved by the bell, saved by the sudden end of the Cold War without the worst thing having happened.

Ian Sanders (4:22)

In one of my rare Swedish episodes, I did interview a Viggen pilot, and he did mention the fear of assassination of the fighter and bomber pilots by illegals or Spetsnaz as a precursor to an invasion.

Johan Wennström (4:41)

Definitely, and I interview one of those Viggen pilots in the book.

The Soviets, they had to put our air force out of play, basically. They had to not only destroy runways and landing sites, but also, in fact, get rid of pilots and other high up military officers who were in a position to prevent or delay a Soviet invasion. So the pilots were very much in the crosshairs on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Ian Sanders (5:17)

With the Stay Behinds, what was the intentions behind that?

Johan Wennström (5:24)

The lesson that the Soviet Union drew from the Second World War was to never again fight a war on its own territory. So the Soviet Union wanted to move the entire scenario westwards of Norway to avoid the kind of catastrophic losses in their home territory that they experienced during the war.

The lesson that the western societies drew from the war and from German occupation during the war was that you have to prepare a resistance movement already in peacetime. You can't spend two or three years on improvising a resistance movement from scratch, which was the case in occupied France and Denmark and Norway and indeed Czechoslovakia. When Sweden and other western nations switched enemy after 1945 from Germany to the Soviet Union, one of the first things they did was to establish clandestine resistance networks. The catch-all phrase for this phenomenon is Stay Behind. But every organization was under national command. They had a national designation. The name was never Stay Behind with a capital S, which makes one associate to a specter from the James Bond films. And my book is a case study of the Swedish organization, the Swedish Stay Behind organization. But it is actually the first qualified book to appear in English. On the entire Stay Behind phenomenon. And the Swedish organization was set up in 1949