Night Frost Crisis

To make matters worse, the Finnish People's Democratic League (Suomen Kansan Demokraattinen Liitto) was excluded from the government in spite of their success in the parliamentary elections.

However, no visa was issued to Soviet Union delegation's original member Otto Ville Kuusinen, the head of the Winter War period Terijoki Government, who was marked by the Finns as a traitor.

Nikita Khrushchev had also understood Kuusinen's rejection of his visa, but the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Pravda, nevertheless used the case as a weapon against the Fagerholm government.

In October, the Soviet ambassador to Finland, Viktor Lebedev, went on "a vacation”, failing to visit the foreign minister, Johannes Virolainen, as protocol required, and it was subsequently announced that he had been transferred to other duties with no plans to appoint a successor.

In a meeting brokered by the then head of the body representing Finnish industries, Johan Nykopp, United States Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey met President Kekkonen in November 1958 while the American was on his way to Moscow and offered Finland economic support to relieve the Soviet pressure.

The Night Frost Crisis was resolved during a private trip Urho and Sylvi Kekkonen made to Leningrad in January 1959, where he "accidentally" met Nikita Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.