Stalin

CHAPTER 12 SMASHED PIG

Voroshilov is a fairy tale. His authority was artificially created by totalitarian agitation.

TROTSKY, Bulletin of the Opposition, fall 1939 ¹

It is clear now how Finland was prepared for a major war against us. They readied every village for that aim.

STALIN, January 21, 1940, following the annual commemoration of Lenin’s death at the Bolshoi Theater ²

THE SOVIET UNION had a longer coastline than any other country—more than 16,000 nautical miles. Stalin, still reliant on imperial Russia’s aging fleet, had decided back in late 1935 that the country needed not only a modern navy, but one larger than any other in the world. He wanted to achieve command of the Gulf of Finland, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Japan, and, ultimately, attain a substantial offensive capability to challenge other powers on the oceans. His “big-fleet” program far exceeded in ambition Peter the Great’s, and formed part of a global naval arms race.³ The despot had established a self-standing naval commissariat during the terror.⁴ Then, between 1938 and 1940, he put to death the chief of Soviet naval forces, the commanders of the Pacific, Northern, Black Sea, and Baltic fleets, eight leaders of the central naval administration, five chiefs of staff of fleets, fifteen other flag officers, and dozens upon dozens of other high-ranking naval officers.⁵ In 1939, the navy claimed nearly a fifth of Soviet defense outlays. Nikolai Kuznetsov, the Serbian immigrants’ son who had joined the party at age nineteen in 1924 (the same year he attended Lenin’s funeral on Red Square), was promoted to naval commissar at thirty-four. He recalled that in late 1939, when he perceived Stalin to be in a good mood, he gently asked how the despot intended to use all the big, expensive ships under construction—the plan now called for 699 total—in light of the shallowness of the Baltic Sea (which could be readily mined) and the Pact with Hitler (altering Germany’s status as the main enemy). Stalin answered, “We shall build them even if we have to scramble up the last kopeck!”⁶

A super-dreadnought, the Soviet Ukraine, had been laid down at the Nikolayev Shipyard for the Black Sea Fleet. The keels of two heavy cruisers were laid down for the Pacific Fleet at a new shipyard founded on the Amur River, at remote Komsomolsk, out of range of Japanese fighter planes. About 120,000 slave laborers had started construction on another shipyard for the new Northern Fleet, at Molotovsk, on the delta of the Northern Dvina, above the Arctic Circle. At the Baltic Shipyard, in Leningrad, another super-dreadnought, the Soviet Union, had been laid down for the high-priority yet weak Baltic Fleet.⁷ By 1940, plans for oceangoing ships would be made larger still, but the number to be built would be reduced in favor of submersibles. (Characteristically, Stalin would order that the revised naval program’s details be kept secret from his own fleet commanders.)⁸ Blueprints and advanced naval technology had to be purchased abroad. France demurred, and Britain was not even approached, but fascist Italy had proved eager.⁹ Still, Nazi Germany was the chief source, and naval equipment formed a centerpiece of Soviet desiderata after the Pact with Hitler—cruisers, coastal and naval guns, battleship blueprints, and at least three samples of the heavy gun turrets fitted on the Bismarck and Tirpitz battleships.¹⁰

Stalin’s various slave-labor internal canals had not enhanced his navy’s room for maneuver. The Black Sea was relatively narrow and hemmed in, while the Arctic Sea was icebound most of the year and the Pacific coast was remote from Soviet industry and population. But the most immediate challenge was the Baltic, where the Soviet shipbuilding program lagged behind the capabilities of both the German and the British navies, and, even worse, the Soviet Fleet depended on the goodwill of Finland and Estonia just to get in and out. Baltic defenses could not block hostile navies from approaching the USSR’s shores, as had transpired during the Russian civil war. More broadly, the 1932 Soviet-Finnish treaty recognizing tsarist Finland’s independence had settled the land border on the Karelian Isthmus, less than twenty miles from Leningrad, a distance that, by the 1930s, fell well within artillery range. In other words, Leningrad, the only Soviet port on the Baltic and the home to a third of Soviet military industry, could be fired upon without entering Soviet territory. Stalin worried that a hostile great power would make use of Finnish territory as a launch pad to seize the USSR’s second capital and set up a Russian “White Guard” regime, with the aim of provoking a new civil war to destroy the Soviet regime.¹¹

Finland’s trade with Germany, as the Leningrad NKVD noted in a detailed analysis, had doubled since the Nazis came to power and, as with Finnish trade with Britain, exceeded trade with the USSR by a factor of forty.¹² Contacts between the Finnish and German militaries had again come to seem very close. Almost all Finnish staff officers had trained in Lockstedt, Germany, during the Great War and continued to feel grateful for that opportunity, as well as for the fact that a German military landing—precipitated by Trotsky’s antics at Brest-Litovsk—had rescued Finland’s independence from Red Guards. In April 1938, on the twentieth anniversary of Germany’s anti-Bolshevik intervention—and a few weeks after Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria—Helsinki had warmly received yet another prominent German military delegation, to the strains of “Alte Kameraden.”¹³ In summer 1939, Finnish officers paid a visit to Lockstedt to recall their “brotherhood in arms.” In mid-June, Beria informed Stalin that the Finns had placed orders for military hardware at the Škoda Works right after it had fallen into Nazi hands.¹⁴ In late June, Lieutenant General Franz Halder had toured Finnish military installations, his first visit abroad as Wehrmacht chief of staff. “I greet you with all my heart, Mr. General, as a representative of the glorious army of Germany,” enthused the Finnish foreign minister, Eljas Erkko, according to the NKVD police report. Halder, who flew above the entire length of the Finnish-Soviet border, wrote to Berlin of his trip that the Finnish military “undoubtedly are partisans of Germany.”¹⁵

The Finnish government—a rule-of-law, parliamentary democracy—professed a Nordic orientation and strict neutrality vis-à-vis the great powers. But the fear that smaller nations, if not folded within Russian borders, would fall under the control of a hostile great power and be used against Russia long predated the Soviet regime. After the borderlands, or limitrophes, of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as Finland, had broken off into independent states, the alarm intensified.¹⁶ Soviet intelligence reported that German specialists were helping the Finns build aerodromes, which exceeded the capacity of the Finnish air force.¹⁷ Even if Stalin had been inclined to take the “White Finns” at their word, which he was not, intentions mattered less to him than capabilities. The despot was not about to wait around while another power forced little Finland into becoming a springboard for attack against him, whether by Germany or Great Britain. In Stalin’s mental map, the British were not at the far other end of Europe, but at the gates of Leningrad.¹⁸

The menacing strategic situation on the northwestern frontier would have exercised the minds of tsarist strategists, too, but the Soviets had a largely untrained naval command as a result of Stalin’s mass slaughter, while the despotic regime’s bottlenecks were becoming more severe. Even as the relentless barrage of reports had only increased, the regime had continued to narrow, not only to the Little Corner but within the Little Corner, where Stalin saw fewer people, despite being responsible for more and more business. He was physically overwhelmed. The despotism, to an extent, was undermining itself, generating colossal quantities of information that neither Stalin nor anyone else could process fully. He and his minions often could not effectively act upon even the information they possessed, because of hypersuspicion and blinkered thinking. And, notwithstanding the semblance of continued camaraderie within the inner sanctums, he was surrounded by men he had broken, or neophytes he had promoted over others’ bones, all of whom strained every nerve to divine his thoughts to feed them right back to him. NKVD chief Beria exemplified the dynamic, beginning so many of his memoranda, “In connection with your instructions . . .”¹⁹

Stalin had shown himself to be more of a gambler than most people understood at the time (or subsequently). He had taken one of the biggest gambles in a millennium of Russian history with forced collectivization-dekulakization, even if to him that course had seemed dictated by iron logic. He had taken a sizable gamble with the mass terror, risking the potentially fatal destabilization of a Soviet state that was involved in wars in Spain and China, and faced Germany on the march in Central Europe. Stalin had also taken a gamble in the Pact with Hitler. True, the despot was not on the hook for anything other than mutually beneficial economic obligations. But the choice to spurn the Western powers and divide the spoils with Hitler constituted a pact of blood. To be sure, in contrast to Hitler’s impulsive high-stakes gambling, Stalin usually readied the ground before acting. With Finland, however, he would end up taking a largely unprepared gamble, and without realizing he was doing so. Napoleon is said to have remarked that in war, as in prostitution, amateurs are often superior to professionals. He was wrong. If the Pact with Hitler had involved Stalin’s first high-stakes test in the diplomatic arts, Finland, unexpectedly, would entail his first trial by fire in the modern military arts, and the results initially proved disastrous. At the Soviet despot’s side during his roll of the “iron dice” in 1939–40 was his civil war crony, the overmatched Voroshilov, who contributed generously to Stalin’s own military dilettantism.

DIPLOMACY, OF A SORT

Stalin tried diplomacy, in his own way, with Finland. The NKVD intelligence station chief in Helsinki, Boris Rybkin (b. 1899, code name “Yartsev”), had been doling out bribes to Soviet-friendly Finnish politicians and businessmen; one asked for and received permission to purchase Soviet timber “at an advantageous price.”²⁰ In spring 1938, Yartsev—by then into his third year in-country—had been summoned to Moscow. Massacres of diplomatic and intelligence personnel were in full swing; Yartsev discovered on April 7 that he was not being arrested but would be received, for the first time, by Stalin. The despot tasked him with conducting conspiratorial negotiations with the Finns, reporting only to him, obviating even the head of Soviet intelligence (the operation was code-named “the April 7 Affair”). Yartsev noticed that Stalin manipulated his pipe like a rosary.²¹

On April 14, two days after the departure of a German major general from Finland, Yartsev, nominally a mere second secretary at the Soviet legation, called the Finnish foreign minister and asked to be received, with an urgent message from the Soviet government. The Finns set aside protocol, knowing who the junior embassy official really was. Yartsev informed the Finnish foreign minister that the USSR required “cooperation” in its security, explaining that he had recently been in Moscow and was empowered to conduct “negotiations.” He offered the Finns arms at cut-rate prices, in exchange for a “guarantee” not to assist Germany in an anti-Soviet war, and gave assurances that the Soviet Union aimed not to occupy Finland but to protect its own maritime defenses. Yartsev also appears to have indicated that if Germany attacked Soviet territory via Finland, the Red Army did not intend to remain at the Soviet border but would advance to meet the enemy.²² He flew back to Moscow to report to Stalin on the results.²³ “The approach to the Finnish government had taken place in so strange a fashion,” recalled a high Finnish official, “that the members of the government who were aware of it . . . did not at first give it the attention it merited.”²⁴

The Finnish prime minister, Aimo Cajander, who, as head of the National Progressive Party, led a coalition government with the Social Democrats and the Agrarians, informed the finance minister but not the defense minister or the defense forces commander. The Swedish foreign minister was told, but Finland’s ambassador to Sweden was not; Britain’s ambassador knew, but not Helsinki’s ambassador to London. The Finns, who had been part of Russia until 1917–18, tended to view Russians as gluttonous for territory. But Cajander, a professor of botany, could not discern whether the proposals from Yartsev were genuine. Tsarist experience had shown that one could not always tell if intermediaries spoke for the regime or were engaged in personal intrigues. Stalin, for his part, had employed Radek and Kandelaki, both now dead, as special envoys to spark agreements with Poland and Nazi Germany, respectively. His back-channel warnings and enticements to Finland continued for almost a year, evidently to probe Helsinki’s bottom line.²⁵ Then, having unwittingly deepened Helsinki’s already deep distrust of his intentions, he switched to conventional diplomacy.

A Finnish delegation was invited to Moscow and, on March 5, 1939, presented with a formal proposal for a thirty-year lease of the Hanko Cape, which had been used by the tsarist fleet and constituted a choke point where ships from the Baltic Sea could be blocked from entering the Gulf of Finland. The Soviets emphasized that their proposal was not for a full-fledged military base but merely an observation point.²⁶ The Finns responded negatively within just three days. Beyond the likely public firestorm that would have consumed any Finnish government that consented, the country’s constitution called its territory “indivisible” and therefore nonnegotiable by the foreign ministry. A Soviet counterproposal to exchange four Finnish islands in the Gulf of Finland for Soviet territory north of Lake Ladoga was similarly rebuffed, to Moscow’s evident disappointment.²⁷ The more the Soviets doggedly insisted that small states such as Finland were simply unable to prevent third parties from using their territory for aggression against another state, the more the Finns began to see the Soviet Union as that third party.²⁸

Diplomatic efforts were also made in Helsinki, but not via the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Derevyansky; instead, Stalin sent the former envoy to Finland, Boris Stein, who was now stationed in Italy. Stein arrived in Helsinki in March 1939, supposedly to take a holiday in the chilly north. He carried a proposal to exchange Soviet Karelia, a predominantly ethnic Finnish enclave contiguous with Finland, for the Finnish islands the Soviets sought, and to pay for the relocation of Finnish citizens from any territory acquired by the USSR. But he, too, proved unable to convince Foreign Minister Erkko of the ineffectiveness of a policy of neutrality by small states, despite citing recently devoured Czechoslovakia (which, of course, had had mutual assistance pacts with France and the Soviet Union). Stein departed for Moscow empty-handed, albeit not before warning Erkko that “the Soviet government does not accept Finland’s answer. We will not give up our demand for the islands in the Gulf of Finland.”²⁹

NO APPARENT WIGGLE ROOM

Secretly, in the first half of March 1939, Voroshilov had informed the recently appointed commander of the Leningrad military district, Kirill Meretskov, to prepare for a possible military aggression from the territory of Finland, by a third party.³⁰ Stalin called Meretskov “Yaroslavets,” according to Molotov, because “the people in Yaroslavl were so shifty there were almost no Jews, and there the Russians themselves perform those functions.”³¹ (Meretskov actually hailed from a village near Ryazan.) On-site, the ingratiating Meretskov judged that Finnish troops stationed near the border themselves had aggressive intentions to burst through and seize Leningrad.³² The Soviets launched a massive military construction effort in the region, which the Finns could not help but notice. In June 1939, Meretskov would later claim, Stalin summoned him to discuss the Finnish threat and anti-Soviet moods in the Finnish government. The Leningrad military district’s war contingency plans for Finland were defensive. Stalin ordered up operational plans for a “counter-blow.”³³

Soviet interest in Finland would soon be mentioned in the Pact’s secret protocol, but the suspicious despot would keep a close eye on the intelligence concerning whether Hitler would keep his word. If Hitler abandoned Finland to its fate, he would be throwing away decades of goodwill toward Germany in this strategically located country. Additionally, as the Soviet ambassador to Berlin would warn the foreign affairs commissariat, Germany had to be careful not to suffer interruption in strategic supplies from Finland of timber, food, copper, and molybdenum for steel alloys.³⁴ In July 1939, during General Halder’s jubilant tour of Finland, Stalin received details, partly from intercepted Japanese military intelligence telegrams sent from Helsinki to Tokyo, about German-Finnish military links.³⁵ In fact, the Finns were working diplomatic channels to try to exact British protection. On July 4, 1939, a representative of the British war office posted to Helsinki reported to London that the Finns “do not want anything to do with Germany but, rather than accept a Russian guarantee, they would join the Axis.”³⁶

The August 23 Hitler-Stalin Pact removed that option. After the forced introduction of Soviet military bases onto Estonian soil with the September 28 Treaty of Friendship, the Finns feared being subjected to the same compromise of their neutrality and perhaps even their hard-won independence. Sure enough, on October 5, when the Soviets had forced a treaty and bases on Latvia, too, Molotov “invited” the Finnish foreign minister to Moscow to discuss “concrete political matters.”³⁷ Aiming to show resolve, and perhaps worried about a surprise attack, the Finns soon began calling up the reserves and evacuating their civilian population from frontier zones.³⁸ But Beria reported to Stalin from a Soviet intelligence source in London on a pessimistic self-assessment by the retired septuagenarian Finnish field marshal Gustaf Mannerheim (b. 1867). As a former lieutenant general in the tsarist army, he had been stationed in Lhasa for a time, where he taught the Dalai Lama pistol shooting, and had learned to speak Finnish only in his fifties while defending Finland’s independence. Beria’s report had Mannerheim asking a British envoy in Helsinki to inform Whitehall that Finland expected to receive demands analogous to those presented to Estonia, and that “Finland will have to satisfy these demands of the Soviet Union.”³⁹

Finland got indirect support in an obscure place. “No one feels safe in the Soviet Union,” the diplomat-defector Fyodor Raskolnikov wrote in an open letter to Stalin, published posthumously in the émigré press in Paris (October 1, 1939). Raskolnikov condemned the forged trials of victims made to whirl in Stalin’s “bloody carousel” and asked, “Where are the big Soviet military theoreticians?” He answered the question himself: “You killed them, comrade Stalin!” Raskolnikov charged the despot with having abandoned the Spanish Republic and predicted that “sooner or later the Soviet people will put you in the dock as traitor to both socialism and revolution, principal wrecker, true enemy of the people, organizer of the famine.” Eight days after having first composed the letter, Raskolnikov had tried to jump out a hotel window, but his wife and hotel personnel restrained him. He was committed to a mental hospital in Nice, where he perished anyway, at age forty-seven.⁴⁰ In a diary that remained private, he had drawn an incisive psychological portrait of Stalin, naming as the despot’s “fundamental psychological trait” a “superhuman strength of will” that “suffocates, destroys the individuality of people who come under his influence.” Stalin had broken even the “willful” Kaganovich, Raskolnikov noted, adding that “he demands from his closest aides complete submission, obedience, subjection.”⁴¹

Finland’s government was consulting separately with London and Berlin. The Germans bluntly advised acceptance of any Soviet proposal. The British, in talks with the Finns, mostly pooh-poohed the likelihood of a Soviet aggression. Reporting out of Helsinki, a few British foreign office personnel reasoned that a Finnish decision to take up arms against the USSR would be advantageous to the UK, since a war would consume Soviet petroleum, grain, and war materials that otherwise might be shipped to Germany—and could even precipitate that most desirable outcome of all, a Soviet-German clash.⁴² This cynicism came with only offers of moral support to the Finns. Winston Churchill, newly appointed first lord of the Admiralty, flat out told Maisky, the Soviet envoy to London, on October 6, 1939, that he understood “well that the Soviet Union must be the master of the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea,” and added, “Stalin is now playing the Great Game, and very successfully.” This was the same Churchill who, in 1919–20, had schemed with Mannerheim, albeit unsuccessfully, to mount an offensive spearheaded by Finnish troops to topple the Bolshevik regime. Now, desperately wanting to keep all of Scandinavia out of the clutches of Nazi Germany, Churchill told Maisky that if Estonia and Latvia were to lose their sovereignty, he would be “very glad” if it were to the Soviet, and not the German, sphere.⁴³

Soviet military intelligence, on October 9, 1939, reported on Finnish mobilization measures.⁴⁴ The next day, Lithuania was compelled to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union, affording military bases and other privileges. In the forced bargain, Lithuania also acquired a gift at the expense of former Poland: the predominantly Polish and Jewish city of Wilno, which became the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.⁴⁵ On October 11, the first Soviet naval ships docked at their new temporary base in Tallinn, Estonia, across from Finland.⁴⁶ That same day, Soviet ambassador Derevyansky reported to Moscow that the Finnish general staff, unaware of the Pact’s secret protocol, had urgently written to Hitler, requesting that he not grant concessions of Finnish territory to the USSR.⁴⁷ Also that same day, the Finnish negotiating team arrived in Moscow.

“MINIMAL” DEMANDS

Despite a specific request from Molotov, Finland did not send foreign minister Erkko or even a plenipotentiary empowered to sign a state accord. Their delegation was led by Juho Kusti Paasikivi (b. 1870), a conservative banker and the Finnish envoy to Sweden, who had negotiated the 1920 Treaty of Tartu with the Soviets, whose border terms Moscow was now trying to overturn. Also included were Colonel Aladár Paasonen (b. 1898), who had been educated at France’s elite École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr and was the foremost expert on the Soviet Union in Finnish military intelligence; the foreign ministry official who handled Soviet affairs; and the Finnish envoy to Moscow. On October 12, with no advance disclosure of the precise agenda, they were summoned to the Kremlin and taken to Molotov’s office. Potyomkin and Derevyansky were also present, but so was Stalin—an unmistakable sign of seriousness.⁴⁸ Molotov proposed a mutual assistance pact. Paasikivi dismissed this as unthinkable. Molotov dropped his request—apparently astonishing Paasikivi—and proceeded to outline Soviet desiderata for enhancement of its security by way of acquiring a military base on the Finnish coast, mentioning the Hanko Cape. Molotov also indicated a desire to “rectify” both the northern border on the Arctic Sea, near Finnish Petsamo, and the southern border on the Karelian Isthmus, near Leningrad, with territorial compensation from Soviet (eastern) Karelia. Paasikivi responded that Finland’s territorial integrity was inviolable.⁴⁹ The talks adjourned. Paasikivi wired Helsinki the details of Soviet demands and requested additional instructions.

Stalin was sent eavesdropped conversations among people thought to be privy to Finnish government options. Beria reported that the voluble Swedish military attaché in Moscow, Major Birger Vrang, had expressed regret that the Norwegian and Danish envoys to Moscow had failed to greet Paasikivi at the train station to show Scandinavian solidarity.⁵⁰ The Finnish military attaché, Major Kaarlo Somerto, told Vrang that Finland’s general staff did not trust British intelligence to the effect that the Soviets had thirty-three divisions on the Finnish border, including just seven between Lake Ladoga and the Arctic Sea, where roads were practically nonexistent. (This looks like Soviet disinformation; the actual figure was almost double that.) Vrang doubted that the Soviets would invade, which would sully their celebrated policy of “peace.” Somerto reported this assertion to Helsinki but added, of the Swedes, that “about help, they say nothing.” On October 13, Beria reported that the Swedish government had promised Finland’s foreign minister “moral support,” and that Finland’s military intelligence chief had been “very disappointed” by his recent trip to sound out attitudes in Berlin. On October 14, Stalin could read that Vrang had told the military expert on the Finnish negotiating team, Paasonen, that “the Russians are Asiatics: initially they demand a great deal, and later they make concessions to obtain what they need.”⁵¹

That same day in the Kremlin, at the follow-up Soviet-Finnish negotiating session, again with Stalin present, Paasikivi read aloud an analysis by Paasonen rebutting Soviet claims about threats to the Gulf of Finland, but he allowed that the Finns were prepared to discuss a few islands closest to the Soviet shore.⁵² In fact, the Red Navy did not even possess enough ships to patrol from all of their newly acquired naval bases in the Baltic states, and the Soviet naval command was most concerned about air attacks from bases situated on Finland’s Karelian Isthmus.⁵³ Whether Stalin shared his navy’s assessment of Leningrad’s security, however, remains unclear, but at a minimum, a Soviet naval base on Finnish territory could deter the British and the Germans from acquiring such facilities for themselves. Moreover, he looked at the situation in terms of what territory imperial Russia had possessed. Molotov formally requested from the Finns a lease for a naval base on Hanko Cape, as well as the permanent transfer to Soviet possession of Suursaari (Hogland) and other islands in the Gulf of Finland. He further demanded the Finnish portion of the northern Rybachy Peninsula, which guarded the approaches to Petsamo, Finland’s only ice-free harbor. And he asked that the border on the Karelian Isthmus be moved westward nearly forty miles, to a location within twenty miles of Viipuri (old Vyborg), a former medieval fortress and Finland’s second-largest city.

Stalin offered to compensate the Finns with Soviet Karelia. “We cannot do anything about geography, nor can you,” he told Paasikivi, who, like all the Finns present, spoke some Russian. “Since Leningrad cannot be moved, the frontier must be moved farther away. We ask for 1,000 square miles, and we offer more than 2,120 in exchange. Would any other great power do this? No, only we are that stupid.”⁵⁴

The Finns kept insisting that they had no intention of allowing Hitler to use their territory; Stalin kept insisting that someone could seize their country as a springboard to attack the USSR.⁵⁵ He reminded the Finns that territorial concessions were known to history: Russia had sold Alaska to the United States, Spain had ceded Gibraltar to Britain. He further noted that in Poland, he had annexed only the territories with Belorussian and Ukrainian-speaking majorities. “In Poland we took no foreign territory,” he told the Finns, “and now this is a case of exchange.”⁵⁶ Trying to impart a sense of urgency, Stalin also noted that Finnish soldiers had been mobilized and the nation’s frontier cities evacuated, heightening the risk of war and necessitating an agreement. Paasikivi requested a break in the talks to consult in person with Helsinki.⁵⁷

The despot repeatedly underscored how his demands were “minimal,” certainly as compared with Hitler’s vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia or Poland. But to the leaders of Finland’s parliamentary democracy, Stalin was a gangster. Paasikivi was inclined to some sort of deal, but he carried rigid directives: no Soviet military bases to compromise Finnish neutrality, no significant territorial concessions. Back in Finland on October 16, Paasikivi told journalists that Mr. Stalin was a pleasant fellow with a sense of humor.⁵⁸ Beria reported that at a meeting with the Social Democratic parliamentary faction in Helsinki on October 17, Väinö Tanner, the finance minister in the coalition government, had stressed the unexpected scope of Soviet demands, without revealing details, but had also noted that “Paasikivi was surprised that he was received so well and that they tried to create a friendly atmosphere. Stalin joked all the time, and when Paasikivi apologized for his poor Russian, Stalin answered that he could not speak Finnish.”⁵⁹

Stalin had inside information on the Finnish position. He lacked a spy at the top of the Helsinki government, but Hella Wuolijoki, a Finnish writer and businesswoman and the former mistress of the Soviet intelligence official Meyer Trilisser (her NKVD code name was “the Poet”), hosted a political salon in the capital. She learned details of a Finnish war cabinet meeting on October 16 (perhaps via an intentional leak by Tanner) and concluded that, in terms of Soviet demands, the Finnish defense minister was hostile, the foreign minister passive, and the prime minister wavering. The next day, based upon information from Wuolijoki, the deputy Soviet intelligence chief in Helsinki, Zoya Rybkina (the wife of Boris Rybkin/Yartsev), who posed as the Soviet tourist representative, reported to Moscow that Helsinki might concede some Gulf of Finland islands, but a bilateral military alliance or leases for Soviet bases on Finnish territory had been ruled out. Also on October 17, Soviet intelligence in Helsinki reported that it had gotten word of a secret visit to Berlin by Finland’s former security police chief, who, it was reported, had been told by Himmler, “Stand firm if you want to, but we will not help you.”⁶⁰ Four days later, Stalin received a report from Soviet military intelligence to the effect that the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Colonel Doi, had complained to his Swedish counterpart, Vrang, that it was incomprehensible how the Germans could afford the Soviets a free hand in Finland.⁶¹

Beria’s rich NKVD reports made plain the narrowness of Finland’s options, but the Finns felt uncertain about Stalin’s real aims.⁶² Right around this time, the Finnish police rounded up 272 known members of the outlawed Finnish Communist party, expecting to uncover a plot on orders from Moscow for domestic subversion. But it turned out that no organized treasonous activities were under way; most of the arrested Finnish Communists were released within three days. Even some who had been trained militarily in the Soviet Union pledged to take up arms for Finland. The interrogations surprised the Finnish authorities.⁶³

IMPASSE

Paasikivi, his passage slowed by Finnish troop movements (the reserves had been ordered into training), arrived back in Moscow on October 23 for a second round of talks. He had in tow the Social Democrat Tanner, who it was believed would stand firm against the Communists.⁶⁴ In fact, while this representative of the “Finnish working class” evoked mistrust in Moscow, because he came from the Communists’ despised rivals on the left, the representative of the big bourgeoisie, Paasikivi, was regarded as a trustworthy partner and proponent of good relations. The intensive consultations in Helsinki had led to the conclusion that Stalin had staked out an absurdly maximalist price, from which he was prepared to come way down to close a deal. The Finnish government, very reluctantly, had come around to the possibility of moving the border westward on the Karelian Isthmus, but only about eight miles from Leningrad. And Helsinki held fast to its condition that no territory could be leased to the USSR for military purposes.⁶⁵

At the next negotiating session, that very evening of October 23, Stalin was again present. The Finns read out a statement on behalf of their government and agreed to offer some islands in the Gulf of Finland that had not been requested by the Soviets, as well as to discuss Suursaari (Hogland). Stalin pointed out to the returning Finnish delegation that his original proposal—the Hanko Cape, the western Rybachy Peninsula near Petsamo in the north, the Karelian Isthmus—had been his indispensable minimum. Still, the despot, who showed himself extremely well versed in the geographical details, did soften his territorial demands, seizing a pencil and drawing a new line across the Karelian Isthmus on a general staff map. It ran slightly south of the border he had first named. That, Stalin concluded, was the best he could do. Two hours of mostly fruitless exchanges ensued, until the Finnish delegation decided to take their leave. “Is it your intention to provoke a conflict?” a surprised Molotov asked. Stalin smiled enigmatically.⁶⁶

The Finns were in the process of preparing to book the next train back to Helsinki when the phone rang, summoning them back to the Kremlin—a sign either of a Soviet ultimatum or, the Finns hoped, of Stalin’s climbdown. At 11:00 p.m., Molotov opened by reading a formal memorandum that contained a precise formulation of the new line Stalin had hand drawn. It did, however, contain still more concessions: the strength of a Soviet garrison at Hanko would be not 5,000, but 4,000, and the length of the lease would be altered from thirty years to the date on which the current war in Europe ended.⁶⁷ As Stalin knew, the British held Gibraltar, on the Spanish coast at the entrance to the Mediterranean, indefinitely. Again, however, the Finns declared that they needed to consult at home. They departed by train on October 24.⁶⁸ By now, Finland’s mobilization was complete: all men ages twenty-two to forty for the army, and up to age fifty for the auxiliary Schutz Corps—more than a quarter million total. Beria reported to Stalin that Tanner, on October 26, had told the Social Democratic faction in Helsinki that “the situation is entirely critical” and that further military mobilization would be necessary.⁶⁹

Soviet forces deployed to the new bases in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were issued strict orders not to interfere in domestic affairs.⁷⁰ “During the first imperialist war, the Bolsheviks overestimated the situation,” Stalin explained to Zhdanov and Dimitrov (October 25), an implicit criticism of Lenin. “The masses must be led to revolution gradually! Slogans must be brought out that will help the masses break with Social D[emocratic] leaders!” He concluded: “We believe that in our pacts of mutual assistance (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) we have found the right form to allow us to bring a number of countries into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. But for that we must wait, strictly observe their internal regimes and independence. We shall not push for their Sovietization. The time will come when they will do that themselves!”⁷¹

Stalin had not demanded any territory from the Baltic states, perhaps because he had in mind their eventual Sovietization. Perverse as it may seem, his demands for territory from Finland indicated the absence of a plan for eventual wholesale Sovietization—otherwise, why seek pieces? He was having severe difficulty getting this message across, however. The Finnish negotiators, after the second—and, from Stalin’s point of view, unusually long—hiatus, boarded a train to return to the Soviet Union on October 31. Almost simultaneously, Molotov, at an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet, delivered a speech mocking the Western democracies while also publicly revealing the heretofore secret Soviet negotiating demands made to Finland. Excerpts of the speech were broadcast on Radio Moscow.⁷² This public declaration was apparently intended to bring the pressure of world opinion to bear upon Finland. The action also seemed to indicate that Stalin was not bluffing about the “minimalist” quality of his demands, for, once they were made public, they could not be relinquished without loss of prestige.

Molotov’s maneuver disoriented the Helsinki government. Just after midnight on October 31–November 1, the Finnish prime minister decided to order Paasikivi and Tanner back to the capital. But at a 3:00 a.m. cabinet meeting, the ministers were divided, with some arguing that recalling the delegation would be interpreted as a unilateral move to terminate negotiations. The cabinet opted to consult by phone with Paasikivi and the negotiating team, effectively putting the onus on them. Reached at Viipuri later that morning, members of the delegation were no less at a loss about how to respond to Molotov’s speech, but, not wanting to be responsible for the momentous decision of appearing to break off the talks, they called Helsinki just before Terijoki, the border station on the Finnish side, to report that they had firmly decided to travel on, even though they had no writ to meet the Soviet demands.

Privately, Molotov told Kollontai, whom he had summoned from Stockholm to receive instructions, that “our troops will be in Helsinki in three days, and then the stubborn Finns will be forced to sign an accord that in Moscow they reject.”⁷³ Paasikivi and company arrived in Moscow on November 2 and were invited to the last day of a three-day extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet, attended by 2,000 people, including 800 invited spectators in the balcony and loges. The day before, part of former eastern Poland had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. November 2 was the turn of former eastern Poland’s Belorussian-speaking territory to be formally admitted into the Belorussian SSR.⁷⁴ On the evening of November 3, the Finnish delegation was again received in Molotov’s Kremlin office, for the third round of negotiations; this time Stalin was absent, however. Instead, deputy foreign affairs commissar Potyomkin attended. The session broke up after an hour, with both sides digging in their heels. As the Finns moved to depart, Molotov stated ominously, “We civilians can see no further in the matter; now it is the turn of the military to have their say.”⁷⁵

PERSISTENCE

The Finns spent November 4 visiting the Tretyakov Gallery and making the rounds of the Scandinavian representatives. At the Norwegian legation, a call came in from the Finnish legation: it relayed a Kremlin summons for the Finns to yet another bargaining session. This time, Stalin attended. He emphasized how no Russian government had ever tolerated the independence of Finland, but the USSR did. He reiterated the transcendent importance of the Gulf of Finland to Soviet security. He reminded the Finns that they could cede the Hanko Cape in any form they preferred: lease, sale, exchange. The Finnish delegation once more declared Hanko beyond discussion. “Do you need these islands?” Stalin suddenly asked, stabbing his finger toward a wall map, which had little red circles drawn around three small islands (Hermansö, Koö, Hästö-Busö) just east of Hanko. The Soviet Union, he said, would be willing to settle for a leased base on these little islands most Finns had never even heard of.⁷⁶

Again, the Finnish team had no authority to agree, and requested a break to consult Helsinki. November 5 was a Sunday, making it impossible to gather all the members of the Finnish government. On November 6, the Soviets held their customary eve-of-the-anniversary celebration at the Bolshoi.⁷⁷ Molotov’s holiday address, published the next day in Pravda, boasted that with the “liberation campaign” in eastern Poland, the frontiers of socialism were expanding and the capitalist world “getting a bit squeezed and retreating.” Voroshilov, in his remarks to the troops on November 7, took note of the Soviet victory over Japan at the Halha River and the reconquest of western Ukraine and western Belorussia, labeled Britain and France “instigators and zealous continuers of war,” as well as “aggressors,” and celebrated the “mutual interests of the two great countries” that had signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact.⁷⁸

Finland, with a population of 4 million, was defying a great power of 170 million. Stalin nonetheless kept trying to reach a deal.⁷⁹ At 10:00 p.m. on November 7, Molotov hosted the foreign commissariat’s Revolution Day reception for foreign envoys at the Spiridonovka. Dinner followed a musical program by the country’s leading artists. Tanner was seated at Molotov’s table. (Paasikivi, complaining of a slight cold, had declined to attend.) Molotov, among more than a dozen toasts, after each of which he drained his glass, proposed one to Finland, wishing for success in the negotiations. Tanner rose to reciprocate. Beria’s name card was also at the table, but his place was occupied by his deputy, Merkulov, who sat directly adjacent to Tanner and was uncommunicative. Mikoyan, also at the head table, approached Tanner in private and was evidently astonished to be told that the Soviet demands were excessive; Mikoyan retorted that they were “minimal.” The foreign trade commissar, according to Tanner, pointed out that “Stalin is a Georgian, I’m an Armenian, and many of the rest [in our government] are national minorities. We understand the position of a small country well.”⁸⁰

Also at the head table was Schulenburg, who, introducing himself to Tanner, said that he had flown in specially from Berlin that day to be present, and that the German foreign ministry expected a Finnish-Soviet deal. (Hitler, after being apprised of the details, had judged Stalin’s demands to be moderate.)⁸¹ Not only had Germany declined to help militarily if it came to war, but Britain, France, the United States, and even Sweden had advised Helsinki not to count on military support.⁸² As the Soviet joke had it at the time, when the Finns asked the Swedes to send tanks, the Swedes replied, “How many? One or all three?” Stalin, however, took no chances: when having Soviet demands leaked into the stream of intelligence channels, he made sure to emphasize that Moscow would refrain from impinging in any way upon the Ålands, a group of Swedish-populated islands under Finnish suzerainty. Any Soviet presence there would threaten Stockholm. The leaks offered reassurance for Hitler as well: Swedish iron ore exports to Nazi Germany sailed right by that strategic archipelago.⁸³

CREDIBILITY GAP

Field Marshal Mannerheim had been urging compromise on his government. Clear-eyed about the imperialist nature of Russia, he nonetheless saw the basis for a deal, and privately explained to the civilians that the Red Army was immensely bigger and better armed than during Finnish resistance, some twenty years earlier—and now the Finns were alone.⁸⁴ But Foreign Minister Erkko and Prime Minister Cajander continued to dismiss Stalin’s security concerns over Leningrad as a ruse. Other members of the government worried that Stalin would never stop at the acquisition of military bases, suspecting that if Finland conceded any territory, it would face escalating Soviet demands, immediately or in the future, and that Stalin would use territorial encroachments as a pressure point to curtail or even eliminate Finland’s sovereign right to independent action. Back on September 22, 1939, Molotov had told the Estonians in the Kremlin—in a message that might also have reached Helsinki—that “the Soviet Union has become a powerful state with a highly developed industry, and in possession of a great military force,” so that “the status quo which was established twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union was weakened by civil war, can no longer be considered as adequate to the present situation.”⁸⁵ But neither Stalin nor even Molotov had said anything like that to the Finnish delegation. On the contrary, they and others in the Soviet regime had repeatedly underscored the Soviets’ preferential regard for Finland.