Stalin

Hitler, from the start, had wanted all of Czechoslovakia—and more—which contemporaries had failed to grasp. They also failed to understand that Stalin was a revolutionary imperialist with limits. He had suppressed not only the genuine, bottom-up collectivization by anarchists in Spain, but also a Communist putsch there, and he pushed back strongly against the revolutionary impulses of the Communists in China. Regarding Finland, too, in his own way, he was showing a sense of limits. Paasikivi, during this latest negotiating pause, telegrammed Helsinki to ask if he could offer the island of Jussarö, in the west, and the fort of Ino (on Cape Inoniemi), in the east (opposite Kronstadt), suggesting that with these concessions, more favorable terms might be reached on Soviet demands for the Karelian Isthmus and near Petsamo, in the far north. But at this decisive phase, the Finnish government took Stalin’s last-minute concessions, which aimed to close a deal, as evidence that he would soften still more, and might be bluffing altogether. On the morning of November 8, Helsinki telegrammed instructions—as inflexible as ever. Paasikivi, attempting to acquire some authority to cut a deal, wrote back, “Instructions received. If no agreement on this basis, may we let the negotiations be broken off?” Erkko did not take the bait.⁸⁶

That day, the Soviets were still recuperating from the holiday, according to Tanner. On November 9, Molotov had the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Helsinki, the undercover NKVD operative Yelisei Sinitsyn, whose intelligence experience dated back just a few months to Soviet-conquered Lwów/Lvov, call on Erkko. Sinitsyn emphasized the differences between tsarist and Soviet treatment of Finland, but Erkko would not budge.⁸⁷ That same evening, the Finns were in Molotov’s office, again with Stalin present. Paasikivi read out the Finnish government reply to Stalin’s proposal for just the three islands east of Hanko Cape: negative. “The eyes of our opposite numbers opened wide,” Tanner later wrote. “It was clear that they had expected us to assent gladly to this suggestion.” Paasikivi brought out a chart and proposed to offer the southern part of Suursaari (Hogland) Island. He tried to get Stalin to abandon demands for any territory in western Finland (nearer the entrance to the gulf) and focus solely on eastern Finland (nearer Leningrad). Stalin: “You don’t even offer Ino?”⁸⁸

The Finns took their leave. Stalin retreated to the Little Corner with Molotov until 11:05 p.m.⁸⁹ No further sessions had been agreed to. Still, that circumstance had occurred twice before, and each time Molotov’s office had reinitiated contact. Sure enough, just after midnight, a courier arrived at the Finnish legation. But to the Finns’ dismay, the message, from Molotov, contained neither a new proposal nor an invitation, just casuistry about the concept of “territory.” Nonetheless, the Soviet side was maintaining communication. Later that morning (November 10), after a bit of sleep, the Finns sent their own letter. But they waited in vain on Saturday and Sunday (November 11–12) for another summons.

Privately, Mekhlis, head of the Red Army political department, told a gathering of the defense commission of the writers’ union, regarding Finland (November 10), that “our army is on the border, ready.” He added that “Germany was undertaking a useful thing, shattering the British empire. The latter’s destruction will lead to a general collapse of imperialism—this is clear.” Mekhlis, according to notes by the playwright Vishnevsky, stressed that the USSR’s main enemy was, “of course, England.”⁹⁰ Churchill continued to work to prevent a full-fledged Nazi-Soviet alliance. “I find your demands on Finland completely natural and normal,” he told Maisky over lunch (November 13), while reaffirming his view that it would be better for the Soviet Union, rather than Nazi Germany, to dominate the Baltic Sea. “I would like to hope, however, that the USSR will not resort to force to resolve its dispute with Finland. If the USSR did so, then—you yourself understand—it would make a most painful impression here in England and for a long period of time would render the improvement of Anglo-Soviet relations impossible.”⁹¹

Also on November 13, the Finnish delegation was called home from Moscow.⁹² No ranking member of the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat saw them off.⁹³ Pravda (November 13) sent them off with accusations that the Helsinki government was allowing Finland to be turned into “an armed camp” targeting the USSR.

Stalin’s family had become an afterthought, but his children could suddenly remind him of their existence: that same day, Vasily happened to write a letter to his father. “Little Svetlana got things mixed up telling you that I want to come home for the [winter] holidays and that you authorized me to come,” he wrote. “Papa! I’ll not come home again until I finish school, even though I miss you very much. There is only a little time to go and I decided to tough it out, because I think that it would be more pleasant for you to see me after I’ve finished school, and for me too it would be more pleasant. I think you’ll understand me and agree with me.”⁹⁴

Internationally, Stalin made sure not to appear the aggressor. On November 13, V. I. Chuykov, commander of an army group, had baldly declared from the dais of the Belorussian Supreme Soviet, “If the party says so, we’ll follow the lines of the song—first Warsaw, then Berlin.” On the ciphered report from the Belorussian party boss, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, Stalin wrote a note for Voroshilov: “Chuykov, it seems, is a fool, if not an enemy element. I suggest you give him a swift kick. This is a minimum.”⁹⁵

On November 14, Schulenburg called on Molotov to ascertain the disposition of the Soviet-Finnish negotiations, and he found the foreign affairs commissar “very angry at the Finns” and downright mystified. Molotov voiced suspicions that the Finns’ stubbornness “was being bolstered by England.”⁹⁶

On November 23, Hitler would summon 200 Wehrmacht officers to urge accelerated preparations for an offensive against the Western powers. “The purpose of this conference is to give you an idea of the world of my thoughts, which governs me in the face of future events, and to tell you my decisions,” he began, before reviewing German history and developments under his rule, including the victory over Poland in a war he forced. Germany and he himself had to fight, Hitler insisted. “In fighting I see the fate of all creatures,” he noted, encapsulating his worldview. “Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.” Hitler deemed this “struggle” to be “racial” and material (for oil, rubber, food), and he asserted that “the moment is favorable now; in six months it might not be so anymore.” Just weeks before, Hitler had escaped Elser’s attempt to assassinate him in Munich. “As a final factor I must, in all modesty, list my own person: irreplaceable,” Hitler concluded. “Neither a military nor a civilian personality could take my place. Attempts at assassination may be repeated. . . . The fate of the Reich depends on me alone.”⁹⁷

Stalin, as earnestly as he worked for a deal, seems not to have grasped that a Finnish concession of any national territory, in purely procedural terms, required a five-sixths majority in the Finnish parliament, which, the Finns explained, was far from automatic. Accustomed to the Supreme Soviet, he mocked this barrier, proposing that they count his and Molotov’s votes, too.⁹⁸ Nonetheless, it is beyond doubt that the despot was not crudely bullying the Finnish negotiators, as he had the Balts.⁹⁹ Why he was treating Finland differently remains unclear. It was not because he feared or even respected the Finnish military. Perhaps it was a dose of sentimentality: it had been in Finland that he first met Lenin, in December 1905, and he himself had found sanctuary there from the tsarist police.¹⁰⁰ Perhaps it reflected realism about the depth of Finnish national pride. Whatever the motive, Stalin was far from being maximalist, and he had reduced his demands multiple times. And yet he could not get the Helsinki government to take him at his word.¹⁰¹ Stalin’s track record and methods—beginning with the approaches by the NKVD station chief in Helsinki—did not inspire confidence. Still, in his own way, he had made plain his sincerity: he had attended six of the seven formal negotiations, on October 12, 14, and 23 (twice) and November 4 and 9. Stalin did not countenance, let alone attend, that many bargaining sessions with anyone else.

WISHFUL THINKING

After the Finns’ departure from Moscow, the Soviets had quietly stepped up their massing of troops. The inexperienced NKVD intelligence operative Sinitsyn, on November 12, had sent an ingratiating report to Moscow on the supposedly egregious state of the Finnish army and the discontent of its soldiers, as well as Finland’s economic limitations.¹⁰² On November 15, during a seven-hour marathon in the Little Corner, Stalin directed Zhdanov and Meretskov, a member of the Leningrad military district’s council as party boss there, to tour the front.¹⁰³ The Finnish government announced that citizens who had evacuated from border areas could now avail themselves of free train rides home. Reservists who had been called up were also to be sent home. Schools were reopened. People removed the protective strips on their home windows. These military precautions had been viewed as necessary even before negotiations had commenced; now, after negotiations had failed, they were no longer necessary?¹⁰⁴

Finnish intelligence, it seems, interpreted the accelerated Soviet military buildup as an exercise in turning up the pressure, to force the Finns back into disadvantageous negotiations. Soviet newspapers had not announced a termination of the negotiations. Finnish intelligence further surmised that the Soviets were hardly likely to attack during harsh winter conditions, or without first issuing an ultimatum, allowing time to respond.¹⁰⁵ Finland, moreover, had a binding nonaggression pact with the USSR. Stalin, however, cynically circumvented that obstacle, borrowing a page out of Hitler’s Poland playbook: on the afternoon of November 26, five shells and two grenades were fired on Soviet positions at the border, killing four and wounding nine, manufacturing a casus belli.¹⁰⁶ Already that morning, Pravda had likened the Finnish prime minister to a “withering snake,” a “circus clown standing on his head,” and “a puppet of the imperialist powers.” That evening, Molotov summoned the Finnish ambassador, denounced the Finnish “provocation” at the border, and demanded that all Finnish troops be pulled back some twelve to fifteen miles from the frontier.

An investigation by the Finns indicated that the shots had emanated from the Soviet side. They were right. In an operation under Leningrad NKVD chief Goglidze, Soviet forces had deliberately fired at their own lines.¹⁰⁷ (Soviet soldiers were killed; Hitler, in his staging, had had Polish prison inmates killed.) A TASS communiqué in the name of the Leningrad military district, published in Izvestiya and Pravda on November 27, reported the fatalities and blamed Finland. That evening, Stalin received Sinitsyn, recalled from Helsinki, in the Little Corner. (As it happened, that same evening in Berlin, Soviet military intelligence operative Captain Zaitsev [“Bine”] managed to meet with Ilse Stöbe [“Alta”]: the breathtaking Soviet spy network from Warsaw would now be reconstituted in Berlin.)¹⁰⁸

Around midnight on November 27–28, after prolonged internal debate in Helsinki, the Finnish embassy delivered its government’s response to Molotov’s accusatory note about the border incident. The Finns maintained that Soviet troops had not been in range of Finnish batteries, so they could not have been killed by Finnish fire, and suggested a mutual frontier troop withdrawal. On November 28, Molotov announced that, owing to the “aggression” by the Finns, the Soviets had been relieved of their obligations under the bilateral nonaggression pact, even though the accord legally forbade unilateral renunciation.¹⁰⁹ The Finnish envoy was summoned to the Soviet foreign ministry and told by Potyomkin that diplomatic relations had been severed. To maintain operational surprise, a Soviet plant told the Finnish and Swedish military attachés in Moscow that the Soviet stance was actually “neither war nor peace,” the old Trotsky line at Brest-Litovsk. Late on November 29, the desperate Finnish government sent instructions for its envoy to convey to Molotov, saying that if the USSR resumed negotiations, Soviet demands could be discussed.¹¹⁰

Before dawn on November 30—without a formal declaration of war—Soviet artillery and aerial bombardment commenced, the planes taking off from their new base in Estonia, and a 120,000-troop Red Army force smashed across the frontier. “We go into Finland not as conquerors, but as friends and liberators of the Finnish people from the yoke of the landowners and capitalists,” Meretskov and Zhdanov wrote in a proclamation to the troops. “For the security of the USSR’s northwestern borders and the glorious city of Lenin! For our beloved Motherland! For the Great Stalin! Forward, sons of the Soviet people, soldiers of the Red Army, to the destruction of the enemy!”¹¹¹

Even as Soviet bombers rained explosives and leaflets on Helsinki, the Finnish cabinet did not comprehend that full-scale war had been unleashed.¹¹² Somehow, Stalin’s open military mobilization had come across as no more credible than his diplomatic concessions.¹¹³ The banker-diplomat Paasikivi, writing in his diary on the day the war began, despaired, “We have allowed our country to slide into war with the giant Soviet Union although . . . 1) Nobody has promised us any help. 2) The Soviet Union has its hands free.”¹¹⁴ On December 1, 1939, Beria ordered Gulag camps to prepare for 26,500 anticipated POWs.¹¹⁵

PEOPLE’S FINLAND

Defied by Helsinki, Stalin became determined to get a friendly government. Back on November 10, 1939, he had summoned Otto Kuusinen, the son of a tailor and a top official in the Comintern, to the Little Corner.¹¹⁶ Kuusinen (b. 1881) had been a participant in the “German October” Communist putsch fiasco in 1923. He had gone on to betray Zinoviev, the nominal Comintern chairman, running to Stalin behind his back. Kuusinen ended up being the only survivor of the Finnish party’s Central Committee to reside in the Soviet Union; all the rest had been shot or incarcerated in the Gulag. On November 13—the day the Finnish negotiators departed Moscow—Kuusinen had sent a cryptic summons to Arvo “Poika” (Boy) Tuominen (b. 1894), the general secretary of the Finnish Communist party and the last survivor of Lenin’s Comintern presidium, who was in the safety of Swedish exile. Tuominen had sat in Finnish prisons for the better part of a decade, dreaming of the day when “the workers” would come to power in Finland. In 1933, he had been allowed to leave for Moscow. In 1938, he had somehow managed to get himself and his wife out, on assignment to Sweden. “Stalin could be a convivial companion in intimate, friendly circles,” he recalled of his occasional audiences, adding that the Soviet leader “undeniably was a highly gifted and above all a highly energetic man.”¹¹⁷ Now Tuominen declined multiple summonses sent via courier to return to Moscow, citing ill health.¹¹⁸

Stalin named Kuusinen, without Tuominen, to lead a puppet regime, called the Finnish Democratic Republic or “People’s Government,” whose existence was announced as having been discovered via a Soviet-intercepted radio broadcast on the day of the outbreak of war, as if the new “government” had formed on its own.¹¹⁹ “It is necessary,” exhorted the “intercepted” proclamation, published in Pravda on December 1, 1939, “to establish a broad laboring people’s front: the entire working class, the peasantry, artisans, petty traders, and the laboring intelligentsia; to unite the immense majority of our nation in a single united front for the defense of our interests; and to bring to power a government of the laboring nation basing itself on that front—that is, a People’s Government.”¹²⁰ Moscow immediately recognized the People’s Government and gave it a “People’s Army” corps of up to 13,500 troops, drawing on ethnic Finnish inhabitants of Soviet Karelia, which, it was hoped, would attract rank-and-file soldiers from Finland, thereby splitting the enemy’s forces.¹²¹

Molotov had forewarned German ambassador Schulenburg that “it is not excluded that there will be the formation of a Finnish government friendly to the Soviet Union, as well as to Germany,” adding that it would be not a “Soviet government but a democratic republic type. No one will create soviets there.”¹²² This posture was repeated in the confidential explanation to Communist parties around the world, as well as in Kuusinen’s public appeal, which declared his government “provisional,” until a newly elected Finnish diet could meet.¹²³ All in all, it must have seemed like a brilliant strategy: preempt German or British use of Finland for aggression against the USSR; shift international borders to enhance Soviet security; and move to install a pro-Soviet regime, keeping open a future full Sovietization. The ideologue Zhdanov, citing Soviet intelligence, had insisted that the workers and peasants of Finland, who constituted the bulk of the nation’s army, were ready to welcome Soviet forces. Even Voroshilov predicted that “the working masses of Finland . . . are threatening to mete out justice on those who pursue a policy hostile to the Soviet Union.” After all, had not the Ukrainians and Belorussians of eastern Poland, in early fall 1939, greeted the Red Army as “liberators” in joyous meetings?¹²⁴

Initially, the People’s Government was established in Terijoki, the small village resort of summer houses on the Finnish side of the border where the rebel Kronstadt sailors had once obtained refuge.¹²⁵ At the outbreak of hostilities, the Finns had abandoned the settlement. Whether Kuusinen even went out to the site of his own government is unclear. He was received in the Little Corner on December 2. That day, Pravda carried a front-page story with photographs of Molotov and Kuusinen, along with Stalin, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov, signing a “treaty” between the USSR and the Finnish People’s Government, which agreed to all Soviet terms of territorial transfer: shifting the border westward on the Karelian Isthmus, thus granting 1,500 square miles of territory to the USSR; selling five islands in the Gulf of Finland; and selling the western end of the Rybachy Peninsula, in the far north near Petsamo.¹²⁶ Military basing rights on the Hanko Cape were granted in a “confidential protocol.” In exchange, the puppet government was awarded Soviet Karelia—not 2,120 square miles of its territory, as discussed during the negotiations with Finland, but the entire 27,000. A map of this new “People’s Finland” appeared in Pravda (December 3, 1939).

Here was one reason Stalin had not issued a formal declaration of war: the Soviet Union was not at war with Finland, but supporting that country’s “democratic forces” against the “fascist military clique” of the “White” Finnish government in Helsinki.¹²⁷ Stalin had Beria collect surviving Finns from the Gulag, including one of Kuusinen’s sons (from his first wife), Esa (b. 1906), who had been arrested in Karelia, contracted tuberculosis in Siberian camps, and was now named a government official.¹²⁸ Kuusinen “was at bottom a man of immense, rather cynical self-confidence,” his estranged second wife, Aino, recalled. “He had no practical knowledge and could never get on terms with ordinary Finnish workers and their families. . . . Throughout his life, the failure of the Communist rising in Finland in 1918 rankled like an open wound. . . . Kuusinen once told me himself that he dreamed of controlling Finland and, eventually, being ‘proconsul’ for the whole of Scandinavia; then, after the rest of Europe had surrendered to Communism, he would return to Moscow and be the éminence grise of the Soviet empire.”¹²⁹

MILITARY DILETTANTE

Hitler had never risen above the rank of corporal in the Great War, but Stalin had never served at all. He had not involved himself in the operational details of the summer 1939 border war at the Halha River (which had been the work of Stern and Zhukov). Nor had he micromanaged the fall 1939 invasion of eastern Poland (commanded by Semyon Timoshenko, of the Kiev military district, and Mikhail Kovalyov, of the Belorussian). The Winter War, as the Soviet invasion of Finland came to be known, proved to be Stalin’s first genuine test as a military figure since the Russian civil war. “The scattered episodes in Manchuria, at Lake Khasan or in Mongolia,” he later said, “were trifles [chepukha], not war, just episodes on a little patch, strictly limited.”¹³⁰ In fact, the 1939 border war victory against the Japanese, as well as the German-assisted “promenade” through Poland, had induced smugness in Moscow. The Finns, unlike the Poles, did not even have an air force or armor apart from some 1918 vintage tanks. They lacked wireless, too, forcing them to rely on field telephones and, when these inevitably became disrupted, on human runners. But it was the Soviets who turned out to be wholly unprepared for the war Stalin unleashed.

If the negotiations for the pact had been Molotov’s star turn, the Winter War should have been Voroshilov’s, but the war planning and the war itself were run out of Stalin’s office, on the high-frequency phone.¹³¹ Many top officials were kept in the dark, and if they had the naïveté to complain, Stalin would remind them, “When necessary, you, too, will be informed.”¹³² At a meeting of the Main Military Council, Shaposhnikov had submitted a battle plan calling for a massive invasion force attacking in a narrow-front assault to smash through the formidable Finnish defenses, in a campaign of several months. Stalin respected Boris Mikhailovich, as the despot deferentially addressed his chief of staff, a former tsarist staff officer who had served in that role from 1928 to 1931 and again since 1937. But Stalin dismissed his battle plan as unworthy of a great power. He had shifted the war planning to the Leningrad military district, as if it were a mere local affair of the northwest. The logistics had to be rushed. Worse, Meretskov, the commander there, bent to the despot, as well as to Leningrad party boss Zhdanov, when they insisted that Finnish resistance could be smashed in a mere twelve to fifteen days.¹³³

Meretskov’s revised battle plan, delivered on October 29, 1939, dutifully slashed the number of Soviet forces necessary, while calling for an attack at widely separated points across the entire 800-mile border—the wide-front approach of the Russian civil war, two decades earlier. Just 12 divisions would strike at an equal number of different points. Stalin chose not to have the Main Military Council discuss the new plan. He had Shaposhnikov sent on holiday to Sochi.¹³⁴

Thanks to Stalin’s shift of the economy to wartime production and his personal attention to military factories, the Soviet Union was armed to the teeth. In 1939, the armaments commissariat had been expanded into four, for armaments, ammunition, aircraft, and shipbuilding. The Finns, however, had built a series of defense belts, known as the Mannerheim Line (for their commander in chief), made up of reinforced concrete emplacements two stories high and topped by armor-plated roofs. Although many of the pillboxes and bunkers were too old to withstand modern shell fire, some were sturdy, and there were antitank traps, log barriers, ditches, and minefields. Beyond the line, primitive traps (boulders, barbed wire strung across sticks) were laid. The Finns also glued portraits of Stalin onto structures, making Red Army troops hesitate before firing. Above all, the line was complemented by marshy forest, countless lakes, and other natural obstacles, which constituted a key reason the war had been started in the dead of winter: the frozen watery wastes would presumably allow tanks and wheeled artillery to cross. But in such unsuitable terrain, Soviet mechanized units attempted a German-style war of maneuver.

Without sufficient room to maneuver its heavy forces or bring its superior firepower to bear, the Red Army saw entire divisions sliced to pieces (or frozen to death). Moreover, in trying to race ahead in simple frontal assaults without accompanying infantry, the Red Army exposed its tanks to ad hoc attacks by flammable liquids stuffed in bottles and ignited by hand-lit wicks, first used in the Spanish civil war and now christened “Molotov cocktails.” (“I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,” remarked one Finn.) Furthermore, the north’s long winter darkness blunted the advantages of Soviet air power. Back on November 19, eleven days before launch, when Meretskov had toured the region to fix deployment problems, his staff car had become stuck in the deep snow, leading him to conclude that “it would be very difficult to conduct military operations in this region.”¹³⁵ The 1939–40 winter turned out to be especially cold: a site on the Karelian Isthmus recorded a record low of 45 degrees below zero (minus 43 Celsius).¹³⁶ The Red Army suffered from pervasive frostbite. Neither the climate nor the terrain should have been a surprise.

Finland showed tactical superiority. Dark silhouettes of Red Army soldiers stood out against the white snow, even if they had not lit fires to try to warm themselves, but the Finns adapted to the subarctic wilderness by donning camouflage whites, using mobile troops on skis, and carrying submachine guns to strike at the Soviet flanks or rear, in asymmetric warfare. The Finns called this tactic motti, meaning “firewood battle,” or “chopping the enemy off in bits.” Especially proficient Finnish snipers became known as “White Death.”¹³⁷ “The Finns have chosen a special combat tactic in the forests: they climb the pine trees, conceal themselves behind the branches, pull white sheets or camouflage garments over themselves, and become completely invisible,” Stalin privately marveled. “As our people approach, they get shot down point-blank from the trees.”¹³⁸ Even when the Finns yielded some territory, they carried off useful supplies and livestock. They also left behind eye-catching consumer goods—bicycles, gramophones, radios—which were booby-trapped.¹³⁹ Some Soviet commanders were observed giving orders to attack and then fleeing the battlefield. Complaints were overheard that, while soldiers got a measly 8 rubles per month, officials in the rear were paid 800 rubles—at safe desk jobs. Reports surfaced in Leningrad that returning soldiers were desperately selling army property.¹⁴⁰

In the censored Soviet public sphere, the information about the hostilities was miserly and distorted. Pravda found it necessary to issue denials that the Red Army was on the verge of defeat. At military hospitals in Leningrad, according to the NKVD, crowds surrounded wounded Red Army soldiers to learn what was really happening in the war.¹⁴¹

MISCALCULATION EXPOSED

Vladimir Zenzinov, an émigré, arrived from Paris as a war correspondent on January 20, 1940, and eventually managed to get to the front, where he collected letters from home that were found on dead Red Army soldiers. “Corpses were found everywhere—one, two, whole groups,” wrote Zenzinov. “There were places where they lay in piles, one on top of the other, in the most horrific and incomprehensible poses.” The letters originated from widely distributed geographical regions, Leningrad to Vladivostok. Written by parents, siblings, sweethearts, wives, children, they were mostly personal, contained playful alliteration, and evinced anxiety about their loved ones’ possible wartime injury or death. They frequently ended by invoking God. They mentioned listening to the radio for morsels of information. They overflowed with complaints about red tape over payments to families whose sons had been conscripted, poor pay on collective farms, excessive taxation, and a dearth of available clothing or footwear. Still, they usually referred to the Finns as “fascists, “White Guardists,” or “agents of the English bourgeoisie” and urged the conscripts “to rally around our beloved father and friend Comrade Stalin,” “defend our sacred borders,” and “liberate the Finnish people.” Zenzinov concluded that “the whole Soviet population was sincerely convinced that the attacking side was Finland, set against the Soviet Union by the imperialist governments of England and France, and that the Soviet Union was only defending itself.”¹⁴²

Zenzinov perhaps underestimated people’s desire to ensure their letters got through. (They did not know that while just about every letter from the front was perlustrated and censored, not every letter from the rear was.) Be that as it may, hundreds of these handwritten letters convey a strong sense of inculcated vocabulary (“speaking Bolshevik”) and Soviet patriotism.

No such rallying around the flag occurred vis-à-vis the People’s Government, which ruled no Finnish people, being located where the country’s civilian population had largely been evacuated. With the repulsion of Meretskov’s numerous offensives, it acquired no new settlements. Its “personnel” remained in huts at the border village. “In Terijoki there is no government of Finland, and not a single one of Kuusinen’s ministers is to be found in Terijoki, nor have they been there,” a young reporter for Signal, the railroad newspaper, discovered and reported over the telephone to the editorial offices in Moscow. “This government exists on paper only, and our troops suffer immense losses.” This reportage never saw the light of day: the NKVD got wind of it.¹⁴³ Indeed, about the only operational work in Terijoki was that of the Leningrad branch NKVD, which had moved a field headquarters there and sent back reports about both the emptiness of surrounding villages and attacks by “bandit formations.”¹⁴⁴ Although Stalin’s People’s Government fiasco failed to rally Finns on the basis of supposed class antagonisms, it did stiffen that nation’s resolve to fight a war no longer about some islands in the gulf, but about Finland’s independent existence.¹⁴⁵

No foreign country recognized Stalin’s stooge regime, and its existence did nothing to alleviate the international perception that Moscow was the aggressor. The arguments that the Soviets had put forth over eastern Poland—that the area was really western Ukraine and western Belorussia, an annexation to “protect” national minorities—did not apply in Finland. The weak League of Nations, with strong British and especially French backing, pronounced the Soviet attack on Finland “illegal” and expelled the USSR on December 14, 1939. Only seven of fifteen Council members voted, violating the League’s covenant requiring a majority, and three of those had been added to the Council the day before the vote (South Africa, Bolivia, and Egypt). But the expulsion went through, and it stung.The Soviet Union was the only League member ever to suffer such an indignity.

Stalin had not reckoned with the depth of hostility among the Western powers and the League, failing to consult even the rump experts who had survived his massacres.¹⁴⁶ Nor had he reckoned fully with the negative repercussions of his relationship with Germany. The Soviet invasion of Finland put Hitler in an awkward spot. The German populace had no knowledge of the 1939 Pact’s secret protocol granting Finland to a Soviet sphere of influence; what they did know was that fellow “Nordic people” were under attack and that Hitler condoned and aided the aggression. German officials, beginning with the ambassador in Helsinki, tried to change Germany’s policy, and some of their complaints reached the Führer, who, in fact, personally sympathized with the Finns. But German diplomats were instructed, more than once, to avoid an anti-Soviet tone even in private conversations on Finland, while arms shipments for Finland from Italy and Hungary were turned back at German ports. In a further outrage, Germany found itself hurriedly evacuating the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) from Finland.¹⁴⁷

The Far East, too, had to be watched. Sorge had reported (November 25, 1939) on discussions among the Japanese general staff about possibly dividing China into three spheres of influence: Japan (northeast, center), the USSR (northwest), and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chongqing government (southeast). But in contrast his deal with Hitler over Poland, Stalin never sought to partition China with another power. In any case, as the Chinese Communist party reported to Moscow, the Japanese soon began concentrating additional troops in Manchukuo.¹⁴⁸

Worst of all, Stalin’s Finnish People’s Government prevented him from accepting the feelers from the new government in Helsinki. Already on the second day of war, the intransigents in the government who were against a deal had been swept aside, replaced by Finns ready to negotiate many of the concessions that he sought.¹⁴⁹ Finnish politicians, it turned out, had required a show of force in order to agree to a version of Stalin’s proposed land-exchange deal and military basing. Wars are won partly with agile responses to unexpected twists and turns but, above all, with political planning in conjunction with military action. “War,” as Clausewitz had explained, “should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.” Had the Soviet attack been cleverly designed as a quick, massive blow, followed by a pause and a demand for immediate return to the political bargaining table, it might have worked after a few days.¹⁵⁰ But such a cunning stratagem would have required a level of subtlety that Stalin, not to mention the broken men around him, lacked. Instead, what transpired was a Soviet catastrophe.¹⁵¹ “Papa and Mama,” a Soviet soldier wrote, in one of the hundreds of letters excerpted in Beria’s NKVD reports submitted to the Little Corner, “our army has met enormous resistance. . . . This is a devil’s patch, which tanks cannot cross, [instead] sinking in the swamps.”¹⁵²

BIRTHDAY BASH

In 1939 and 1940, Stalin authorized 2,000 visits to his office, the peak in his three decades in power. He met foreign officials in Molotov’s office as well, and had a hand in additional meetings in Mikoyan’s office (to iron out details with German trade representatives).¹⁵³ The sessions in the Little Corner frequently stretched to seven hours or more; many ran past midnight, and sometimes until 3:00 a.m. Now, as gallant little Finland attracted the sympathy of the whole world, the Little Corner became even tenser than it had been during the border war with Japan or the high-stakes poker with Hitler and the partition of Poland. Perhaps the stress and long hours took a toll: Stalin had an outbreak of his chronic fevers, streptococcus, and staphylococcus, as well as sore throats. Germany’s lightning conquest of Poland was fresh in people’s minds and made for a devastating contrast to the awkward Soviet thrust into Finland. Adding insult to injury, Schulenburg relayed a German offer to assist the Soviets militarily. “You can imagine it!” recalled Khrushchev. “Hitler was demonstrating our weakness, and he wanted us to admit it by accepting his aid. A feeling of alarm grew in the Soviet leadership.”¹⁵⁴

Serious tensions had arisen in Soviet-German trade and economic relations, too. A Soviet delegation’s visit to Germany had begun in October 1939, in connection with the new trade agreement, and the Germans had sought to play the consummate hosts, housing the proletarian representatives in the Adlon, Berlin’s finest hotel.¹⁵⁵ But the Germans were outraged at a forty-eight-page shopping list presented in late November: not just fighter aircraft, naval cruisers, and artillery, but whole factories, up to 1.5 billion reichsmarks. On December 11, Ribbentrop had to remind Soviet ambassador Shkvartsev that “Germany is at war” and could not go “beyond the humanly possible.”¹⁵⁶

That same day, in a convoy near Suomussalmi, in central Finland, not far from the Soviet border, Mekhlis’s car became disabled under fire; several Soviets were wounded. Mekhlis did not reach the Soviet frontier post until thirteen hours later, evidently spending the night in the forest. That same night of December 11–12, after Molotov and Voroshilov had left the Little Corner at almost 1:00 a.m., the despot summoned Beria at 2:30. The unfolding catastrophe had finally been getting through via the brutal NKVD reports about the Red Army. On December 15, Stalin ordered Beria to set up seven new NKVD regiments in the rear of Soviet positions, to interdict any soldiers who retreated.¹⁵⁷ But the battlefield situation was not so easily reversed. The despot found himself meeting essentially every night with military men in the Little Corner. On December 15, they were present from 11:00 p.m. until 1:25 a.m.; Voroshilov and Molotov stayed until 5:00 a.m. The brass and the cronies were right back that night. From the evening of December 18 through to the wee hours of December 20, Molotov and Voroshilov were in the Little Corner on and off for nine hours, and then back again the evening of the 20th, until 3:45 a.m. By then, it was officially Stalin’s sixtieth birthday (December 21).¹⁵⁸

Victory in Finland was supposed to have been celebrated as part of the jubilee, and Zhdanov had commissioned a score from Shostakovich to be played in the streets of Helsinki. The Suite on Finnish Themes would go unperformed, but the birthday bash went ahead in the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. The evening called for exactly sixty guests for Stalin’s sixty years (some accounts record seventy or eighty); Stalin shook each person’s hand individually. After the inevitable toasts to the despot, he answered with toasts to Soviet pilots, artillerymen, tank drivers, sailors, workers, peasants. Everyone got smashed. Molotov, noting that “I do not know a greater leader than Lenin,” observed in his toast that “in some ways Stalin has surpassed Lenin. Lenin for many years lived removed from his people, from his country, in emigration, but comrade Stalin the whole time lives and lived among the people, in our country.” The despot, entourage in tow, repaired to the adjacent St. George’s Hall for a night of entertainment. Molotov danced away, showing off the results of his tango lessons with Voroshilov, while also singing—in key.¹⁵⁹

Arkady Raikin, a twenty-nine-year-old born in tsarist Russia’s Latvian-speaking territory and educated in a Jewish heder, was a master of skits and impersonations, especially of heedless Soviet bureaucrats. That night, he had been summoned to the Kremlin for the first time, but then he was told that the summons was off, so he spent the night performing at a B-list gathering at the House of the Actor. Upon returning to his room at the Hotel Moskva, he was suddenly informed that he had been sought throughout the city—to perform for Stalin—but that now it was too late. Raikin went up to bed. Then the telephone interrupted his slumber at around 5:00 a.m.: he had to be downstairs immediately, whence he was whisked by government vehicle to the Kremlin, next door, and escorted into the St. George’s Hall. The entertainment planned by the committee for artistic affairs had long ended, but Stalin and his entourage were still there, so a second “concert” had to be conjured up. (Raikin had discovered upon exiting his hotel that the Bolshoi soprano Natalya Spiller had been bundled into the same waiting car.) The tables in the Grand Kremlin Palace still overflowed with food and drink, and Stalin asked Raikin the purpose of the little netlike string bag he was holding. Raikin said he had brought it for groceries, just in case some became available, the way Soviet inhabitants did when roaming urban streets.

The eating and drinking lasted until 8:00 a.m., in what the Comintern head Dimitrov described as “an unforgettable night.”¹⁶⁰ The mischievous Raikin further recalled that when the gathering finally ended, Khrushchev followed Stalin to the exit, clinging to the despot’s waist.¹⁶¹ Alexander Pirogov (b. 1899), the great bass—and the youngest USSR People’s Artist ever—also received his summons to the Grand Kremlin Palace birthday bash while celebrations were well under way. He had just finished singing Glinka’s Ivan Susanin at the Bolshoi and, exhausted, declined the “invitation.” His aghast friends and relatives expected his arrest. Pirogov was nonplussed. “It’s more difficult to repress me than a people’s commissar,” he is said to have asserted. “A people’s commissar is a political figure, and few are those who could not be replaced in the government. But with a famous actor it’s harder.”¹⁶²

Sergei Prokofyev had composed a special cantata for Stalin, Zdravitsa (“Hail”), using folk melodies; it was performed by Nikolai Golovanov, director of the USSR’s Great Symphony Orchestra, which played classical music for Soviet radio.¹⁶³ The Red Army chorus gave a series of special performances, and the theme of Stalin as “Leader and Architect of the Red Army” received renewed emphasis. Stalin’s image was sewn into Turkmen and Ukrainian carpets, northern bone carvings, miniature Palekh lacquer boxes. The State Tretyakov Gallery mounted Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts, featuring a mass of oil paintings, busts, engravings, and book illustrations. “The will of millions long ago tasked art with the theme of Stalin as the central theme,” wrote one summary.¹⁶⁴ Among the most celebrated works was Alexander Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, depicting them standing tall, dressed in military overcoats and caps, against a cloudy sky and the Kremlin walls and towers.¹⁶⁵ Most artists had to paint Stalin from retouched photographs, but the despot had sat for Gerasimov.¹⁶⁶ A livelier composition, An Unforgettable Meeting (1937) by Vasily Yefanov, depicted Stalin smiling and grasping, with both hands, the hand of a young maiden at a reception for female activists in heavy industry; in a wood-paneled Kremlin room laden with flowers, Orjonikidze, Molotov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Kalinin, and the now deceased Krupskaya are shown applauding.¹⁶⁷

Stalin received his first Order of Lenin, a decade after the award had been introduced. As bards in each Union republic outdid one another in panegyrics, “Stalin Prizes” were inaugurated for the country’s top scientists, military designers, and artists—the top awards (“first class”) came with a staggering cash award of 100,000 rubles, at a time when yearly wages averaged perhaps 10,000.¹⁶⁸ More than 4,000 students received Stalin scholarships. The party organized group tours of the buildings in which Stalin had lived, in Solvychegodsk, Tbilisi, and Gori. A new museum of the old Bolshevik underground in Baku was opened.¹⁶⁹ Soviet newsreels depicted how factories all across the country had fulfilled production pledges for the approaching occasion, but also showed pilgrimages to Stalin’s birth hovel in Gori, even though Stalin had denied TASS permission to convey the hordes’ enthusiasm.¹⁷⁰ “Who won at ‘Krivi’ [Georgian boxing]? Soso!” recalled Grigory Elisabedashvili, a school chum at both the Gori parish school and Tiflis seminary. “Who could throw the ball the farthest? Soso! At the same time who could read the most books? Soso! . . . Who sings better and more enchantingly than everyone? Soso!” Stalin forbade publication of these recollections, noting that, “apart from everything else, the author shamelessly lied.”¹⁷¹

The despot did authorize Pravda (December 21) to carry a new “short biography,” in twelve broadsheet pages (double the usual edition), produced by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute; it was also published as an eighty-eight-page book, with an initial print run of more than 1 million. Upon receiving his copy, Stalin told his aides that he had “no time to look at it.” In fact, he had changed some wording, made insertions, cut text, and substituted some different photographs.¹⁷² The link to Lenin remained the touchstone. “He thinks about Lenin always; even when his thoughts are deep in problems that require decisions, his hand automatically, machine-like, writes on a sheet of paper, ‘Lenin—friend . . . teacher,’” Poskryobyshev and Dvinsky, Stalin’s two top aides, wrote in Pravda. “Often at the end of the workday we remove papers from his desk with these very words written along and across them.”¹⁷³