Stalin

Pravda’s birthday issue also featured some of the congratulations sent from each and every factory and farm, and from around the world. The next day (December 22), the Academy of Sciences made Stalin an “honorary member,” despite his lack of a degree. Pravda carried a photograph depicting a benevolent Stalin receiving bouquets from women and children of the various Soviet nationalities. Adolf Hitler, too, sent December 1939 birthday greetings—which were printed on Pravda’s front page: “On the day of your 60th birthday I ask that you receive my sincerest congratulations. I offer my best wishes, I wish good health to you personally and a happy future to all the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.”

Stalin graciously replied to the Führer: “I ask that you accept my gratitude for the congratulations and my thanks for your kind wishes in connection with the peoples of the Soviet Union.”¹⁷⁴ There were no birthday greetings from the leaders of Britain or France. But Time magazine named Stalin Man of the Year for 1939, contrasting him favorably with the warmongers Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, as well as with Roosevelt. (Time had named Hitler Man of the Year in 1938.) “Stalin’s actions in 1939,” the magazine wrote, “were positive, surprising, world-shattering.”¹⁷⁵

COURSE CORRECTION

Back in Finland, as Finnish reservists, often boys barely old enough to shave, starved and froze but fought on against vastly superior Red Army numbers, Soviet corpses piled up. “The Russians,” a photographer for America’s Life magazine observed, “lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters. . . . Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow.”¹⁷⁶ Voroshilov urged that Meretskov and the officers under his command be replaced and court-martialed as “cowards and laggards (there are also swine).”¹⁷⁷ Beria, not to be outdone, recommended arrests, too.¹⁷⁸ Stalin did not indulge them. But he did direct the rabid Mekhlis to travel back to Finland and, on December 29, signed an order, along with Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov, for Soviet armies to adopt a defensive posture and guard against encirclement by the Finns. It admonished commanders—himself, actually—that “the war with Finland is a serious war, distinctly different from our autumn campaign in Poland.”¹⁷⁹

Alarmingly, Soviet military intelligence reported (December 20, 24, 28, 29) that Romania was intensively readying for war against the USSR and preparing concentration camps for people sympathetic to the USSR. Soviet official circles worried that Turkey could be enticed into war against the USSR as well.¹⁸⁰ A piece of uplifting news had been delivered by the Soviet agent Stöbe, who reported from Berlin, based upon information from Scheliha, that Hitler was intending “a major western offensive in 1940. At one meeting, a plan was outlined: first the seizure of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, then a strike against Britain. Among the military brass, there is opposition on this question.” When asked about the USSR’s position, Hitler was said to have responded that “the USSR would be occupied by Finland.”¹⁸¹

On December 28, Stalin finally convoked the Main Military Council, which subjected the failed battle plan of Meretskov to withering criticism. When Stalin asked who among those assembled would be willing to take over, Timoshenko, the ambitious commander of the Kiev military district, volunteered, on the condition that he could alter the battle plan back to what Shaposhnikov and the general staff had proposed. On December 31, 1939, Stalin had Shaposhnikov awarded the Order of Lenin, and seven days later he summoned Zhdanov and Meretskov to the Little Corner. “The whole world is watching us,” the despot reproached Meretskov. “The authority of the Red Army is the guarantor of the security of the USSR. If we get stuck in the face of such a weak opponent, that will arouse the anti-Soviet forces of imperialist circles.”¹⁸² On January 7, 1940, the despot had Timoshenko formally appointed to “assist” Meretskov, ending the idiotic posture that the war was some local affair of the Leningrad military district.¹⁸³

Timoshenko, born in 1895 to peasants in Bessarabia, near Odessa, had served as a machine gunner in the Great War, joined the Red Army in 1918 and the party in 1919, met Stalin at Tsaritsyn during the civil war, and rose under his patronage, becoming the top commander in the Soviet west. But excavating the country from the Finnish debacle would not be easy. On the night of January 7–8, Stalin, with Voroshilov also on the line, called Stern, recently installed as a frontline commander in Finland, to discuss reports of traffic jams. (Voroshilov had already spoken to Stern that morning.) Stalin warned Stern against transporting troops with trucks on the city roads, as if that were the cause. Stern noted that horse-drawn carts were clogging the roads and turned the conversation to his desperate need for reinforcements and supplies. “It is necessary to mobilize for us all concentrated meat and protein, canned fish, biscuits, and dry spirits, whatever the country can give us, because frequently we are unable to give the troops all the food supplies required,” he told Stalin. “It is also necessary not to send troops older than 30 to this severe theater—that’s all I have, pardon me for detaining you.”¹⁸⁴

PROTÉGÉS

That January of 1940, in Nazi-occupied Poland (the General Gouvernement), all Jews ten years and older were compelled to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on the right sleeve of their clothing. In the part of Poland that Germany annexed, Jews were forced to wear yellow patches with the Star of David. Jewish-owned shops or other enterprises were also forced to display a Star of David, which often led to their expropriation. Many Jews in Poland were pressed into forced labor.

Denunciations reached Moscow that Choibalsan, the Mongolian butcher-leader handpicked by Stalin, was helping himself to cash from state vaults. But Stalin knew that he was loyal. Granted an audience in the Little Corner (January 3), Choibalsan brought a wish list: a new railroad, a meatpacking plant, a cement factory. He received the Order of Lenin. Stalin directed that Mongolia’s herds should grow from 20-odd million to 200 million head. (They would reach 30 million by the year 2000.) The Soviet despot also chose a new state emblem for Mongolia (a man on horseback) and imposed a new draft constitution and Mongolian People’s Party program, which called for extirpation of the remnants of feudalism and, bypassing capitalism, “development along the noncapitalist path in order to prepare for entering socialism.” After the puppet Choibalsan’s return to Ulan Bator, he would preside over the 10th Congress of the Mongolian People’s Party. He would remain concurrently prime minister and war minister, but the Congress would formally confirm the promotions of young people to top positions, including, at Soviet insistence, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, a 1938 graduate of the Siberian Finance Institute, in Irkutsk, who became the Mongol party’s general secretary, at age twenty-three.¹⁸⁵

At home, too, Stalin continued his dizzying promotion of new people. On January 8, 1940, Alexander Yakovlev (b. 1906) was sitting at his desk in the design bureau at Moscow Aviation Plant No. 39 when the phone rang. “Are you very busy?” the voice asked. “Might you be able to come over right now?” It was Stalin. Yakovlev was in the Little Corner fifteen minutes later. Stalin told those present that Mikhail Kaganovich, brother of Lazar, was being removed as aviation commissar. “What kind of commissar is he? What does he know of aviation?” Stalin stated to Lazar Kaganovich’s face, adding, in an allusion to his Jewish background, “How many years has he lived in Russia and he still hasn’t learned how to speak proper Russian.” Alexei Shakhurin, party boss of Gorky province (and, before that, Yaroslavl, site of airplane manufacturing), was appointed the new commissar. “And,” Stalin continued, turning to Yakovlev, “we decided to make you Shakhurin’s deputy.” Yakovlev professed his lack of experience, but those present retorted that Shakhurin had no experience, either. “So you don’t want to be deputy commissar?” Stalin remarked. “Maybe you want to be commissar?” Smiling, the despot invoked party discipline. “We are not afraid of force, we do not shrink from force when it is necessary. Sometimes force is useful; without force there would have been no revolution. Indeed, force is the midwife of revolution.”

Yakovlev recalled wondering: “What would the designers and other figures of our aviation think of me as a deputy commissar—I, the youngest among them?” He got a new apartment in the commissariat’s new residential complex, but without a telephone. Stalin called for him. Not wanting to again bother the one neighbor in the building who had a home phone and had received the call, Yakovlev went to the street to return Stalin’s call, which prompted the despot to ask what had taken him so long to respond. Yakovlev answered that he had had to use a pay phone. “What, you have no telephone?” Stalin remarked. The next day when Yakovlev got home from work, he found a city phone installed in his apartment. At some point, Stalin called again and began asking questions about a specific airplane, but Yakovlev responded, “It is forbidden to discuss those kinds of questions on a city line.” “Yes, right, I forgot,” Stalin said, then asked, “What, you don’t have a government line in your apartment?” “Of course not,” the despot answered his own question. “By rank it is not specified for you.” Stalin laughed. The next day, Yakovlev came home to find a second phone installed in his apartment, a Kremlin vertushka.¹⁸⁶

This is how it worked for countless young functionaries: Stalin would summon them to his inner sanctum. Many would learn only then where he worked and the nickname for his inner sanctum—the “Little Corner,” magical words they could now whisper to other intimates. Stalin had brought them into his confidence. Invariably, they were startled at his command of detail: the different specifications of the various artillery pieces, the distinguishing characteristics of the various types of steel, even the number of shops in their factory. He had done his homework, he understood technology, he knew the challenges they confronted. Speaking with restraint, he would patiently explain the rightness of a line of action, the necessity of their taking on a certain assignment and of meeting his impossible demands. They came to feel he was watching them, mentoring them. Some would be summoned frequently, others just once in their lifetimes, but even a single visit could last that entire lifetime.

Another young protégé, Vasily Yemelyanov (b. 1901), the deputy commissar for defense industry, was summoned to the Little Corner on January 13. He had studied at Krupp’s factories in Germany and been tasked with production of Soviet armored plating. Yemelyanov arrived with a group that included the Izhorsk Factory director and industrial designer, who were supposed to produce a lightweight armored shield for infantry on skis. Poskryobyshev showed them in. They found themselves in the presence of Voroshilov and Molotov, among others, as well as armaments commissar Boris Vannikov, who had brought a new version of an automatic rifle. Stalin was said to have taken the shield prototype and the rifle, hit the floor, and rolled around, adopting various positions while aiming the weapon through the shield’s opening. Then he rose and offered suggestions, such as slightly increasing the size of the shield and creating a small shelf on it for spare ammunition. The designer recorded the instructions in a notebook.¹⁸⁷

Despite Stalin’s impromptu floor show, the armored shield prototype—still to be mass-produced—was not going to save the situation in Finland. That would fall to Timoshenko, who arrived in the Little Corner, with Alexander Vasilevsky from the general staff, right after Yemelyanov and the others had departed. Plans were being finalized for an offensive.

SUSPICIONS

Also on January 13, 1940, Soviet intelligence supplied Stalin with Russian translations of the unflattering internal reports on the Soviet-Finnish War sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Helsinki.¹⁸⁸ At least the intercepted reports showed that Germany was not going to assist Finland. But the British, in January 1940, had begun to discuss possible military assistance to the Finns.¹⁸⁹ Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British imperial general staff, had sent an envoy to Mannerheim’s field headquarters, and on January 8, in a long conversation, the Finnish supreme commander indicated that he expected a renewed Soviet offensive but maintained that he could hold out until May. He sought British fighter planes, ammunition, artillery, and, crucially, 76.2-millimeter antiaircraft guns—then “maybe the wonder will happen that we should be victorious—we must be.” Mannerheim mentioned a 30,000-man foreign legion, but he seemed most intent on the Western powers themselves attacking Soviet oil fields. “Do you think you will make a move in the Caucasus?” he asked. “It should be easy.” He asserted that “the capture of Baku would be a deadly blow to Germany, as well as to Russia,” and urged a British expedition to seize Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, too. But Ironside took Mannerheim’s assertion that the Finns could last until May as a reason not to move expeditiously on his request for weaponry and Western action.¹⁹⁰ Still, Beria sent a report to Stalin (January 13) that Britain would furnish Finland with 12 Bristol Blenheim bombers, to destroy the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway, and conduct demonstration raids over Leningrad and Moscow. Maisky was now reporting that the British were resolute.¹⁹¹

Stalin began to wonder whether he had been tricked.¹⁹² British sources, via the Soviet Union’s London station, had been relaying stories of Mannerheim’s prewar pessimism—but now those same sources were reporting his confidence. Had British secret services lured Stalin into a trap with disinformation? Intelligence that informed the Soviet battle plan had proved misguided.¹⁹³ Churchill had told Maisky how he sympathized with a Soviet seizure of the Gulf of Finland—and now? “Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril Finland shows what free men can do,” he declared in a radio address on January 20, 1940. “The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.”¹⁹⁴

A pig in a poke? Stalin became suspicious that his many agents in Britain—run by Anatoly Gorsky—were too good to be true, a suspicion that cast a shadow over the spectacular Cambridge Five. The despot turned to his spies in Paris, who reported that the French were contemplating air raids on Baku, which supplied 80 percent of Soviet aviation fuel, 90 percent of kerosene, and more than 90 percent of gasoline.¹⁹⁵ The French were also said to be planning attacks on Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the north, with the goal of eventually seizing Leningrad and installing a White Russian regime. This was the very nightmare scenario whose avoidance had motivated Stalin’s launch of the pressure on Finland in the first place. Stalin followed the Western machinations involving Turkey, a possible participant in a Western air assault on Baku. German intelligence began playing up the Western intervention plans, seeking to drive the wedge between France/Britain and the Soviet Union deeper.¹⁹⁶ The Soviet high command issued a general order to open fire, without seeking further permission, on any foreign airplanes that crossed Soviet borders.¹⁹⁷

On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved a sentencing list containing 457 prominent people; 346 were to be shot, including Yezhov, as well as the writer Isaac Babel, the journalist-propagandist Koltsov, and the dramaturge Meyerhold, three of the country’s long-standing brightest lights, each of whom Yezhov had implicated as spies.¹⁹⁸ Four days later, when the regime conducted the annual commemoration of Lenin’s passing at the Bolshoi, Stalin made remarks to the inner circle. “Mayakovsky was the finest proletarian poet,” he stated. “Ten volumes of verse by Demyan Bedny are not worth that one poem of Mayakovsky’s. D. B. could never rise to such a height.”

Stalin also stated that night, in the presence of others, that “Voroshilov is a good fellow, but he is no military man.” The despot acknowledged that Finland had prepared for a major war, but in a way that went beyond its own military capabilities: “hangars for thousands of aircraft—whereas Finland had [only] several hundred of them.” He blustered that, as the Red Army now advanced, “there should be nothing left but the bare bones of a state” in Finland, adding, “We have no desire for Finland’s territory. But Finland should be a state that is friendly to the Soviet Union.” Then he proposed a toast: “To the fighters of the Red Army, which was untrained, badly clothed, and badly shod, which we are now providing with clothing and boots, which is fighting for its somewhat tarnished honor, fighting for its glory!”

Grigory Kulik arrived at the celebration bearing bad news from the front. Born into a peasant family near Poltava, Kulik had been a staff artillery officer in the tsarist army and became acquainted with Stalin during the civil war; by 1937, the despot had named the notorious bully and blockhead as head of the Red Army’s main artillery directorate. “You’re lapsing into panic,” Stalin now admonished him. “I shall send you [Georgy] Chelpanov’s book on the foundation of psychology.” Stalin noted that when the pagan Greek priests “would get disturbing reports, they would adjourn to their bathhouses, take baths, wash themselves clean, and only afterward would they assess events and make decisions.”¹⁹⁹

After the Lenin commemoration, between January 23 and February 3, Stalin received people in the Little Corner just once, in the wee small hours of January 29, and only briefly: Molotov (65 minutes), Mikoyan (30 minutes), Kulik (25 minutes), and Shaposhnikov (48 minutes).²⁰⁰ Later that day, Molotov telegrammed Kollontai in Stockholm, instructing her, to her astonishment, to inform the Swedish government that Soviet peace negotiations with the Finnish government in Helsinki would be possible.²⁰¹ Stalin could not have had any intention of conducting actual negotiations, given that planning was well under way for an immense Soviet offensive. Rather, the despot likely wanted to break any momentum, such as it was, in possible Western military assistance to the Finns. In February 1940, Stalin ordered Beria to recall Gorsky and shut down the entire Soviet intelligence station in London, for having served as a conduit of “disinformation.”²⁰²

MASSACRES

On February 10, 1940, in response to an article in Pravda summarizing a journal story about his heroic prerevolutionary underground exploits in Baku, Stalin lashed out at inaccuracies (pointing out he had never edited the oil workers’ newspaper) and the portrayal of Voroshilov (“Comrade Voroshilov was in Baku for only a few months, and then left Baku without leaving visible traces behind”). In the letter, which he marked “not for publication,” Stalin also cast doubt on the reminiscences used in the article, indicating that the memoirs had likely been “dictated” by journalists.²⁰³

Around this time, death sentences based upon fabricated evidence were implemented for cultural figures, as well as former NKVD first deputy Mikhail Frinovsky, former deputy foreign intelligence chief Spigelglas, former intelligence chief and Comintern operative Trilisser, Yefim Yevdokimov, and Redens, Stalin’s ethnic Polish brother-in-law (part of a “Polish diversionary-espionage group”). Frinovsky’s wife was executed the day before him; their son, a high school student, was executed not long thereafter. Under interrogation-torture, Redens had admitted his complicity in the annihilation of innocent people while working atop the NKVD in Ukraine, Moscow, and Kazakhstan. His wife Anna—Nadya’s sister—and their two boys were not touched, and the family continued to live in the elite House on the Embankment and were allowed to visit Svetlana at Zubalovo (but not the Kremlin).²⁰⁴

The principal executioner was usually Vasily Blokhin (b. 1895). The son of a poor peasant from central Russia, he had risen to become the NKVD’s head executioner already in the mid-1920s and was known to insiders by his signature brown leather cap, brown leather gauntlets above the elbow, and brown leather apron. He had survived the transition from Yagoda to Yezhov, and then to Beria, although the latter had evidently tried to have him arrested as a Yezhovite, assembling the requisite compromising materials.²⁰⁵ To Blokhin fell the honor of executing Yezhov.²⁰⁶ In a last statement to the “court,” held in the prison warden’s office, Yezhov repudiated the espionage and terrorist charges and requested that his aging mother and adopted daughter not be touched. “I purged 14,000 Chekists,” he stated, “but my enormous guilt lies in the fact that I purged so few of them.” He was cremated at the Donskoi Monastery Crematorium, his ashes dumped into a mass pit, joining those of Tukhachevsky. Yezhov’s very last words were for the despot: “Let Stalin know that I shall die with his name on my lips.”²⁰⁷

“Yezhov was scum,” Stalin told the new deputy aviation commissar, Yakovlev. “A degenerated person. You call him at the commissariat, they say he’s left for the Central Committee. You call the Central Committee, they say he left for a job. You send someone to his residence, it turns out he’s lying in bed, dead drunk. He destroyed many innocents. We shot him for that.”²⁰⁸

Massive artillery barrages began to strike Finland, then, on February 11, in frosts reaching 31 degrees below zero (minus 35 Celsius), Timoshenko’s onslaught via escalating artillery barrages, known as a Wall of Fire, commenced on the Viipuri axis. Rather than attempt a war of maneuver through partially frozen swamp with dispersed forces, Timoshenko massed more than 450,000 Soviet troops, against perhaps 150,000 Finns, on a single point, in classic Napoleonic fashion. Within the week, the Red Army finally had pierced the Mannerheim Line, forcing the Finns to retreat. (Voroshilov at first refused to believe Meretskov’s phone report that the Red Army had broken through.) Soviet artillery tore the colossal Finnish concrete emplacements right out of the ground, as if trying to make up for their earlier humiliation.²⁰⁹ On February 15, a much-relieved yet feverish and nauseated Stalin was again examined by his doctor. “In front of Stalin on the table was a map of Finland,” the doctor recalled. “Stalin took a large, thick pencil and drew in the course of the war and then, tapping the pencil, said, ‘Any day Vyborg will be taken.’”²¹⁰

On the same day that Timoshenko’s offensive began in Finland, Stalin deepened his bargain with Hitler, after difficult negotiations, with a new Commercial Agreement (February 11, 1940). The Soviet Union agreed to supply Germany with 650 million reichsmarks’ worth of raw materials during the next eighteen months, promising fully two thirds in the first twelve months, while Germany pledged to furnish the same amount of industrial goods, but over twenty-seven months—a significant Soviet concession.²¹¹ The cornucopia for Germany included Soviet feed grain and legumes (1 million tons), oil (900,000 tons), scrap and pig iron (800,000 tons), phosphates (500,000 tons), iron ore (500,000 tons), platinum, chromium ore, asbestos, iridium, and albumin. The earlier vague promises for German “industrial deliveries” were now, at Stalin’s insistence, enumerated in four lists covering forty-two pages: a fully equipped Panzer III, five Messerschmitt Bf 109 E and five Bf 100 C fighters, two Junkers 88 bombers, two Dornier 215 light bombers, and one Fa 226 helicopter, as well as extra engines, artillery pieces, armored vehicles, gun sights, and extensive spare parts (piston rings, spark plugs, propellers, submarine periscopes), and the massive naval ship the Lützow. The lists also specified turbines, locomotives, excavators, cranes, forges, diesel engines, and steel tubing. There was even a list covering possible future Soviet interests.²¹²

In China, the renewed “united front” was coming undone. Under Japan’s savage array of air power, artillery, and armored forces, China was losing every engagement on the battlefield, but not the war. First the Nationalist government had abandoned north China, trading space for time, then, after being evicted from ever more territories along the coast, had retreated to the western interior, whence it conducted sabotage and flanking operations designed to outlast Japan and its shoestring logistics.²¹³ Finally, Chiang Kai-shek launched a multifront counteroffensive. Once again, he confided in his private diary that the threat of the Chinese Communist party to the country, whom he saw as collaborating with Japan, exceeded the threat of the latter.²¹⁴ Zhou Enlai, in a long report, claimed a party membership of nearly half a million, and an Eighth Route Army of more than a quarter million (additionally, a New Fourth Army was said to number 30,000). At the same time, the Communists’ budget was in severe deficit: about $358,000 per month, a tidy sum Zhou requested from Moscow. His request amounted to more than 40 percent of the Chinese Communists’ total military and civilian expenditures. On February 23, Dimitrov sent Stalin a draft letter intended as a response, and two days later he managed to speak with Stalin on the phone. “Cannot see me about Chinese affairs,” Dimitrov noted in his diary for that day. “Very busy. Has not read the material he was sent. ‘There is a lot of paperwork I am not finding time to read. Decide for yourself.’”²¹⁵

Dimitrov concluded his diary entry: “We shall give the assistance.”²¹⁶ Zhou Enlai, who had been in Moscow for treatment of a broken arm (he had fallen from a horse), set out for Yan’an, the Red capital, carrying with him a Comintern resolution that afforded the Chinese Communists great leeway in making decisions based upon fluid local circumstances. Mao took advantage by tightening his grip. Dimitrov telegrammed Mao (March 17, 1940) that Zhou “will personally inform you about everything we discussed and agreed upon regarding Chinese affairs. You need to seriously consider everything and take decisive measures completely on your own. In case of disagreement with us on some questions, please inform us promptly and tell us your reasons.”²¹⁷ Such deference from Moscow to foreign Communists was unheard of. Mao seized upon the Comintern document to appoint his own loyalists and lay plans to set up new Communist bases in China.²¹⁸

Also against the background of Finnish events, in early March 1940, Beria had reported to Stalin that “a large number of former officers of the Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence services, members of Polish nationalist counterrevolutionary parties, participants in uncovered counterrevolutionary uprising organizations, refugees, and so forth are held in NKVD USSR camps for POWs and in the prisons of the western provinces of Ukraine and Belorussia.” He added, on the basis of informants, that they were “sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system,” and that each was “waiting only for his release in order to enter actively into the struggle against Soviet power.” Some had had the temerity to write petitions pointing out that if, according to Soviet propaganda, the USSR was not at war with Poland, then they could not be held as POWs. To expedite their sentencing, Beria recommended that a troika be formed, made up of himself, Merkulov, and the head of the NKVD’s first special department. Stalin, using blue pencil, crossed out Beria’s name, underlined Merkulov’s, and wrote in “Kobulov.”²¹⁹ On March 5, in the name of the politburo, Stalin approved a troika and a “special procedure” for executing the 21,857 captured or arrested Polish officers, civil servants, and intellectuals. Voroshilov, who had had to surrender jurisdiction over POWs in the Polish campaign to Beria, also signed the execution order, along with the redoubtable Molotov and Mikoyan. The officers of the Polish army—some of whom were ethnic Ukrainian and Jewish—were murdered at several sites, including near Smolensk, in the Katyn Forest.²²⁰

Soviet liquidation of the Polish officers in captivity took place around the same time as a similar Nazi action across the border under Hans Frank, who, explaining his operation, stated, “I admit, utterly openly, that this will cause the deaths of thousands of Poles, above all from the leading stratum of the Polish intelligentsia.”²²¹ Soviet preparations for the executions might have commenced as early as January 1940. Through agents in Britain, the Soviets likely picked up on recent French whisperings to employ exiled Polish forces (“volunteers”) to attack Soviet positions in northern Finland, around Petsamo, a scenario that eventually could have had Polish army officers inside the USSR playing the role that the Czechoslovak Legion had played in 1918—namely, sparking a civil war.²²² But whatever the anxieties, the massacres ultimately flowed from a bottomless well of Soviet-Polish enmity.²²³ Families of the executed, who were deported to Kazakhstan, were told nothing; all too many would not survive their own ordeals. A handful of top Polish officers, such as General Władysław Anders, were kept alive, perhaps for future use; some others survived by offering their services to the NKVD. The Katyn Forest slaughter would prove to be not just another epochal Soviet state crime, but a strategic blunder.

All of this occurred in strictest secrecy. For the Soviet people, fairy tales persisted. A Member of the Government, with Gelovani in a cameo as Stalin, premiered on March 8, 1940. The film opens in spring 1930, when a poor peasant, Alexandra Sokolova (played by the radiant theater actress Vera Maretskaya), joins a collective farm and becomes its chairman, courageously coping with all the obstacles to collectivization: other villagers’ distrust, false accusations against her, bureaucratism, wrecking. The heroine is seen growing into her position, breaking free of her patriarchal husband in the name of the new life, speaking with authority in the name of the people, and eventually being elected a deputy of the new USSR Supreme Soviet—the strongest female character to emerge in Soviet cinema to date.²²⁴ The Soviet press was preoccupied for several days with celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the head of the actual government, Molotov (March 9, 1940), affording him the designation “very major figure.”²²⁵ On March 10, two months shy of his forty-ninth birthday, Mikhail Bulgakov succumbed to nephrosclerosis, an inherited kidney disorder.²²⁶ The Master and Margarita and many of his other works remained unpublished.

REVELATION

On March 12, the Finnish government, reeling from Timoshenko’s furious Wall of Fire that had reduced Viipuri, now renamed Vyborg, to a bombed-out hulk and opened the road to Helsinki, capitulated. The NKVD reported that Finland appeared to be on the verge of total military collapse. Stalin refrained from trying to overrun the country entirely (which had not been his intention in the first place). He did not deign to participate in the numerous sessions required to hammer out the details of Helsinki’s acceptance of defeat. Molotov, reversing the original offer to cede a large part of Soviet Karelia, now claimed a chunk of Finnish Karelia, plus the Karelian Isthmus right through to Vyborg—well beyond prewar proposals. This was more territory than the Finns had lost in the fighting. When they objected, Molotov snapped, “Any other great power in our position would demand war reparations or all of Finland.” When the Finns pointed out that in 1721, Peter the Great had paid compensation for the expansion of Russia’s Baltic frontier, Molotov barked, “Write a letter to Peter the Great—if he orders it, we will pay compensation.”²²⁷

The consequences of Finland’s civilian leaders’ prewar refusal to cut a deal struck the country like a punch in the face.²²⁸ “The terms of the peace are onerous for us,” stated Tanner, a participant in the failed negotiations, “but the government is happy that the agreement does not limit Finland’s sovereignty and independence, and that the program of Kuusinen’s government has been abandoned.”²²⁹ Flags in Helsinki flew at half-mast, newspapers appeared with black borders, and the radio played funeral dirges.

Two of Stalin’s fiercest émigré critics had stood with him regarding Finland. Living in France, Paul Miliukov, the former leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), observed of the Winter War, “I feel pity for the Finns, but I am for a Vyborg province.”²³⁰ Trotsky, too, had supported the USSR in the clash with Finland, imagining, like the ideologue Zhdanov, that the Soviet invasion heralded the onset of a Finnish class-based civil war. Trotsky argued that, just as in Spain, it was right to be on the side of the left, although it was proving difficult for Finland’s workers and peasants to rid themselves of landowners and the bourgeoisie. The reality, of course, was that Finnish workers and peasants had staunchly supported the “bourgeois” regime. After the war, Trotsky wrote that Stalin’s “authority has been dealt an irreparable blow.”²³¹

Stalin allowed the Helsinki government to retain the nonaggression pact with the USSR, rather than a mutual assistance pact of the kind imposed on the Balts.²³² He seems to have been keen to avoid, if not further international complications with the Western powers, at least their seizure of a foothold in Scandinavia under the pretext of “aiding” a victimized Finland. It also bears recalling that in tsarist Russia, Finland had had special status (and, for a time, its own constitution). Stalin was perhaps also chastened by the Finns’ military resistance. “We knew that Peter I fought for twenty-one years to cut off the whole of Finland from Sweden,” he would explain to the Soviet military the next month, perhaps in order to indicate why Finland was not being annexed.²³³

Small countries, in the unforgiving international system, had to be smart—and the smaller the country, the smarter it had to be, particularly if its geographical location attracted the close attention and calculations of the great powers.²³⁴ The Finnish government, morally in the right, had been geopolitically in the wrong. Back in 1938, the leaders of Czechoslovakia—diplomatically isolated but possessing an advanced army—had shown themselves unwilling to pay the price of war against Hitler for their independence. In 1939, the diplomatically isolated but under-armed Finns chose to fight, yet it was their neutrality, not their sovereignty, that had been at stake, a fact recognized by the hamstrung Finnish negotiator Paasikivi and Field Marshal Mannerheim and, belatedly, by Tanner and the rest. Hitler’s appeal on behalf of ethnic Germans abroad had been revealed as a lie, a mere pretext to swallow the whole Czechoslovak state, but Stalin’s security concerns for Leningrad, even if they evoked a history of Russian expansionism, were not a pretext.

Finland paid a heavy price for the avoidable war. Nearly 400,000 Finns (mostly small farmers)—upward of 12 percent of its population—were forced to evacuate the newly annexed Soviet territories for rump Finland, leaving homes and many possessions behind. Finland lost 11 percent of its land and perhaps 30 percent of its prewar economic assets. Beyond the significantly greater territory it was forced to relinquish, compared with what it would have lost in prewar political concessions, Finland suffered at least 26,662 killed and missing, 43,357 wounded, and 847 captured by the Soviets. The Finns had been adamant about not relinquishing the Mannerheim Line of defensive emplacements, but it was now lost. (“Even after it had been blasted and penetrated in many places,” observed Alexander Solodovnikov, who traveled by car in spring 1940 from Leningrad to set up a Russian-language theater in newly conquered Vyborg, “the ‘line’ amazed with its monstrous, agglomerated, ingenious pillboxes, bunkers, concrete blocks, and concealed traps.”)²³⁵ The Finns would end up losing their cherished neutrality, too (becoming aligned with Nazi Germany).

Great powers usually can expect to have considerable room to recover from even the most egregious mistakes, but that room, in the late 1930s and into 1940, had vastly narrowed. Thanks to the Finnish resistance, the 105-day Winter War proved even more costly to Stalin than to the Finns. The despot did obtain a more secure border for Leningrad, as well as security for the ocean port Murmansk, while the Red Army, including its command, did get valuable, albeit painful, combat experience.²³⁶ Still, the Soviets lost an astonishing 131,476 dead and missing; at least 264,908 more were wounded or fell to illness, including the frostbitten, who lost fingers, toes, ears. Total Soviet losses neared 400,000 casualties, out of perhaps 1 million men mobilized—almost 4,000 casualties per day.²³⁷ (Later, Stalingrad would produce around 3,300 per day.) Another 5,486 Red Army troops were captured, most of whom, upon returning home, would be sent to the Gulag for the crime of falling into enemy hands. Of course, the giant scale of losses was kept secret, but during a discussion of the war’s lessons, one Soviet general nonetheless snapped, “We have won enough ground to bury our dead.”²³⁸

The shocking Red Army failures of December 1939 overshadowed not just the impressive corrections of February 1940, but even the fact that, in the end, the Soviets had won the war decisively and exceeded their objectives.²³⁹ Foreign intelligence services had been knocking themselves out trying to gauge the strength of the gigantic Red Army, and now they believed they had the answer: it was impotent. They overlooked the special circumstances of roadless, marshy terrain and deep-winter combat, just as Stalin and his commanders had overlooked them at the outset. The German general staff wrote on New Year’s Eve 1939–40 that the Red Army was “in quantity a gigantic military instrument,” but “the Russian ‘mass’ is no match for an army with modern equipment and superior leadership.”²⁴⁰ Even after the Soviets had turned the tide, the Germans, as well as the British and the French, remained confirmed in their prejudice that the Soviet Union was a colossus of clay. On March 31, 1940, Hitler, in a closed speech in the Chancellery to his commanders, called the USSR a “tenacious adversary” but went on to say that “the Russian is inferior,” and the Soviet army “without leadership,” undermined by Jewish-Bolshevik lies.²⁴¹

Soviet military doctrine, in its most sophisticated versions, had long stressed aggressive counterattack, decentralized command, and organizational flexibility, but within such a rigidly hierarchical political despotism, only the first principle was realized in practice. In Finland, shocking chaos in the rear services had severely handicapped military operations, and hypercentralization and the inexperience of commanders meant they could not adapt or take initiative on the battlefield. Both the horrific casualty count and the immense expenditure of ordnance testified to the depth of the problems. But Timoshenko had managed to improve both coordination and flexibility, implementing combined attacks of air and armor, as well as continuous vertical and horizontal communications with superiors and neighboring staffs and services. At the same time, Stalin, relying on Mekhlis, had political indoctrination recalibrated to emphasize the discipline and traditions of the Imperial Russian Army. From late 1939 into 1940, the Soviet press published articles on the military genius of Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century generalissimo, as well as Great Russian nationalism, and transformed Finland into a “patriotic war.”²⁴²

The contribution of that notable shift, in the case of Finland, remains hard to gauge. The conscript soldiers—peasants from collectivized villages or workers from factory barracks—on their first trips abroad, with the mission of “liberating” the exploited Finnish people from “White Finns,” encountered the well-built, well-equipped homes of ordinary Finnish people. The Soviet lads, and especially their commanders, as in Poland in 1939, madly looted sewing machines, gramophones, bicycles, kitchen utensils, silk stockings, women’s dresses, shoes. That said, despite record-breaking frosts, horribly inadequate supplies, and incompetent commanders, Red Army morale had not cracked. Soviet conscripts and reservists often fought on even after having been encircled, entrenching their tanks as makeshift pillboxes.²⁴³ True, NKVD detachments blocked retreat, and even then there were desertions. But the Soviet troops’ failure to crush the Finns had aroused a widespread desire to defend their honor. On the front lines, Soviet colonels and captains, themselves conscripts, knew the Red Army could fight.

Among outsiders, only Finland’s field marshal Mannerheim—the former tsarist officer—grasped the truth about this contradictory beast. “In the higher ranks there were signs of a kind of inertia,” he observed, indicating that the Red Army had reproduced the shortcomings of the army under tsarism. “The Russians based their art of war on the weight of material, and were clumsy, ruthless, and extravagant. There was a striking absence of creative imagination where the fluctuations of the situation demanded quick decisions.” With equal perspicacity, again almost uniquely, he comprehended the Red Army’s immense brute power, a profligate yet determined fighting machine, one of the hinges of the twentieth century.²⁴⁴

FATHERLINESS

Stalin evidently admitted to Shaposhnikov that “concerning Finland you were right.”²⁴⁵ Such an admission of a mistake, even in private, was exceedingly rare for him. It was likely made possible by his respect for Shaposhnikov, a feeling that redounded to a Shaposhnikov protégé, Alexander Vasilevsky (b. 1895), who had graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1937 and joined the party the next year (when admission was reopened). Vasilevsky’s father was a priest; his mother, the daughter of a priest. In 1939, he had become a deputy chief of the general staff’s operations directorate and had assisted in preparing the Winter War plan of battle that Stalin did not use. In the first half of March 1940, after a long meeting in the Little Corner, Vasilevsky returned to staff headquarters to issue orders based upon the decisions. Suddenly, Poskryobyshev called to say that he was expected at the post-meeting supper at Stalin’s Kremlin apartment below the Little Corner. He rushed back and was seated next to Shaposhnikov.

Stalin pronounced one of the many toasts to Vasilevsky’s health, then unexpectedly asked why, after graduating from seminary, Vasilevsky had not become a priest. He answered that he had had no such intention. “At that, Stalin smiled through his mustaches and observed, ‘I see, I see, you had no such intention. Understandable. But Mikoyan and I did want to become priests, but for some reason they would not take us. Why, I do not understand to this day.’” After this playful gesture of solidarity, Stalin asked Vasilevsky why he did not help his father financially. “As far as I know, one of your brothers is a physician, another is an agronomist, a third is a military commander-aviator and a well-off person,” he remarked, underscoring his familiarity with Vasilevsky’s personnel file. “I think all of you could be helping your parents, and then the old man could long ago have broken with his church. He would not need the church in order to survive.” Vasilevsky had been scrupulously avoiding contact with his father; recently, when he got a letter from home, he had run straight to the party organization at the general staff to confess. Now, Vasilevsky recalled, “Stalin said that I should immediately reestablish contact with my parents and give them systematic assistance and inform the general staff party organization about the authorization to do so.”²⁴⁶