Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

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.

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

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

Vasily Stalin, in the latter half of March 1940, completed his two-year course of study at the military aviation school near Sevastopol with marks of “excellent,” according to a report sent to Stalin. He received the rank of air force lieutenant.²⁴⁷ Later that year, he would marry Galina Burdonskaya, a student of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute, also nineteen years old, who lived in a communal apartment. Stalin would not be informed until after the wedding. “You’re married; so be it,” he would write to Vasily in red pencil. “I pity her, marrying such a fool.”²⁴⁸

A RECKONING

A harsh internal Soviet reckoning of the Winter War—which would make no mention of Stalin’s errors or his prior murderous rampages—commenced on March 26–28, 1940, at a Central Committee plenum, two weeks after hostilities ended. Molotov reported on the settlement with Finland, prompting Litvinov to criticize the course of foreign policy since his dismissal, while predicting that Germany would attack the Soviet Union. Molotov tried, and failed, to cut Litvinov off; Stalin remained silent.²⁴⁹ Voroshilov gave an unusually self-critical opening report and offered to resign.²⁵⁰ Mekhlis was one of those who piled on (hearsay accounts have Mekhlis complaining that “Voroshilov cannot stand Mekhlis,” which was true, and likely reflected how every officer in the room felt).²⁵¹ But Stalin upbraided his attack dog for “a hysterical speech,” called Mekhlis “a good man, a hard worker, but unsuitable for army leadership,” and praised Voroshilov for conceding his errors. “It does not happen often around here that a people’s commissar speaks so openly about his own shortcomings.”²⁵²

Stalin, in the discussion, brushed off the circumstance that the war had been launched in winter. “We are a northern country,” he said, and “if our military leaders had studied the history of the Russian army and followed the fine traditions of the Russian army, then they would know that all of our most impressive victories were won in winter.” He mentioned Alexander Nevsky against the Swedes on the ice, Peter the Great against the Swedes and Charles XII on the Baltic, Alexander I’s conquest of Finland from Sweden, and Kutuzov’s victory over Napoleon.²⁵³ Stalin also criticized the army’s use of biscuits instead of dried bread toasts (sukhari), stating that in Finnish frosts, the biscuits froze and became inedible. “Kutuzov, a real count, visited the soldiers to see what they were eating, but the ‘self-made count’ Kulik did not do that. (General laughter.)” Despite this dig at Kulik, Stalin praised the artillery. “Now we know the secret of how to smash a fortified defense line. We are the only country that knows this secret. The answer is that first you need to crush the enemy physically and morally with heavy artillery, and after that send in the infantry.” Stalin added, “The rank and file constitute superb material, but the commanders turned out not to be on the heights. . . . The goal is to improve the commanding corps and then our army will be the best in the world.”²⁵⁴

On the final day of the plenum, Ribbentrop coincidentally instructed Schulenburg, in Moscow, to revive the invitation of a reciprocal trip by Molotov to Berlin. “It goes without saying that the invitation is not to be confined to Herr Molotov,” the Nazi foreign minister telegrammed. “It would suit our own needs better, as well as our really ever closer relations with Russia, if Herr Stalin himself came to Berlin. The Führer would not only be particularly happy to welcome Stalin in Berlin, but he would also see to it that he would get a reception commensurate with his position and importance, and he would extend to him all the honors that the occasion demanded.” Schulenburg replied that he felt confident Molotov would fulfill his obligation to reciprocate, albeit not in the current circumstances, for it would undermine the appearance of Soviet neutrality and potentially risk inviting a Western declaration of war against the USSR.²⁵⁵ Molotov, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet on March 29, 1940, venomously denounced Britain and France, insisting yet again that the Soviet Union would never become a “weapon of the Anglo-French imperialists in their struggle for world hegemony.” He said that a British buildup in the Near East might entail “objectives antagonistic toward the Soviet Union.”²⁵⁶

All the while, Soviet merchants were still shopping in Berlin. Also on March 29, Ivan Tevosyan, a German-speaking ethnic Armenian from Karabakh, met Göring. The corpulent Luftwaffe head promised shipments of the contracted Junkers 88 airplane in April and May, noting that “there has never been an instance in which I, Göring, did not keep my word,” and adding that “the interests of both countries demand that Germany and the Soviet Union are together. This is the Führer’s opinion. He has decided this firmly and irreversibly. . . . This wish of Hitler is known to the duce; England and France know about it.” Göring further observed that “he personally had told the Finns repeatedly that it was senseless for a small state to fight with such a large country and had recommended accepting the USSR’s conditions.” Tevosyan—who had barely escaped Beria’s clutches as an alleged “German spy”—underscored the friendly character of bilateral relations, “reconfirmed in the February 11, 1940, economic agreement,” but he pointed out that although the Soviets had shipped everything required of them, “Germany so far has not made a single shipment to the USSR, not one rivet.” Göring interrupted to express his regrets at this news of German delays. “I give you my word, I am the guarantee.”²⁵⁷

On March 31, a Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was established through the merger of Soviet Karelia and territories annexed from Finland (part of the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia). The KFSSR became the twelfth Union republic, but the only one whose titular nationality, ethnic Finns, made up a minority of its inhabitants (around one quarter). Stalin soon named Kuusinen the KFSSR’s head of state.²⁵⁸

Back in Moscow, at a follow-up military conference on the Winter War (April 14–17), Stalin scapegoated his head of military intelligence, Proskurov.²⁵⁹ In the war’s run-up, Soviet military intelligence had produced a photo-and-sketch album of the Mannerheim Line (possibly based on maps delivered by the Germans after the 1939 Pact signing). This album lay on Meretskov’s desk.²⁶⁰ True, there had been subsequent modernization of the defense belt. But Meretskov misunderstood or ignored the implications of the fortifications for his battle plan.²⁶¹ That said, extreme hypersecrecy seems to have kept some centrally held intelligence from being shared with the Leningrad military district, to which Stalin had handed the war effort.²⁶² More broadly, one young military intelligence officer on the front, who later defected, observed, plausibly, that “the maps of Finland supplied to us by military intelligence were extremely poor, an indication of sloppy work. . . . Ironically, we soon found that the maps of that part of the Soviet Union were just as poor.”²⁶³ Proskurov, in the discussion at the military conference, pushed back against the criticisms leveled by Stalin, Mekhlis, and Meretskov, whose own head was on the line.²⁶⁴ Meretskov complained that the army command had no access to foreign newspapers, with their wealth of information about the course of military matters. “An intolerable situation,” Stalin interjected. Proskurov pointed out that information from foreign newspapers was translated into Russian, just not circulated. “Why?” Stalin asked. Proskurov: “It contains slander against the Red Army.”²⁶⁵

Proskurov, a hero aviator, took the fall (and, later, a bullet to the neck).²⁶⁶ Stalin did criticize himself, too, albeit indirectly. “We expected to bag an easy win,” he stated (April 17, 1940). “We were terribly spoiled by the Polish campaign.”²⁶⁷ It was the royal “we.” His main theme was that the Russian civil war “had not been a real war, because there was no artillery, aviation, tanks, and mortars used.” One more heroic cavalry charge was not going to drive off tanks and artillery. “What hindered our commanding staff from conducting the Finnish war in a new way—not by the civil war style, but in a new way?” Stalin asked rhetorically. “What hindered us, in my view, was a cult of the traditions and experience of the civil war. How did we evaluate commanders: ‘Did you take part in the civil war?’ ‘No, you did not take part—then get lost.’ ‘That one, did he take part?’ ‘He took part—let’s appoint him.’” Stalin urged everyone—really, himself—“to renounce the cult of the civil war, which only reinforces our backwardness.”²⁶⁸

Stalin’s closest civil war crony, Voroshilov, suffered guilt, anger, and anguish over the regime’s massacre of so many innocent officers in the Red Army and his complicity therein. One night at the Near Dacha, during the Finnish events, the despot and his defense commissar went at it. They all must have been even drunker than usual. Stalin “was in a white-hot rage and berated Voroshilov severely,” Khrushchev recalled. “He got irate, jumped up, and [verbally] went after Voroshilov. Voroshilov also blew up, got red in the face, rose, and hurled Stalin’s accusation back in his face. ‘You’re to blame in this! You annihilated the military cadres.’” True enough, although Voroshilov had signed 185 extant execution lists—fourth behind Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich. After Stalin answered him in kind, “Voroshilov picked up a platter with a roast suckling pig on it and smashed it on the table.”²⁶⁹ That pig, in a way, was plucky little Finland—the “pig rooting around in the Soviet garden,” in the dismissive phrase used on the eve of the war—but now it was also Voroshilov’s military career and, by association, Stalin’s military dilettantism.

LEARNING

With its strong incentives for lying and an absence of institutionalized consultation or corrective mechanisms, despotism is particularly prone to strategic blunders, and yet despotic systems—and despots—can learn. The Winter War launched Stalin’s belated military reeducation, which was a long time coming.²⁷⁰ Prior to the Finnish experience, the Spanish civil war had delivered valuable firsthand experience in sabotage operations behind enemy lines, had battle-tested Soviet weapons systems, and had enabled study of Nazi Germany’s arsenal. The initiative to collect this valuable information was taken by Soviet military men whom Stalin then mostly murdered, but the data and analyses remained for their successors. Case studies of individual battles in Spain became available for study at Soviet military schools, in order to assimilate the tactical and operational lessons for artillery, tanks, airplanes, navy, and combined operations, much of which was published in the army newspaper, Red Star, for the broadest possible audience. Voroshilov and his aides selected key material on Spain to present to Stalin.²⁷¹

Some key lessons that had been drawn from Spain were blatantly misguided. Kulik, for example, had concluded that the use of large mechanized tank units had turned out to be wrongheaded, for in Spain the infantry had not been able to keep pace with the tanks.²⁷² He was hardly alone in this misreading, but with Tukhachevsky and others murdered, Kulik’s misread had gone largely uncontested, and Stalin had approved the Red Army’s dismantling of stand-alone mechanized tank units. Lessons from the border war with Japan were distilled by Zhukov, who was holed up in Ulan Bator. His long report labeled the incompetent commander he had relieved a “criminal” and underlined problems arising from poor battlefield communications and inadequate intelligence, but overall, he called the engagement “a victory which, in our view, should be carefully studied by all commanders.” This document was completed only in November 1939, not in time for the Winter War planning.²⁷³ But Zhukov and Stern had improvised back into existence stand-alone mechanized units and demonstrated, in practice, the devastating effectiveness of massive application of tanks and aircraft. Now, after Finland, these units would make a belated comeback. Nonetheless, in front of the full military during discussion of Finland in April 1940, Stalin belittled the brilliant 1939 victory in the border war with Japan.²⁷⁴

Development of military technology involves strategic decisions concerning manufacturing capabilities and spare parts availability, cost, ease of use and repair by soldiers, and, of course, effectiveness in combat, all decisions that take time to unfold. In the meantime, the enemy’s technology can improve.²⁷⁵ The consequences of mistakes can be immense. Kulik would soon block the placement of the advanced F-34 guns on the T-34 tank, which would be launched into mass production in fall 1940, largely because the superior gun was not his initiative.²⁷⁶

One hard Spanish lesson that the Soviets had learned was the squandering of their initial aviation advantage. The Soviets were winning the quantitative arms race with Nazi Germany, producing 4,270 airplanes in 1936 (to Germany’s 5,112), 6,039 in 1937 (to Germany’s 5,606), 7,727 in 1938 (to 5,235), and 10,362 in 1939 (to 8,295).²⁷⁷ But German quality had improved more significantly. Germany had opened a gap with its upgraded Heinkel bomber (He-111), which was capable of carrying 3,000 pounds of bombs, and its Messerschmitt fighter (Me-109), which had a range of 400 miles, a high rate of climb, a bulletproof fuel tank, and a top speed of 350 miles per hour, and had shown its deadliness at Guernica.²⁷⁸ The belated Soviet responses—Yak-1, Yak-7, MiG-3, and LaGG-3—finally appeared in 1940, but only in experimental production.

The despot summoned the thirty-six-year-old aviation commissar, Shakhurin, and his deputy, the thirty-three-year-old Yakovlev (the designer of the “Yak”), to the Little Corner, and they arrived in the middle of a large gathering. Without asking them to sit, Stalin began to read aloud from a letter written by an airplane designer who complained that he had a brilliant idea for a new killer plane but that the deputy commissar would not brook a rival and was blocking the innovative design, forcing the letter writer to appeal directly to “the Central Committee.” Silence ensued. Yakovlev responded that the designer had never actually approached him. (Shakhurin did not know anything about the proposed plane.) “Of course, he should first of all have spoken with both of you,” Stalin allowed. “Not speaking with you, and writing a complaint about you, is not the way. I don’t know about this proposal—maybe it’s a good airplane, maybe it’s a bad one—but the promised specs are alluring.” Stalin then asked how much it would cost. They answered, “8 to 9 million [rubles].” Stalin ordered it built, adding, “I ask you not to go after this designer for writing the letter. . . . For you it is unpleasant, probably, that such letters are written. But I am pleased. By the way, it is not the first letter.” As Yakovlev neared the exit to the Little Corner, Stalin called out. “Do not persecute the designer for writing the complaint; let him build the plane. We shall risk the millions; I shall take the sin on my soul.” The plane was duly built. It crashed on its maiden flight, taking with it one of the country’s best experimental pilots.²⁷⁹

All the while, significant interruptions were occurring in German deliveries of contracted military weapons as called for in the new commercial agreement. Stalin began demanding a new short-term trade agreement with Germany to ensure compliance. Mikoyan, in mid-April 1940, complained to his German interlocutors that he could “no longer afford to make a fool of himself, in practice conducting a bilateral exchange of goods but unilaterally delivering goods to Germany.” Stalin had been retaliating for the German shortfall: out of a contractual 1 million tons of grain for Germany, fewer than 150,000 had been delivered.²⁸⁰ Soviet oil deliveries had barely reached 100,000 tons, just one ninth of the contractual amount and less than 15 percent of German stocks.²⁸¹ But Romania was supplying huge multiples of that in oil, while Swedish iron ore shipments dwarfed Soviet supplies to Germany. The major Soviet contribution would come in feed grain and legumes. The original 1 million tons of grain would be raised to 1.5 million, and the Germans soon sought yet another 1 million.²⁸² In the face of Germany’s nearly insatiable demand, Stalin raised prices.

RED ARMY RESURRECTION

At the conclusion of the Finnish war military reckoning, on April 17, 1940, Stalin formalized the appointments of three new deputy heads of the Council of People’s Commissars: Mikhail Pervukhin (b. 1904), the chief engineer and then director of the Moscow Energy utility, who had rocketed to first deputy commissar of heavy industry in 1938; Alexei Kosygin, who had been a shop foreman on a factory floor as late as 1937 before becoming textile industry commissar in 1939; and Vyacheslav Malyshev, a locomotive designer and the recently named commissar of heavy machine building. They joined Molotov’s six other deputies: Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Nikolai Bulganin (b. 1895, chairman of the state bank), Nikolai Voznesensky (b. 1903, head of state planning), Vyshinsky, and Rozaliya Zemlyachka. The latter was an old revolutionary terrorist (b. 1876), but otherwise these were predominantly economic managers.

Notwithstanding these promotions, the terror continued to cast its shadow. In May 1940, no annual reception took place at the Kremlin for the young graduates of military academies, where arrests and executions during the terror had damaged the level of instruction. On May 4 and 5, Stalin, the immediate retinue, and surviving military elite were gathered in the form of a commission of the Main Military Council to codify the lessons from Finland.²⁸³ No one on that commission, or at the various meetings with Stalin present, blamed the tough going in Finland on the terror, but the thought was on people’s minds. At a separate May 1940 meeting on military ideology, Dmitry Pavlov, a Spanish civil war veteran and high-ranking tank commander in the Finnish war, stated, “We had so many enemies of the people that I doubt that all of them could have been enemies.” He added, “Here it is necessary to say that the operations of 1937–38, before Beria arrived, so compromised us that, in my opinion, we would [otherwise] have easily had our way with an adversary like the Finns.”²⁸⁴

Military personnel changes were the most consequential since 1925. On May 7, 1940, Stalin named Timoshenko defense commissar and kicked Voroshilov “upstairs” to the post of deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars—making him the tenth.²⁸⁵ The despot also promoted Timoshenko to the rank of marshal. Stalin had always been taken by Voroshilov’s gifted sociability and doglike loyalty, insurance against a Bonapartist coup, but the price of his military shortcomings had become too high and the despot had hit upon a replacement. The peasant boy Timoshenko had won Stalin’s trust in a way that the brilliant aristocrat’s son Mikhail Tukhachevsky never could.²⁸⁶ Returning the number of marshals to five, Stalin also promoted Shaposhnikov and the dense Kulik.²⁸⁷ Two days before, Stalin had colluded with Beria to have Kulik’s beautiful Jewish second wife, Kira Simonich, kidnapped. The despot then pretended he had no idea where she might be, advising Kulik to remarry and forget the “nympho female spy.” She was the daughter of the former okhranka chief in Helsinki who had been executed by the Cheka in 1919; her first husband had been a NEPman with foreign connections; her two brothers, one of whom had been an officer for the Whites, were arrested for espionage; her mother left for Italy in 1934. Nonetheless, Kulik had refused Voroshilov’s entreaties to divorce the fetching Kira.²⁸⁸ Such compromising associations would have been more than enough to bury any Red Army officer; Kulik, in addition, had been a Socialist Revolutionary, not a Bolshevik, before the October Revolution. He supplied a steady stream of denunciations on the other military men.

Two of the five marshals (Voroshilov and Budyonny) were civil-war-era cavalrymen who defended the role of horse-riding troops deep into the era of tanks and planes. The strategically literate Shaposhnikov—the highest-ranking former tsarist officer still around—had not been able to block the wrongheaded breakup of mechanized divisions, but he had closely advised Stalin on the military operations to recover the old tsarist borders.²⁸⁹ Nevertheless, the despot soon replaced him as chief of staff with, of all people, the Finnish-war failure Meretskov.²⁹⁰

The big story was Timoshenko: the defense of the socialist motherland now rested upon his shoulders. On May 7, 1940, at a celebration of Tchaikovsky’s centenary, Timoshenko appeared in the imperial box at the Bolshoi in a threesome with Stalin and Molotov—a Kremlinological signal to the elite, whose whispers could be counted on to spread word of the coronation. With the transfer of the defense portfolio, a chastened Stalin also allowed Timoshenko to conduct a genuine investigation into the state of the Red Army.²⁹¹ He sent Timoshenko to inspect key Soviet military districts in person. The despot and his new defense commissar forced through sweeping reforms, including greater discipline and genuine basic training.²⁹² Military production, already immense, was savagely ramped up, including the mass manufacture of machine guns, which Stalin’s idiot cronies had dismissed but the Finns had put to devastating use. Mikoyan negotiated new defense-related trade pacts with more than a dozen countries, which forced still deeper shortages on the Soviet populace in order to free up resources for export.²⁹³ Timoshenko oversaw a hasty expansion of officer training: in 1940, the Soviet Union counted eighteen military academies, plus eight military departments at various civilian universities, as well as 214 schools (uchilishche) for the army and six for the navy. Training courses lasted from forty-five to ninety days. The defense commissar also rushed to extend rail lines and build airports—a target of 950 by the end of 1941, meaning more than 300 new ones.²⁹⁴

Stalin approved the reintroduction of the ranks of admiral and general on May 7, 1940, as well. Meretskov would be among those promoted to full general, while naval commissar Kuznetsov became a new admiral. “Stalin by that point did not entertain objections,” Kuznetsov recalled. “A kind of thick cloud had formed around him of bootlickers and obsequious types who blocked the necessary people from accessing him. For us, young people raised up by the ‘unquiet’ 1937–38 period and striving out of inexperience to ‘develop our own views,’ we quickly learned that our part was to listen more and speak less.” Still, Kuznetsov noted that “back then I bowed before Stalin’s authority, not doubting anything that emerged from him.”²⁹⁵

There were some 1,000 senior officer promotions altogether. Zhukov, who had remained in Mongolia and missed the Finnish campaign, was among those elevated. Voroshilov recalled him from Ulan Bator, and Stalin summoned him to the Little Corner. “I had never met Stalin before and I went to the meeting very agitated,” Zhukov recalled. “Greeting me, Stalin, puffing his pipe, immediately asked, ‘How do you assess the Japanese army?’” Zhukov gave a detailed answer, after which Stalin inquired about the performance of Soviet troops and the Soviet commanders Kulik, Dmitry Pavlov, and Nikolai Voronov. Zhukov claimed he had praised the latter two, but not Kulik. After further discussion, Stalin said, “Now you have combat experience. Take over the Kiev military district”—which Timoshenko was relinquishing—“and use your experience in the training of the troops.” Zhukov returned to the Hotel Moskva but could not fall asleep. “Stalin’s external appearance, his soft voice, his concreteness and depth of thinking, his attentiveness in listening to the report, impressed me greatly.”²⁹⁶

Stalin also authorized Beria to release more than ten thousand Red Army officers from the Gulag.²⁹⁷ Colonel Konstanty Rokossowski, who had been arrested as a Polish spy, had been released on March 22, 1940, without explanation, after thirty months in confinement. He had served under Timoshenko back in the Volga military district. Rokossowski, aged forty-four, had refused to sign confessions to crimes he had not committed, but his toes had been smashed to bits with a hammer and nine of his teeth knocked out.²⁹⁸ He was promoted to general. The regime feared its own returning soldiers who had seen the capitalist world. The Finnish general staff had organized an occasional newspaper for Soviet POWs. Under the rubric “Truth is dearer than everything on earth,” the first issue stated, “We consider that your main misfortune and the misfortune of the entire Russian people consists in the fact that you do not at all know the truth about the life that surrounds you. Your authorities kept you isolated from the whole world and told you only what they thought you needed to know. Fate had it that by falling into captivity in a free country, you got the chance to know the truth about how other nations live. . . . You will learn the truth and will be able to compare your life with the life of other countries.”²⁹⁹

• • •

STALIN EMERGED from the war he launched against Finland with both a crushing victory and a severely impaired military reputation, emboldening the country’s potential enemies, maybe even more than he had with his executions of his own military. He also undermined further the Soviet Union’s international standing as a supposed bulwark of peace. “My anti-Communism, half suppressed by my friendships and the need for Soviet support against the Third Reich, burst forth,” noted the French intellectual Raymond Aron of the fall of 1939. “Those who did not denounce Stalin and the German-Soviet pact became unbearable for me.”³⁰⁰ In Philadelphia on November 17, 1939, Professor Carlton Hayes, of Columbia University, noted the convergence of German, Italian, and Soviet “force against Czechs and Albanians, Poles and Finns.”³⁰¹ Hayes spoke at the first academic conference devoted to the concept of “totalitarianism,” which would provide a cudgel for principled opponents of the Soviet regime, both on the right and on the left.³⁰² On April 25, 1940, Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Marxist luminary and author of Finance Capital (1910), published an essay in the Menshevik émigré paper in Paris, titled “State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy?” He lent his authority among socialists to the view that in the Soviet Union, as in Germany and Italy, politics determined economics, and that the Bolsheviks had “created the first totalitarian state, even before the name was invented.”³⁰³

The Red Army, in 1940, would acquire five times as many weapons as it had as recently as 1935.³⁰⁴ Stalin also appeared to have caught a stupendous break: on May 10, 1940, Hitler attacked the Low Countries and France. The despot could scarcely have hoped for more.³⁰⁵ Previously, during what now, in retrospect, became the First World War, the Russian general staff had shuddered at the thought that a quick German rout of the French would lead to a separate peace on the western front, which in turn would give Germany a completely free hand against Russia in the east.³⁰⁶ But their fears were misplaced: the fighting had lasted four stalemated years. Surely France, assisted again by Britain, even with the Soviet Union on the sidelines, could again stalemate Germany?³⁰⁷ Like the British, Stalin seemed to have a high opinion of French military capabilities.³⁰⁸ With a presumed protracted war in the west, he seemed set to gain all the time needed to correct his mistakes, and force-modernize the massive Red Army.