Stalin полностью

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