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.