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.