Stalin полностью

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.