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,
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
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