Even as Soviet bombers rained explosives and leaflets on Helsinki, the Finnish cabinet did not comprehend that full-scale war had been unleashed.112 Somehow, Stalin’s open military mobilization had come across as no more credible than his diplomatic concessions.113 The banker-diplomat Paasikivi, writing in his diary on the day the war began, despaired, “We have allowed our country to slide into war with the giant Soviet Union although . . . 1) Nobody has promised us any help. 2) The Soviet Union has its hands free.”114 On December 1, 1939, Beria ordered Gulag camps to prepare for 26,500 anticipated POWs.115
PEOPLE’S FINLAND
Defied by Helsinki, Stalin became determined to get a friendly government. Back on November 10, 1939, he had summoned Otto Kuusinen, the son of a tailor and a top official in the Comintern, to the Little Corner.116 Kuusinen (b. 1881) had been a participant in the “German October” Communist putsch fiasco in 1923. He had gone on to betray Zinoviev, the nominal Comintern chairman, running to Stalin behind his back. Kuusinen ended up being the only survivor of the Finnish party’s Central Committee to reside in the Soviet Union; all the rest had been shot or incarcerated in the Gulag. On November 13—the day the Finnish negotiators departed Moscow—Kuusinen had sent a cryptic summons to Arvo “Poika” (Boy) Tuominen (b. 1894), the general secretary of the Finnish Communist party and the last survivor of Lenin’s Comintern presidium, who was in the safety of Swedish exile. Tuominen had sat in Finnish prisons for the better part of a decade, dreaming of the day when “the workers” would come to power in Finland. In 1933, he had been allowed to leave for Moscow. In 1938, he had somehow managed to get himself and his wife out, on assignment to Sweden. “Stalin could be a convivial companion in intimate, friendly circles,” he recalled of his occasional audiences, adding that the Soviet leader “undeniably was a highly gifted and above all a highly energetic man.”117 Now Tuominen declined multiple summonses sent via courier to return to Moscow, citing ill health.118
Stalin named Kuusinen, without Tuominen, to lead a puppet regime, called the Finnish Democratic Republic or “People’s Government,” whose existence was announced as having been discovered via a Soviet-intercepted radio broadcast on the day of the outbreak of war, as if the new “government” had formed on its own.119 “It is necessary,” exhorted the “intercepted” proclamation, published in
Molotov had forewarned German ambassador Schulenburg that “it is not excluded that there will be the formation of a Finnish government friendly to the Soviet Union, as well as to Germany,” adding that it would be not a “Soviet government but a democratic republic type. No one will create soviets there.”122 This posture was repeated in the confidential explanation to Communist parties around the world, as well as in Kuusinen’s public appeal, which declared his government “provisional,” until a newly elected Finnish diet could meet.123 All in all, it must have seemed like a brilliant strategy: preempt German or British use of Finland for aggression against the USSR; shift international borders to enhance Soviet security; and move to install a pro-Soviet regime, keeping open a future full Sovietization. The ideologue Zhdanov, citing Soviet intelligence, had insisted that the workers and peasants of Finland, who constituted the bulk of the nation’s army, were ready to welcome Soviet forces. Even Voroshilov predicted that “the working masses of Finland . . . are threatening to mete out justice on those who pursue a policy hostile to the Soviet Union.” After all, had not the Ukrainians and Belorussians of eastern Poland, in early fall 1939, greeted the Red Army as “liberators” in joyous meetings?124