Stalin полностью

Initially, the People’s Government was established in Terijoki, the small village resort of summer houses on the Finnish side of the border where the rebel Kronstadt sailors had once obtained refuge.¹²⁵ At the outbreak of hostilities, the Finns had abandoned the settlement. Whether Kuusinen even went out to the site of his own government is unclear. He was received in the Little Corner on December 2. That day, Pravda carried a front-page story with photographs of Molotov and Kuusinen, along with Stalin, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov, signing a “treaty” between the USSR and the Finnish People’s Government, which agreed to all Soviet terms of territorial transfer: shifting the border westward on the Karelian Isthmus, thus granting 1,500 square miles of territory to the USSR; selling five islands in the Gulf of Finland; and selling the western end of the Rybachy Peninsula, in the far north near Petsamo.¹²⁶ Military basing rights on the Hanko Cape were granted in a “confidential protocol.” In exchange, the puppet government was awarded Soviet Karelia—not 2,120 square miles of its territory, as discussed during the negotiations with Finland, but the entire 27,000. A map of this new “People’s Finland” appeared in Pravda (December 3, 1939).

Here was one reason Stalin had not issued a formal declaration of war: the Soviet Union was not at war with Finland, but supporting that country’s “democratic forces” against the “fascist military clique” of the “White” Finnish government in Helsinki.¹²⁷ Stalin had Beria collect surviving Finns from the Gulag, including one of Kuusinen’s sons (from his first wife), Esa (b. 1906), who had been arrested in Karelia, contracted tuberculosis in Siberian camps, and was now named a government official.¹²⁸ Kuusinen “was at bottom a man of immense, rather cynical self-confidence,” his estranged second wife, Aino, recalled. “He had no practical knowledge and could never get on terms with ordinary Finnish workers and their families. . . . Throughout his life, the failure of the Communist rising in Finland in 1918 rankled like an open wound. . . . Kuusinen once told me himself that he dreamed of controlling Finland and, eventually, being ‘proconsul’ for the whole of Scandinavia; then, after the rest of Europe had surrendered to Communism, he would return to Moscow and be the éminence grise of the Soviet empire.”¹²⁹

MILITARY DILETTANTE

Hitler had never risen above the rank of corporal in the Great War, but Stalin had never served at all. He had not involved himself in the operational details of the summer 1939 border war at the Halha River (which had been the work of Stern and Zhukov). Nor had he micromanaged the fall 1939 invasion of eastern Poland (commanded by Semyon Timoshenko, of the Kiev military district, and Mikhail Kovalyov, of the Belorussian). The Winter War, as the Soviet invasion of Finland came to be known, proved to be Stalin’s first genuine test as a military figure since the Russian civil war. “The scattered episodes in Manchuria, at Lake Khasan or in Mongolia,” he later said, “were trifles [chepukha], not war, just episodes on a little patch, strictly limited.”¹³⁰ In fact, the 1939 border war victory against the Japanese, as well as the German-assisted “promenade” through Poland, had induced smugness in Moscow. The Finns, unlike the Poles, did not even have an air force or armor apart from some 1918 vintage tanks. They lacked wireless, too, forcing them to rely on field telephones and, when these inevitably became disrupted, on human runners. But it was the Soviets who turned out to be wholly unprepared for the war Stalin unleashed.

If the negotiations for the pact had been Molotov’s star turn, the Winter War should have been Voroshilov’s, but the war planning and the war itself were run out of Stalin’s office, on the high-frequency phone.¹³¹ Many top officials were kept in the dark, and if they had the naïveté to complain, Stalin would remind them, “When necessary, you, too, will be informed.”¹³² At a meeting of the Main Military Council, Shaposhnikov had submitted a battle plan calling for a massive invasion force attacking in a narrow-front assault to smash through the formidable Finnish defenses, in a campaign of several months. Stalin respected Boris Mikhailovich, as the despot deferentially addressed his chief of staff, a former tsarist staff officer who had served in that role from 1928 to 1931 and again since 1937. But Stalin dismissed his battle plan as unworthy of a great power. He had shifted the war planning to the Leningrad military district, as if it were a mere local affair of the northwest. The logistics had to be rushed. Worse, Meretskov, the commander there, bent to the despot, as well as to Leningrad party boss Zhdanov, when they insisted that Finnish resistance could be smashed in a mere twelve to fifteen days.¹³³