Stalin полностью

Vladimir Zenzinov, an émigré, arrived from Paris as a war correspondent on January 20, 1940, and eventually managed to get to the front, where he collected letters from home that were found on dead Red Army soldiers. “Corpses were found everywhere—one, two, whole groups,” wrote Zenzinov. “There were places where they lay in piles, one on top of the other, in the most horrific and incomprehensible poses.” The letters originated from widely distributed geographical regions, Leningrad to Vladivostok. Written by parents, siblings, sweethearts, wives, children, they were mostly personal, contained playful alliteration, and evinced anxiety about their loved ones’ possible wartime injury or death. They frequently ended by invoking God. They mentioned listening to the radio for morsels of information. They overflowed with complaints about red tape over payments to families whose sons had been conscripted, poor pay on collective farms, excessive taxation, and a dearth of available clothing or footwear. Still, they usually referred to the Finns as “fascists, “White Guardists,” or “agents of the English bourgeoisie” and urged the conscripts “to rally around our beloved father and friend Comrade Stalin,” “defend our sacred borders,” and “liberate the Finnish people.” Zenzinov concluded that “the whole Soviet population was sincerely convinced that the attacking side was Finland, set against the Soviet Union by the imperialist governments of England and France, and that the Soviet Union was only defending itself.”¹⁴²

Zenzinov perhaps underestimated people’s desire to ensure their letters got through. (They did not know that while just about every letter from the front was perlustrated and censored, not every letter from the rear was.) Be that as it may, hundreds of these handwritten letters convey a strong sense of inculcated vocabulary (“speaking Bolshevik”) and Soviet patriotism.

No such rallying around the flag occurred vis-à-vis the People’s Government, which ruled no Finnish people, being located where the country’s civilian population had largely been evacuated. With the repulsion of Meretskov’s numerous offensives, it acquired no new settlements. Its “personnel” remained in huts at the border village. “In Terijoki there is no government of Finland, and not a single one of Kuusinen’s ministers is to be found in Terijoki, nor have they been there,” a young reporter for Signal, the railroad newspaper, discovered and reported over the telephone to the editorial offices in Moscow. “This government exists on paper only, and our troops suffer immense losses.” This reportage never saw the light of day: the NKVD got wind of it.¹⁴³ Indeed, about the only operational work in Terijoki was that of the Leningrad branch NKVD, which had moved a field headquarters there and sent back reports about both the emptiness of surrounding villages and attacks by “bandit formations.”¹⁴⁴ Although Stalin’s People’s Government fiasco failed to rally Finns on the basis of supposed class antagonisms, it did stiffen that nation’s resolve to fight a war no longer about some islands in the gulf, but about Finland’s independent existence.¹⁴⁵

No foreign country recognized Stalin’s stooge regime, and its existence did nothing to alleviate the international perception that Moscow was the aggressor. The arguments that the Soviets had put forth over eastern Poland—that the area was really western Ukraine and western Belorussia, an annexation to “protect” national minorities—did not apply in Finland. The weak League of Nations, with strong British and especially French backing, pronounced the Soviet attack on Finland “illegal” and expelled the USSR on December 14, 1939. Only seven of fifteen Council members voted, violating the League’s covenant requiring a majority, and three of those had been added to the Council the day before the vote (South Africa, Bolivia, and Egypt). But the expulsion went through, and it stung.The Soviet Union was the only League member ever to suffer such an indignity.