Stalin полностью

Pravda’s birthday issue also featured some of the congratulations sent from each and every factory and farm, and from around the world. The next day (December 22), the Academy of Sciences made Stalin an “honorary member,” despite his lack of a degree. Pravda carried a photograph depicting a benevolent Stalin receiving bouquets from women and children of the various Soviet nationalities. Adolf Hitler, too, sent December 1939 birthday greetings—which were printed on Pravda’s front page: “On the day of your 60th birthday I ask that you receive my sincerest congratulations. I offer my best wishes, I wish good health to you personally and a happy future to all the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.”

Stalin graciously replied to the Führer: “I ask that you accept my gratitude for the congratulations and my thanks for your kind wishes in connection with the peoples of the Soviet Union.”¹⁷⁴ There were no birthday greetings from the leaders of Britain or France. But Time magazine named Stalin Man of the Year for 1939, contrasting him favorably with the warmongers Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, as well as with Roosevelt. (Time had named Hitler Man of the Year in 1938.) “Stalin’s actions in 1939,” the magazine wrote, “were positive, surprising, world-shattering.”¹⁷⁵

COURSE CORRECTION

Back in Finland, as Finnish reservists, often boys barely old enough to shave, starved and froze but fought on against vastly superior Red Army numbers, Soviet corpses piled up. “The Russians,” a photographer for America’s Life magazine observed, “lay lonely and twisted in their heavy trench coats and formless felt boots, their faces yellowed, eyelashes white with a fringe of frost. Across the ice, the forest was strewn with weapons and pictures and letters. . . . Here were the bodies of dead tanks with blown treads, dead carts, dead horses and dead men, blocking the road and defiling the snow.”¹⁷⁶ Voroshilov urged that Meretskov and the officers under his command be replaced and court-martialed as “cowards and laggards (there are also swine).”¹⁷⁷ Beria, not to be outdone, recommended arrests, too.¹⁷⁸ Stalin did not indulge them. But he did direct the rabid Mekhlis to travel back to Finland and, on December 29, signed an order, along with Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov, for Soviet armies to adopt a defensive posture and guard against encirclement by the Finns. It admonished commanders—himself, actually—that “the war with Finland is a serious war, distinctly different from our autumn campaign in Poland.”¹⁷⁹

Alarmingly, Soviet military intelligence reported (December 20, 24, 28, 29) that Romania was intensively readying for war against the USSR and preparing concentration camps for people sympathetic to the USSR. Soviet official circles worried that Turkey could be enticed into war against the USSR as well.¹⁸⁰ A piece of uplifting news had been delivered by the Soviet agent Stöbe, who reported from Berlin, based upon information from Scheliha, that Hitler was intending “a major western offensive in 1940. At one meeting, a plan was outlined: first the seizure of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, then a strike against Britain. Among the military brass, there is opposition on this question.” When asked about the USSR’s position, Hitler was said to have responded that “the USSR would be occupied by Finland.”¹⁸¹

On December 28, Stalin finally convoked the Main Military Council, which subjected the failed battle plan of Meretskov to withering criticism. When Stalin asked who among those assembled would be willing to take over, Timoshenko, the ambitious commander of the Kiev military district, volunteered, on the condition that he could alter the battle plan back to what Shaposhnikov and the general staff had proposed. On December 31, 1939, Stalin had Shaposhnikov awarded the Order of Lenin, and seven days later he summoned Zhdanov and Meretskov to the Little Corner. “The whole world is watching us,” the despot reproached Meretskov. “The authority of the Red Army is the guarantor of the security of the USSR. If we get stuck in the face of such a weak opponent, that will arouse the anti-Soviet forces of imperialist circles.”¹⁸² On January 7, 1940, the despot had Timoshenko formally appointed to “assist” Meretskov, ending the idiotic posture that the war was some local affair of the Leningrad military district.¹⁸³