Also on January 13, 1940, Soviet intelligence supplied Stalin with Russian translations of the unflattering internal reports on the Soviet-Finnish War sent to Berlin by the German ambassador in Helsinki.188 At least the intercepted reports showed that Germany was not going to assist Finland. But the British, in January 1940, had begun to discuss possible military assistance to the Finns.189 Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British imperial general staff, had sent an envoy to Mannerheim’s field headquarters, and on January 8, in a long conversation, the Finnish supreme commander indicated that he expected a renewed Soviet offensive but maintained that he could hold out until May. He sought British fighter planes, ammunition, artillery, and, crucially, 76.2-millimeter antiaircraft guns—then “maybe the wonder will happen that we should be victorious—we must be.” Mannerheim mentioned a 30,000-man foreign legion, but he seemed most intent on the Western powers themselves attacking Soviet oil fields. “Do you think you will make a move in the Caucasus?” he asked. “It should be easy.” He asserted that “the capture of Baku would be a deadly blow to Germany, as well as to Russia,” and urged a British expedition to seize Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, too. But Ironside took Mannerheim’s assertion that the Finns could last until May as a reason not to move expeditiously on his request for weaponry and Western action.190 Still, Beria sent a report to Stalin (January 13) that Britain would furnish Finland with 12 Bristol Blenheim bombers, to destroy the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway, and conduct demonstration raids over Leningrad and Moscow. Maisky was now reporting that the British were resolute.191
Stalin began to wonder whether he had been tricked.192 British sources, via the Soviet Union’s London station, had been relaying stories of Mannerheim’s prewar pessimism—but now those same sources were reporting his confidence. Had British secret services lured Stalin into a trap with disinformation? Intelligence that informed the Soviet battle plan had proved misguided.193 Churchill had told Maisky how he sympathized with a Soviet seizure of the Gulf of Finland—and now? “Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril Finland shows what free men can do,” he declared in a radio address on January 20, 1940. “The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.”194
A pig in a poke? Stalin became suspicious that his many agents in Britain—run by Anatoly Gorsky—were too good to be true, a suspicion that cast a shadow over the spectacular Cambridge Five. The despot turned to his spies in Paris, who reported that the French were contemplating air raids on Baku, which supplied 80 percent of Soviet aviation fuel, 90 percent of kerosene, and more than 90 percent of gasoline.195 The French were also said to be planning attacks on Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in the north, with the goal of eventually seizing Leningrad and installing a White Russian regime. This was the very nightmare scenario whose avoidance had motivated Stalin’s launch of the pressure on Finland in the first place. Stalin followed the Western machinations involving Turkey, a possible participant in a Western air assault on Baku. German intelligence began playing up the Western intervention plans, seeking to drive the wedge between France/Britain and the Soviet Union deeper.196 The Soviet high command issued a general order to open fire, without seeking further permission, on any foreign airplanes that crossed Soviet borders.197
On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved a sentencing list containing 457 prominent people; 346 were to be shot, including Yezhov, as well as the writer Isaac Babel, the journalist-propagandist Koltsov, and the dramaturge Meyerhold, three of the country’s long-standing brightest lights, each of whom Yezhov had implicated as spies.198 Four days later, when the regime conducted the annual commemoration of Lenin’s passing at the Bolshoi, Stalin made remarks to the inner circle. “Mayakovsky was the finest proletarian poet,” he stated. “Ten volumes of verse by Demyan Bedny are not worth that one poem of Mayakovsky’s. D. B. could never rise to such a height.”