Stalin полностью

Soviet liquidation of the Polish officers in captivity took place around the same time as a similar Nazi action across the border under Hans Frank, who, explaining his operation, stated, “I admit, utterly openly, that this will cause the deaths of thousands of Poles, above all from the leading stratum of the Polish intelligentsia.”²²¹ Soviet preparations for the executions might have commenced as early as January 1940. Through agents in Britain, the Soviets likely picked up on recent French whisperings to employ exiled Polish forces (“volunteers”) to attack Soviet positions in northern Finland, around Petsamo, a scenario that eventually could have had Polish army officers inside the USSR playing the role that the Czechoslovak Legion had played in 1918—namely, sparking a civil war.²²² But whatever the anxieties, the massacres ultimately flowed from a bottomless well of Soviet-Polish enmity.²²³ Families of the executed, who were deported to Kazakhstan, were told nothing; all too many would not survive their own ordeals. A handful of top Polish officers, such as General Władysław Anders, were kept alive, perhaps for future use; some others survived by offering their services to the NKVD. The Katyn Forest slaughter would prove to be not just another epochal Soviet state crime, but a strategic blunder.

All of this occurred in strictest secrecy. For the Soviet people, fairy tales persisted. A Member of the Government, with Gelovani in a cameo as Stalin, premiered on March 8, 1940. The film opens in spring 1930, when a poor peasant, Alexandra Sokolova (played by the radiant theater actress Vera Maretskaya), joins a collective farm and becomes its chairman, courageously coping with all the obstacles to collectivization: other villagers’ distrust, false accusations against her, bureaucratism, wrecking. The heroine is seen growing into her position, breaking free of her patriarchal husband in the name of the new life, speaking with authority in the name of the people, and eventually being elected a deputy of the new USSR Supreme Soviet—the strongest female character to emerge in Soviet cinema to date.²²⁴ The Soviet press was preoccupied for several days with celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the head of the actual government, Molotov (March 9, 1940), affording him the designation “very major figure.”²²⁵ On March 10, two months shy of his forty-ninth birthday, Mikhail Bulgakov succumbed to nephrosclerosis, an inherited kidney disorder.²²⁶ The Master and Margarita and many of his other works remained unpublished.

REVELATION

On March 12, the Finnish government, reeling from Timoshenko’s furious Wall of Fire that had reduced Viipuri, now renamed Vyborg, to a bombed-out hulk and opened the road to Helsinki, capitulated. The NKVD reported that Finland appeared to be on the verge of total military collapse. Stalin refrained from trying to overrun the country entirely (which had not been his intention in the first place). He did not deign to participate in the numerous sessions required to hammer out the details of Helsinki’s acceptance of defeat. Molotov, reversing the original offer to cede a large part of Soviet Karelia, now claimed a chunk of Finnish Karelia, plus the Karelian Isthmus right through to Vyborg—well beyond prewar proposals. This was more territory than the Finns had lost in the fighting. When they objected, Molotov snapped, “Any other great power in our position would demand war reparations or all of Finland.” When the Finns pointed out that in 1721, Peter the Great had paid compensation for the expansion of Russia’s Baltic frontier, Molotov barked, “Write a letter to Peter the Great—if he orders it, we will pay compensation.”²²⁷

The consequences of Finland’s civilian leaders’ prewar refusal to cut a deal struck the country like a punch in the face.²²⁸ “The terms of the peace are onerous for us,” stated Tanner, a participant in the failed negotiations, “but the government is happy that the agreement does not limit Finland’s sovereignty and independence, and that the program of Kuusinen’s government has been abandoned.”²²⁹ Flags in Helsinki flew at half-mast, newspapers appeared with black borders, and the radio played funeral dirges.