Stalin полностью

Two of Stalin’s fiercest émigré critics had stood with him regarding Finland. Living in France, Paul Miliukov, the former leader of the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets), observed of the Winter War, “I feel pity for the Finns, but I am for a Vyborg province.”²³⁰ Trotsky, too, had supported the USSR in the clash with Finland, imagining, like the ideologue Zhdanov, that the Soviet invasion heralded the onset of a Finnish class-based civil war. Trotsky argued that, just as in Spain, it was right to be on the side of the left, although it was proving difficult for Finland’s workers and peasants to rid themselves of landowners and the bourgeoisie. The reality, of course, was that Finnish workers and peasants had staunchly supported the “bourgeois” regime. After the war, Trotsky wrote that Stalin’s “authority has been dealt an irreparable blow.”²³¹

Stalin allowed the Helsinki government to retain the nonaggression pact with the USSR, rather than a mutual assistance pact of the kind imposed on the Balts.²³² He seems to have been keen to avoid, if not further international complications with the Western powers, at least their seizure of a foothold in Scandinavia under the pretext of “aiding” a victimized Finland. It also bears recalling that in tsarist Russia, Finland had had special status (and, for a time, its own constitution). Stalin was perhaps also chastened by the Finns’ military resistance. “We knew that Peter I fought for twenty-one years to cut off the whole of Finland from Sweden,” he would explain to the Soviet military the next month, perhaps in order to indicate why Finland was not being annexed.²³³

Small countries, in the unforgiving international system, had to be smart—and the smaller the country, the smarter it had to be, particularly if its geographical location attracted the close attention and calculations of the great powers.²³⁴ The Finnish government, morally in the right, had been geopolitically in the wrong. Back in 1938, the leaders of Czechoslovakia—diplomatically isolated but possessing an advanced army—had shown themselves unwilling to pay the price of war against Hitler for their independence. In 1939, the diplomatically isolated but under-armed Finns chose to fight, yet it was their neutrality, not their sovereignty, that had been at stake, a fact recognized by the hamstrung Finnish negotiator Paasikivi and Field Marshal Mannerheim and, belatedly, by Tanner and the rest. Hitler’s appeal on behalf of ethnic Germans abroad had been revealed as a lie, a mere pretext to swallow the whole Czechoslovak state, but Stalin’s security concerns for Leningrad, even if they evoked a history of Russian expansionism, were not a pretext.

Finland paid a heavy price for the avoidable war. Nearly 400,000 Finns (mostly small farmers)—upward of 12 percent of its population—were forced to evacuate the newly annexed Soviet territories for rump Finland, leaving homes and many possessions behind. Finland lost 11 percent of its land and perhaps 30 percent of its prewar economic assets. Beyond the significantly greater territory it was forced to relinquish, compared with what it would have lost in prewar political concessions, Finland suffered at least 26,662 killed and missing, 43,357 wounded, and 847 captured by the Soviets. The Finns had been adamant about not relinquishing the Mannerheim Line of defensive emplacements, but it was now lost. (“Even after it had been blasted and penetrated in many places,” observed Alexander Solodovnikov, who traveled by car in spring 1940 from Leningrad to set up a Russian-language theater in newly conquered Vyborg, “the ‘line’ amazed with its monstrous, agglomerated, ingenious pillboxes, bunkers, concrete blocks, and concealed traps.”)²³⁵ The Finns would end up losing their cherished neutrality, too (becoming aligned with Nazi Germany).