Russia at war 1941-1945

towards Viborg [Viipuri in Finnish (see map).]—was to be ceded to the Soviet Union. In return, Finland received large stretches of Karelia, including the whole Olonetz area, east of Lake Ladoga.

It is more than doubtful whether these terms did indeed impress the Finns by their show of "generosity". Be that as it may, the clause stipulating that the ratification papers were to be "exchanged" at Helsinki between the Russians and Kuusinen was quite another matter. It suggested that the "liberation" of Finland by the Red Army, accompanied by the Terijoki Government, would only be a matter of a few days, at most of weeks.

Both militarily and politically, Stalin's and Molotov's miscalculations could not have been worse. The "Terijoki Government" was set up two or three days after Molotov had explicitly declared his continued recognition of the Finnish Government at Helsinki, and, except for the capture of Petsamo in the far north in the middle of December, the Red Army's advance on either the Karelian Isthmus or in Central Finland was extremely slow and arduous. The "Mannerheim Line" was much stronger than the Russian command had anticipated, and Finnish resistance was extremely tough. Indeed, casualties were rapidly mounting. Anyone who lived in Leningrad knew that the hospitals had difficulties in

coping with the thousands of wounded pouring in day after day. Meanwhile, the

communiqués were brief and unilluminating, except for showing that most of the heavy fighting was taking place on the Karelian Isthmus. The disconcerted Soviet public soon guessed that the Finnish war was nothing like the walkover in Eastern Poland. Still, the myth of the "Terijoki Government" had to be kept up for quite a while, as well as the myth that the "White-Finnish Clique at Helsinki" was "unrepresentative" of the Finnish people.

Pravda even resorted to quoting from some article in a Rumanian paper which was supposed to have said: "The present 'ruling circles' of Finland consist chiefly of ex-Tsarist functionaries. .. Foreign Minister Erkko recently recalled the happy times when Finland was a Russian Grand-Duchy. General Mannerheim is particularly attached to the good old Tsarist days, when he was a personal A.D.C. to Nicholas II. It was Mannerheim who, in 1918, strangled Finland's democratic freedoms with the help of foreign (sic) troops." Pravda did not specify that the foreign troops in question were German troops.

*

December 21, 1939 was Stalin's 60th birthday which, needless to say, was marked by an orgy of laudatory articles ("Stalin Continues the Work of Lenin" by Molotov, "Stalin and the Build-Up of the Red Army" by Voroshilov, "Stalin, the Great Engine-Driver of History", by Kaganovich, "Stalin is Lenin To-Day", by Mikoyan, etc.), poems and musical compositions, among them Prokofiev's, musically admirable, Ode to Stalin.

Two days later the press began to publish the birthday greetings Stalin had received from abroad. The place of honour was given to the telegram from Hitler, followed by that from Ribbentrop.

In his birthday greeting to Stalin on December 21, Hitler said:

... Please accept my most sincere congratulations. I send at the same time my very best wishes for your personal good health and for a happy future for the peoples of a friendly Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler.

Ribbentrop was even more gushing:

Remembering the historic hours at the Kremlin which marked the beginning of a

decisive change in the relations of our countries and which thus laid the foundations for long years of friendship between our two peoples, please accept my most cordial congratulations on your 60th birthday.

Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Stalin sent Hitler a rather conventional telegram of thanks, but in his telegram to

Ribbentrop he said: "The friendship between the peoples of the Soviet Union and Germany, cemented by blood, has every reason to be solid and lasting."

The impression persisted among the Soviet hierarchy that Ribbentrop was more

wholehearted about the Soviet-German Pact than Hitler was. No doubt they would have

preferred it the other way round.

Third on the list was the telegram from Kuusinen, followed by birthday greetings from Chiang Kai-Shek, Mgr Tiso, the President of Slovakia, Mr Sarajoglu of Turkey, and the particularly obsequious messages from the leaders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.