threatened Molotov, “can see no further… Now it’s the turn of the military…”
During dinner with Beria and Khrushchev at his flat, Stalin sent Finland his ultimatum. Molotov and Zhdanov, who was in charge of Baltic policy, the navy, and the defence of Leningrad, backed him. Mikoyan told a German diplomat that he had warned the Finns: “You should be careful not to push the Russians too far. They have deep feelings in regard to this part of the world and… I can only tell you that we Caucasians in the Politburo are having a great deal of difficulty restraining the Russians.” When the ultimatum ran out, they were still drinking in the Kremlin. “Let’s get started today,” said Stalin, sending Kulik to command the bombardment. The very presence of Kulik at any military engagement seemed to guarantee disaster.
On 30 November, five Soviet armies attacked along the 800-mile border. Their frontal assaults on the Mannerheim Line were foiled by the ingenious Finns, who, dressed like ghosts in white suits, were slaughtering the Russians. The forests were decorated with frozen pyramids of Soviet corpses. The Finns used 70,000 empty bottles, filled with gasoline, against the Russian tanks—the first “Molotov cocktails,” one part of his cult of personality that the vain Premier surely did not appreciate. By mid-December, Stalin had lost about 25,000 men. He amateurishly planned the Winter War like a local exercise, ignoring the Chief of Staff Shaposhnikov’s professional plan. When Kulik’s artillery deputy, Voronov, later a famous marshal, asked how much time was allotted for this operation, he was told, “Between ten and twelve days.” Voronov thought it would take two or three months. Kulik greeted this with “derisive gibes” and ordered him to work on a maximum of twelve days. Stalin and Zhdanov were so confident they created a crude puppet government of Finnish Communists. After 9 December, the Ninth Army was decimated around the destroyed village of Suomussalmi.
Stalin’s military amateurs reacted with spasms of executions and recriminations. “I regard a radical purge… as essential,” Voroshilov warned the 44th Division. The need for the reform of the Red Army was plain to the cabinets of Europe. Yet Stalin’s first solution was to despatch the “gloomy demon” Mekhlis, now at the height of his power, to the front:
“I’m so absorbed in the work that I don’t even notice the days pass. I sleep only 2–3 hours,” he told his wife. “Yesterday it was minus 35 degrees below freezing… I feel very well… I have only one dream—to destroy the White Guards of Finland. We’ll do it. Victory’s not far off.”[166] On the 26th, Stalin finally appointed Timoshenko to command the North-Western Front and restore order to his frayed forces who were now dying of hunger. Even Beria took a more humane stand, reporting to Voroshilov the lack of provisions: “139th Division’s in difficulties… no fodder at all… no fuel… Troops scattering.”
Stalin sensed the army was concealing the scale of the disaster. Trusting only Mekhlis, he wrote: “The White Finns published their operations report that claims ‘the annihilation of the 44th Division… 1,000 Red Army soldiers as prisoners, 102 guns, 1,170 horses and 43 tanks.’ Tell me first—is this true? Second—where is the Military Council and Chief of Staff of the 44th Division? How do they explain their shameful conduct? Why did they desert their division? Third, why does the Military Council of the 9th Army not inform us… ? We expect an answer. Stalin.”
Mekhlis arrived in Suomussalmi to find chaotic scenes which he made worse. He confirmed the losses and shot the whole command: “the trial of Vinogradov, Volkov and chief of Political Department took place in the open air in the presence of the division… The sentence of shooting was performed publicly… The exposure of traitors and cowards continues.” On 10 December, Mekhlis himself was almost killed when his car was ambushed, as he proudly recounted to Stalin: unlike many of Stalin’s commissars, Mekhlis was personally courageous, if not suicidally reckless, under fire, partly because, as a Jew, he wanted to be “purer than crystal.” Indeed, he took command of fleeing companies and led them at the enemy. Mekhlis and Kulik did not conceal the mess: “We lack bread in the army,” Mekhlis reported. Kulik agreed: “rigidity and bureaucracy are everywhere.” When Kulik rushed into a Politburo meeting to report yet more defeats, Stalin lectured him: “You’re lapsing into panic… The pagan Greek priests were intelligent… When they got disturbing reports, they’d adjourn to their bathhouses, take baths, wash themselves clean, and only afterwards assess events and take decisions…”
Yet Stalin was saddened by these disasters: “The snows are deep. Our troops are on the march… full of spirit… Suddenly there’s a burst of automatic fire and our men fall to the ground.” At times, he looked helplessly depressed. Khrushchev saw him lying on a couch, despondent, a rehearsal of his collapse in the early days of the Nazi invasion. The pressure made Stalin ill with his usual streptococcus and staphylococcus, a temperature of 38°C and an agonizing sore throat. On 1 February, his health improved as Timoshenko probed Finnish defences, launching his great offensive on the 11th. Soviet superiority finally took its toll on the plucky Finns. When the doctors re- examined Stalin, he showed them the maps: “We’ll take Vyborg today.” The Finns sued for peace. On 12 March, Zhdanov signed a treaty in which Finland ceded Hango, the Karelian Isthmus, and the north-eastern shore of Ladoga, 22,000 square miles, to insulate Leningrad. Finland lost around 48,000 soldiers, Stalin over 125,000.
“The Red Army was good for nothing,” Stalin later told Churchill and Roosevelt.2 Stalin was incandescent and he was not alone: Khrushchev later blamed Voroshilov’s “criminal negligence,” sneering that he spent more time in the studio of Gerasimov, the court painter, than in the Defence Commissariat. At Kuntsevo, Stalin’s anger boiled over. He started shouting at Voroshilov, who gave as good as he got. Turning red as a turkey- cock, Voroshilov shrieked at Stalin, “You have yourself to blame for all of this. You’re the one who annihilated the old guard of our army, you had our best generals killed.”
Stalin rebuffed him, at which Voroshilov “picked up a platter of roast suckling pig and smashed it on the table.” Khrushchev admitted, “It was the only time in my life I witnessed such an outburst.” Voroshilov alone could have got away with it.
On 28 March 1940, Voroshilov, who became Stalin’s “whipping boy” for the Finnish disasters, confessed, at the Central Committee, “I have to say neither I nor General Staff… had any idea of the peculiarities and difficulties involved in this war.” Mekhlis, who hated Voroshilov and coveted his job, declared: he “cannot simply leave his post—he must be severely punished.” But Stalin could not afford to destroy Voroshilov.
“Mekhlis made a hysterical speech,” he said, restraining his creature. Instead he held a uniquely frank, sometimes comical, Supreme Military Council in mid-April. One commander admitted that the army had been surprised to find forests in Finland, at which Stalin sneered: “It’s time our army knew there were forests there… In Peter’s time, there were forests. Elizabeth… Catherine… Alexander found forests! And now! That’s four times!” (Laughter) He was even more indignant when Mekhlis revealed that the Finns often attacked during the Red Army’s afternoon nap. “Afternoon nap?!” spat Stalin.
“An hour’s nap,” confirmed Kulik.
“People have afternoon naps in rest homes!” growled Stalin, who went on to defend the campaign itself: “Could we have avoided the war? I think the war was inevitable… A delay of a couple of months would have meant a delay of twenty years.” He won more territory there than Peter the Great but he warned against the “cult of the traditions of the Civil War. It brings to mind the Red Indians who fought with clubs against rifles… and were all killed.” On 6 May, Voroshilov was sacked as Defence Commissar and succeeded by Timoshenko.[167] Shaposhnikov was sacked as Chief of Staff even though Stalin admitted he had been right in the first place, “but only we know that!” He raised military morale, restoring the rank of General and the single command by soldiers, whose tasks had been made incomparably harder by sharing control with interfering commissars. He freed 11,178 purged officers who officially returned “from a long and dangerous mission.” Stalin asked one of them, Konstantin Rokossovsky, perhaps noticing his lack of fingernails, “Were you tortured in prison?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin.”
“There’re too many yes-men in this country,” sighed Stalin. But some did not come back: “Where’s your Serdich?” Stalin asked Budyonny about a mutual friend.
“Executed!” reported the Marshal.
“Pity! I wanted to make him Ambassador to Yugoslavia…” 3
Stalin attacked his military “Red Indians” but then turned to his own tribe of primitive braves who remained obsessed with cavalry and oblivious to modern warfare. Budyonny and Kulik believed tanks could never replace horses. “You won’t convince me,” Budyonny had recently declared. “As soon as war comes, everyone will shout, ‘Send for the cavalry!’” Stalin and Voroshilov had abolished special tank corps. Fortunately, Timoshenko now persuaded the Vozhd to reverse his folly. 4
Nonetheless, Mikoyan called the dominance of these incompetents “the triumph of the First Cavalry Army” since they were veterans of Stalin’s favoured Civil War unit. Despite the tossing of the suckling pig, Voroshilov was promoted to Deputy Premier for “cultural matters” which Mikoyan regarded as a joke, given the Marshal’s love of being painted.
