Word: finlander
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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While Comrade Arkhipov, in Leningrad, was inveighing to his fellow workers against the "bankrupt political cardplayers" ruling Finland, at Kiev factory workers declared they "love to fight," and aboard the Soviet battleship October Revolution sailors met and decided: "The time has come to end the criminal game of the Finns." An interesting aberration came from the Kirov plant workers: "The ruling clique of Finland has reached the limits of madness and has, at the orders of its imperialist masters, declared war on our Soviet Union...
First Pressure was applied on Sunday, when the Red Army reported an incident-on the border which, the Soviet Union claimed, killed or wounded 13 soldiers. Premier-Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov dispatched a note to Finland immediately demanding that Finnish troops be moved from twelve to 15 miles back of the border. On Monday the Finns formally disavowed the incident, replied with a refusal to move their troops unless the Soviet Union did likewise. After that the Finnish-Soviet timetable was crowded with angry notes, inflammatory speeches, useless diplomatic parleys...
Tuesday Comrade Molotov handed to Baron Aano Yrjo-Koskinen, Finnish Minister in Moscow, an emphatic reply to Finland's reply. The Finnish note, he said, reflected the "profound hostility on the part of the Government of Finland toward the Soviet Union and carries to the extreme the crisis in relations between the two countries." The Finnish denial of the border incident, said Mr. Molotov, showed a "desire to deride the victims of the shooting" ; refusal to move troops back "betrays a hostile desire by the Government of Finland to keep Leningrad under threat...
Such hostility, the Premier continued, was "incompatible" with the Finnish-Russian non-aggression pact. Therefore: "The Soviet Government deems itself compelled to state that from this date it considers itself free from the obligations undertaken under the non-aggression pact concluded between the U. S. S. R. and Finland and systematically violated by the Government of Finland. Accept, Mr. Minister, assurances of my perfect respect." Meanwhile, three new border incidents were reported exclusively by the Red Army...
...There was wide suspicion that it had been deliberately held up in transmission. At any rate, Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vladimir Potemkin had other business to transact with Minister Yrjo-Koskinen. He handed the baron his passport, told him that diplomatic relations between Russia and Finland were broken. When Minister Yrjo-Koskinen got back to the Finnish Legation he found the note and dispatched it to the Foreign Office by a Legation messenger. He himself was no longer welcome there...