Word: finlandized
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...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...
...note Foreign Minister Erkko proposed that the Finnish-Russian dispute be submitted to "neutral arbitration." Meanwhile, Minister Erkko said, Finland offered to withdraw its forces to "such a distance from Leningrad that it could not even be alleged that they threaten its security." It was too late. The Kremlin had decided, and at midnight, preceded by the playing of martial music and by Red Army songs, Premier Molotov took to the radio, the same radio that had just been calling Finns "dirty dogs, clowns and bastards...
...clear, Comrade Molotov said, where the "attitude of the present Finnish Government lies." The Government of Finland "doesn't wish to maintain normal relations with the Soviet Union. It continues in its hostile attitude. . . . From such a Government and from its thoughtless military clique we can expect only fresh insolent provocations." For this reason, the U.S.S.R. had given order to the Army "to be ready for any surprise and immediately check possible fresh sallies...
...against the day when the "land of workers and peasants" would have to be defended unto death. Another theory was that Dictator Stalin was determined to restore to his country the lands that belonged to the Tsars. If so, then Rumania's Bessarabian territory would be next after Finland on the list of conquests...
...Finns were first conquered by the Swedes in 1157. Peter the Great and Charles XII partitioned Finland and in 1809 Russia seized the entire country, which then became a grand duchy with a Parliament of its own and wide autonomous rights. In 1905 the Finns went on a national strike against the Tsar's usurpation of their rights, and unprecedentedly won. The Red Terror that came with the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution was bad enough: the White Guard Terror which followed was even worse. The Finns are therefore used to trouble...