Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week Finland's aging (78), anxious President Juho K. Paasikivi summoned editors of Helsinki's principal newspapers to the Presidential Palace, handed them a news item and an earnest exhortation. The news was the text of Finland's unwanted treaty of "mutual aid" with the Soviet Union, signed in Moscow's Kremlin. The exhortation: sugar-coat the news in order to minimize anti-Russian feeling among Finns...
Over Finland's state-controlled radio Paasikivi himself set the sugary tone. Said he: "We can look with confidence toward the future." In Moscow, Prime Minister Pekkala had already thanked the Soviet Union for its "benevolent attitude." Editors and politicians took the official cue. Finland, which had wanted no treaty at all, found itself rejoicing at having made the "best possible deal under the circumstances...
Finland's treaty was broadly patterned on similar pacts between Moscow and all its eastern European satellites. It barred Finland from becoming a base for aggression against the Soviet Union by "Germany or any nation allied with her," and provided that the two countries "will consult each other in event of a threat of military attack." Paasikivi and other Finns comforted themselves with this consultation clause, but the comfort was coldish. Moscow could dig up a "threat" any day it had a mind...
Salvemini said he had drawn up a tentative draft of the message, but refused to sign unless it contained the sentence. "American interference is no less deplorable than that of Soviet Russia or the Vatican." The final telegram did not include this sentence...
...perhaps this avid desire for "a universal church" which caused the Webbs to be swept off their feet by the devout fervor of the founders of the Soviet Union. But in 1911, when this diary ends, the Webbs did not yet suspect the revolutionary upheavals that were to come. From her retreat in the "delightful countryside," Beatrice could look back over the furious past, and nostalgically recapture old memories of committees, boards, councils, intrigues and, above all, "the river Thames sweeping through the splendor and squalor of the birthplace of the 19th Century capitalist dictatorship...