Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Until the artillery and the bombs proved he was not fooling, most foreign diplomats in Moscow thought that Joseph Stalin's last wish was an ever so tiny war. They believed until the last minute that Comrade Stalin was merely trying a "war of nerves" on the Finns. So sure was U.S. Ambassador to Russia Laurence A. Steinhardt that there would not be war that he was caught off-base in Sweden, rushed back by special plane to Moscow where he had plenty to do expressing the U. S. Government's ideas...
...peace in which Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain would join together against the U.S.S.R.-and was merely strengthening Russia's land and sea approaches 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...
...more tenable belief was that Andrei Zhdanov, press & propaganda chief, Heir-Apparent to the Stalin throne and political leader of the Leningrad district, was hipped on the subject of the defense of the Soviet Union's second largest city and managed to get Dictator Stalin alarmed too. In any case, whatever the causes or reasons, the U.S.S.R.'s grotesque impersonation of a bear being bitten by, a rabbit did the U.S.S.R.'s waning prestige and corroding ideals no worldwide good...
...Finns thought that by changing their Government thus they could persuade Dictator Stalin to call off his war they were mistaken. Scarcely had they relayed word through to Moscow that a new Government was ready to deal with the Kremlin than out of the clear blue appeared a brand new, ready-made Finnish "People's Government" with a resounding program and declaration...
...Break? Outside Russia last week only the German press gave even lip service to the proposition that J. Stalin & Co. were justified in cracking down on Finland. In private conversations German officers gloomed that if the Red Army is kept fighting for any length of time the Russians will obviously cut down on the supplies they have promised to send the Nazis. Adolf Hitler's own Völkischer Beobachter, observed in cold approval of Russia's course: "Strong powers are only forced to exert pressure on the weak when malicious and selfish advisers mislead a weak power...