ABSTRACT
Stalin had always regarded recovery of the Baltic States and Finland as essential to Soviet security and domination of the Baltic littoral – Finland, particularly because its border on the Isthmus of Karelia was also a bare 20 miles north of Leningrad. Although the Soviet Union had put forward several requests for military access to Finnish territory since the Sudeten crisis of 1938, the summer of the Polish crisis passed quietly for Finland.1 In June, however, Stalin ordered Meretskov, who was still commanding the Leningrad Military District, to begin preparations for and draw up a plan for a ‘counterblow’ against the Finnish armed forces should they initiate a ‘military provocation’.2 On 12 October, having in the previous week and a half coerced Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into similar agreements, Stalin offered the Finns a mutual assistance pact in exchange for extensive territorial concessions. The Finns considered the one as much a threat to their independence as the other; the negotiations broke down at the end of the month. On 26 November, Moscow radio announced that Finnish troops had staged a provocation at a border post on the Isthmus of Karelia. On the 30th the Soviet ‘counterblow’ began.
