INTERNATIONAL: Rabbit Bites Bear

Some of the World could understand why the Soviet Government might be apprehensive. Leningrad, industrial and railroad centre of North Russia, birthplace of the Soviet State, with nearly as many inhabitants as all of Finland together, was within artillery range of a country which 20 years ago swarmed with enemy Germans threatening invasion. But most of the World could not forgive the crude cynical fabrication of incidents, lame excuses and low-comedy lies to prove how the mighty but peace-loving Union of Soviet

Socialist Republics, with an overpowering advantage in citizens, Army and Air Force, was "forced" into action against the warmongering Republic of Finland.

The plot for this drama might well have been concocted by Heinrich Himmler in one of his duller moments; the scenery could have been done by Painter Adolf Hitler suddenly turned Cubist; the dialogue could have been written by a slightly tipsy Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. All in all, the Russian act that led up to its invasion of Finland last week was a weird parody, rather than a Slavish plagiarism, of Nazi methods.

The Finns were suddenly pictured as dreaming "dreams of aggression." The Finnish Government became "marionettes chained to the hounds and incendiaries of war," a "gang of hired bandits of capitalism," "bestial murderers mad with their savage dreams of a Greater Finland up to the Urals."

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."

More specific if scarcely more credible was the Soviet radio's description of the start of hostilities. Finnish soldiers, the radio reported, "invaded" the Soviet Union three times on the night of Nov. 29-30. After the third attempt the Red Army lost its patience and at 8 a.m. the war was on (see p. 23). It was notable that the war was 16 hours old before any Soviet newspaper or radio got around to giving communiques.

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 on the war (see P-15).