Peace?

Desperately the Finns wanted peace. Last week they took desperate steps to get it.

In the grey-red House of Representatives, Finland's Eduskunta (parliament) met five times in one day. In its fifth fevered session it jolted stubborn, Russophobic President Risto Ryti out of office, gave his job to Finland's one indubitably strong man, stubborn, Russophobic Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim.

Ryti & Co. had been war-dancing on dangerous ice since last June's sellout to the Nazis (TIME, July 10). The parliamentary pretext for Ryti's dismissal was a letter he wrote Hitler, promising that no Finn would make a step toward peace with Russia without first informing Berlin. But the cause of Finland's crisis lay deeper. Watching the Red Army thrusts along the Baltic, even the most myopic Finn could see that soon Finland would be cut off from Germany. The troops, tanks, guns and planes that Ribbentrop promised had not been delivered. Finns could no longer be fooled or fool themselves.

Businessmen and industrialists joined hands with Finland's biggest trade-union leader, oldtime Bolshevik Eero Vuori. Vuori might become a link between Bolshevik-hating Baron Mannerheim and Moscow. For despite Risto Ryti's promise to Hitler, secret talks between Finns and Russians had been resumed in Stockholm. Out of them came a Finnish hope that Moscow would deal with Mannerheim.

Nowhere was there a man who hated the Russian regime more deeply than Mannerheim. But nowhere was there a man the Finns were more likely to follow with blind faith. And the Russians are realists. Only Mannerheim could make a crippling peace and make it stick. But the Kremlin was not in a waiting mood. It was reported to have given the Finns twelve days to decide whether to negotiate for peace or face a resumption of the Red Army's offensive.

At last the Finnish nation had learned tragically what Leon Trotsky meant when he said: "The Finnish General Staff should stop measuring the distance from Helsinki to Leningrad, because the distance from Leningrad to Helsinki will always be shorter."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.