Sleepless Nights

When Britons, who like to spend especially cheerless afternoons by the fire reading Tchekov, Turgenev, or Dostoevsky, want to describe a person whose deep gloom is relieved only by occasional starts of dark suspicion, they say: "Frightfully Russian." Frightfully Russian were Russians last week. Citizens heard almost no official announcements about the campaign in Finland--except that Russia's defensive warfare against aggressive Finland had reached points 90 miles inside Finland's borders. But in the streets unhappy Russians heard ugly rumors.

So persistent were these rumors, and so long undenied, that civilians began to discuss openly such things as: "Have you heard that things are going badly in the North? That there have been 70,000 dead and wounded--so many casualties that the wounded overflow from Leningrad to Moscow? Have you heard that the soldiers have no gloves and thin shoes--though the Government told us that we civilians must put up with our scarcity of clothes so that the defenders of revolution might lack nothing? Have you heard that the Finns have driven onto Russian soil at the very place where our men were supposed to be having their only real success? And that we have no chance of winning until warm weather returns? This is the campaign which was to end in ten days!"

If the people were worried, the Government kept its mask of complacency. But signs of official nervousness showed in announcements that henceforth all news dispatches, as well as mail to and from Russia, would be subject to the censor's shears. For eight months foreign correspondents had been sending their copy out at will.

Otherwise the Government sounded positively elated. The Stalin birthday celebrations (TIME, Jan. 1) had been successful beyond expectation, and there was cause for new delight in the annual elections of delegates to the regional Soviets. On every side official candidates were achieving what Pravda called "a brilliant victory"--on ballots on which there were no opposition candidates. On ships of the Baltic Fleet, said a Moscow broadcaster, harmonicas played ceaselessly as the crews eagerly voted "for the invincible Stalinist bloc." He told how airmen fresh from bombing Finland leaped hastily from their cockpits to vote. In Moscow, said the announcer, Marshal Simeon Mikhailovich Budenny was elected delegate "several times over." Joseph Stalin's district was 100% for him. Concluded the announcer: "In the northernmost electoral unit of the Soviet Union, aboard the icebreaker Sedov --adrift for two years in Arctic ice--the hardy crew could not sleep owing to their impatience for the moment when they would be first allowed to vote."

But elections and birthdays can neither raise temperatures nor kill Finns, and at week's end the people were still grumbling.

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