FINLAND: Night

Over Finland the long darkness of the subarctic winter nights had begun to close in. So had the political night. In Helsinki, an assassin fired five bullets at close range into the back of a Russian naval officer’s head. The assassin escaped. Near Helsinki’s airport a Finn, armed with a flatiron, attacked a Russian soldier. The Finn was arrested. At the same airport, a few days later, were found the murdered bodies of two Red Army officers. The shattered country was heaving and grinding like an ice floe.

The shaky Finnish Government of Premier Urko Castren, in crisis ever since the signing of the armistice with Russia last September, staggered out of office. In its place moved a new cabinet headed by Dr. Juho Kusti Paasikivi, 74. Dr. Paasikivi was persona grata in Moscow. He had helped negotiate three treaties that ended Finland’s three wars with Russia—in 1920, 1940 and 1944. The national crisis was deferred, not ended.

Red Army men and Russian political experts were quartered in the turreted Hotel Torni, the plushy Societetshuset and the old Estonian Legation in swank Brunnsparken. They raced around Helsinki in Russian autos. Their boss was smart, rugged Colonel General Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, Leningrad’s Communist chief and Stalin’s heir apparent. In the thick of last week’s crisis, General Zhdanov suddenly zoomed off to Moscow, then zoomed back, presumably bringing Stalin’s latest word to the Finns. What it might be Finns would soon find out.