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Friend or Foe? The biggest unfinished span was, as always, the Soviet connection. Obviously, Russia would not particularly care to have her little friend in the Balkans pass like Rumania into German hands. One day last week an unknown young Russian diplomat, Alexander Mihailovich Alexandrov, said to have been chief of the Balkan Division of the Foreign Commissariat, turned up in Sofia as Counselor of Legation, reportedly charged with giving Boris moral support in refusing German demands. Another day Tass, the official news agency, issued a gruff statement: "If German troops really are present in Bulgaria and if the further dispatch of German troops to Bulgaria really is taking place, then all this occurred and is occurring without the knowledge and consent of the U. S. S. R."
Germany obviously could not afford to antagonize Russia and thus confirm rather than confine the war's second front. Such an alienation would almost certainly bring Turkey into the fight. But it was equally clear that Russia did not dare fight Germany. It was reported: 1) that Adolf Hitler. had offered Joseph Stalin all of Finland and more of Rumania in exchange for a free hand against Greece and Turkey; 2) that he had offered Boris more of the Dobruja in return for permitting German troops the use of Bulgaria as a corridor to the eastern Mediterranean.
But with a little more time Adolf Hitler would surely find means to bluff or persuade Stalin and either satisfy or scare Boris III. Boris ought to scare, for his chance of getting adequate aid from either Greece, Turkey or Britain for defense of his country is not bright.
Until Hitler could make his preparations for taking Bulgaria without a fight, his advance army of psychological sappers continued busily undermining, camouflaging, sending up trial rumors and tentative untruths, paving the way for a Blitzkrieg in the spring just as they did in the Lowlands in 1940. Such a welter of conflicting reports was abroad in the Balkans last week that the Nazis were actually surprised. "It's a splendid fog," said a happy Berlin spokesman, "and others made it for us."
"Only for Bulgaria." At week's end, the worried conferences which Bogdan Filoff had had with his King and his Cabinet bore fruit. He went to Russe, on the Danube, just opposite the spot where the Germans were supposed to be most heavily concentrated. There he made a speech in which he voiced the sentiments of Boris:
"People should bear in mind that we are today witnessing one of the greatest cataclysms that history has ever known. . . .
"We should not be influenced by our feelings or sympathies or desires. We must remain, before everything else, Bulgarians, and work only for Bulgaria, to be ready to make sacrifices only for Bulgarian interests and never for foreign ones. . . .
"I must warn you that today war and peace do not depend on small nations like Bulgaria. She is so small that she cannot dictate whether there shall be war or peace. We have therefore to be ready for any eventuality. . . ."