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Onetime Premier Pierre Laval (who was willing in other days to emasculate Ethiopia for the sake of a deal) led a movement in the Senate for secret debate on the abandonment of little Finland and on the whole war effort. Premier Edouard Daladier acquiesced. After two days behind closed doors, the Senate upheld the Government without one adverse vote, but with 60 of 300 Senators present abstaining.
In a sudden let-up on censorship, daily papers were permitted to print hints of a ministerial purge, with possible formation of a small super-Cabinet for instantaneous major decisions. There was some halfhearted criticism of Sweden for blocking aid to Finland, but plenty of self-recrimination.
Italy, partner of Germany in the Axis, of the Allies in sympathy for Finland, of no one in a pinch, took the paradoxical line of criticizing Britain and France for again failing small nations.
Popolo di Roma scornfully wrote: "Now it only remains for the Western Powers to heap vituperation on the neutral Scandinavian powers which know enough about the capacity for aid of France and Great Britain."
The Balkans were both alarmed and pleased by the peace—alarmed at the fate of another small nation sponsored if not guaranteed by the Allies, pleased that the war was over. Yugoslavia said the lesson of Finland was that small nations must band together. Bulgaria (Russia's one Balkan friend) expressed satisfaction that Russia had insured her Baltic outlet and began talking about an Aegean outlet for herself. Hungary was grateful that Germany was trying to limit the scope of the war. Rumania was in a quandary. Altogether the Balkan States blamed the Allies and took a seven-league leap towards the German-Russian combine.
Russia turned herself inside out with triumph, but did some blaming, too. Official Pravda turned on the Allies with such phrases as: "Incendiaries of war . . . dense, malodorous Anti-Soviet slander . . . dubious tricks of the League of Nations . . . menaces of bribery ... international war provocateurs." To clear Russia of any charges of guilt, Pravda's editorial achieved masterpieces of non sequitur: "Inspired by patriotic enthusiasm, the fighters, commanders and political functionaries of the Red Army and the Red Navy showed there are no fortresses that the Bolsheviki cannot take. . . . The Soviet Union stands unshaken as a guardian of peace and as a buttress of hope for toilers."
Words of the great Lenin were dug up to bless the peace. Quoted Izvestia: "When the Soviet power makes peace proposals, it is necessary to regard them seriously." But no one in Russia dug up, nobody quoted, if anyone remembered he tried to forget the words Lenin wrote in 1901, when Tsar Nicholas II bore down on the Grand Duchy of Finland because it was a "threat" to St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).