"For a Radical Improvement"

After Czechoslovakia, Finns thought their turn had come. Last week, Finland's aging (77) President Juho Kusti Paasikivi received a handwritten letter in the scrawling script of Stalin. It was a polite but imperative summons which Finns construed as the end of their uneasy, nominal independence.

Wrote Stalin: "I assume that Finland, not less than Rumania and Hungary, is interested in a pact of mutual assistance with the U.S.S.R. against possible German aggression. . . . Wishing to establish conditions for a radical improvement in the relations between our countries . . . the Soviet government proposes the conclusion of a Soviet-Finnish pact. . . ."

Finns who thought of Prague could guess what "conditions for a radical improvement" might be. While Finland's leftist Premier Mauno Pekkala began packing for a trip to Moscow, others in Finland were also snapping their suitcase locks. Swarms of Baltic and Russian refugees swamped Helsinki's Swedish consulate seeking visas, and in their near-panic quest for hard currency the open market price of a dollar shot up from 700 Finn-marks to 1,000. Finland's Communist

Minister of the Interior Vrjoe Leino, boss of the "Valpo" or political police, countered with orders for tighter border control. But Finland's border remained wide open to an influx of Finnish Communist agents from Otto Kuusinen's nearby Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. Election of delegates to the Finnish Diet was scheduled for July. At present, in a bloc with the Socialist Union party, Communists control 51 of its 200 seats. But in recent local elections Communist candidates have been losing ground. If the Communists intended to cement control, the time to act was now.

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