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(More customer reviews)I have been called many things during my 35-year writing career, but not, until now, a "Marxist". I have also learned the overall futility of taking up cudgels in a public forum with a hostile critic, but the reader from Colorado's screed is so bizarrely off the mark that I cannot refrain.
Look, pal, ALL wars have "two sides" to them. Stalin did not simply wake up one morning and announce to the Politburo: "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to invade Finland next week?" Soviet foreign policy was certainly naive, bullying, and disasterously uninformed about outside realities. But from the viewpoint of a Soviet strategist in 1939, Finland was suspect. Fact: there WAS a powerful pro-fascist clique in the country that had welcomed German aid before (in 1917) and would do so again (in 1941). Fact: The Red uprising in 1917 WAS put down with ruthless savagery. Fact: Stalin apparently really DID believe Finland would acede to his demands. For me not to have mentioned these things, would have been utterly irresponsible.
As for my comments about Finland "opting for a thoroughly bourgeoise form of government" -- the TONE here is decidedly IRONIC, not ideological. Irony, evidently, sails right past this reader's head.
Be that as it may, his whole hysterical tirade collapses in the face of what I wrote on page 17: "ultimately, of course,it came back down to an irreducible case of right versus wrong. Finland was a sovereign nation, and it had every legal and moral right to refuse any Russian demands for territory. And the Soviet Union, for its part, had no legal or moral right to pursue its policies by means of armed aggression."
I don't know how I could possibly make this point more clearly.
If this reader had bothered even to finish my book, I think he would have seen how fiercely my admiration for the Finns -- indeed, my deepy passionate love for that nation -- burns through the book. Certainly, none of the Finnish reviewers who praised the book saw anything "Marxist" about it, and several lauded its historical even-handedness.
Finally, if my book were indeed the sort of bilious "Daily Worker" tract this reader thinks it is, I hardly think it would have been awarded the Finlandia Foundation's Arts and Letters Prize.
I invite curious readers to judge the book on its own merits and on my skills as a story-teller; I did not write it with any agenda in mind other than that of accuracy, completeness, and narrative vitality. Ninety-nine percent of those who have read it seem to agree that I did at least a passable job shedding light on an otherwise obscure and almost-forgotten, but stirringly heroic, episode.
William R. Trotter
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