Reds For Friends

"What has happened fills us with horror and sorrow. . . . Neutrality as such is no defense in these times. We have no illusions. ..." So spoke the sober Stockholm Tidningen last week as Sweden, only one of the Oslo Group's six peaceful powers as yet unscathed by war, prepared to recast her shattered foreign policy, seek a strong new friend in Moscow. What disgusted the Swedes as much as anything was that day-old German papers, arriving in Sweden the morning of the Lowlands invasion, front-paged an official D. N. B. declaration that all talk of such an invasion was a pack of inflammatory British lies. The Swedes, with a two-week-old guarantee from Hitler in their pocket, promptly blacked out their whole country for the first time, worriedly sifted rumors of German troop-shifts at nearby Kiel.

Taking its cue from Swedish reactions, the Russian press this week proclaimed Russian good neighborship in the North, prepared to welcome cordially a three-man Swedish trade delegation (going to Moscow for new markets, raw materials to replace those lost in the West), boomed a Swedish-Russian rapprochement based on protective Russian power. Significant was revived talk of a Russian-Finnish-Swedish treaty for joint fortification of the strategic Aland Islands, with Finn Juho Paasikivi, whom Stalin likes, as possible intermediary. Sweden, impressed alike by Soviet moderation in Finland and the Baltic States, and German "protection" in Denmark and Poland, seemed about to make the best of a none too good bargain.

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