The Forgotten Winter War

I’m trying to remember when I first heard about the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. I can’t. It certainly wasn’t in school. This topic was not, apparently, worthy of the attention of Soviet schoolchildren.

Probably there were a couple of lines in our textbook, but not in the sections devoted to the Second World War. In the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, textbooks categorized (and continue to categorize) everything that happened at the front before June 22, 1941, as part of the “prewar situation.” The real war began when we were invaded. Up until then there was war in the West, but all was peaceful in the USSR. Well, almost peaceful.

Maybe I was told about it at the university? I don’t remember that either. Was it mentioned in lectures on Soviet history? Probably. The lectures were so boring that nobody was really listening, if we even bothered to attend. For us students of history, the fact that Stalin and Hitler were allies between 1939 and 1941 was obscured in some sort of mist.

Might I, perhaps, have seen memorials commemorating the Winter War? Definitely not. There isn’t a city or village in our country that was left untouched by the war, whether or not it was reached by German troops. From everywhere, people went off to fight, never to return, and everywhere memorials were erected in their honor. Star-topped obelisks emblazoned with lists of the fallen is a common site found on the main thoroughfare of every Russian city or village. But these names all belong to people who died between 1941 and 1945. What about those who died earlier? But for a few monuments in Leningrad Oblast, no serious attempt has been made to store collective memories.

Another thing I can’t recall is when I first read Alexander Tvardovsky’s poem, “Two Lines”:

In my notebook I jotted two lines for
A poor fellow they sent off to wage war.
Back in forty he paid a high price
And was killed on the cold Finnish ice […]

Amid such a cruel and immense war
I can’t really grasp, though I’m trying,
What about this lone fate I’m so sad for,
As if I were the one who’s no more,
As if I were the one left there lying
Frozen, small, and dying,
In that war of which no one is talking,
Forgotten and small, left lying.

Из записной потертой книжки 
Две строчки о бойце-парнишке, 
Что был в сороковом году 
Убит в Финляндии на льду […] 

Среди большой войны жестокой, 
С чего – ума не приложу, – 
Мне жалко той судьбы далекой, 
Как будто мертвый, одинокий, 
Как будто это я лежу, 
Промерзший, маленький, убитый, 
На той войне незнаменитой, 
Забытый, маленький, лежу.

It was as if this strange, obscure war never happened. The heroism of those who fought in it was certainly not extolled in the way that the heroism displayed in the Great Patriotic War proper was.

The Winter War was nothing to be proud of. It exposed the Red Army’s terrible lack of battle readiness. The vast and populous Soviet Union couldn’t even manage to overpower the tiny population of Finland. The war was short (3 months, one week and five days), but the list of Soviet casualties was long (126,000 dead and missing; 188,000 seriously injured).

Finally, in the spring of 1940, Stalin’s demands were met: the border with Finland was moved farther away from Leningrad. Vyborg became a Soviet city, the cities and settlements of Karelia were all given Russian names, and the bridges and buildings the Finns left behind began to gradually fall into disrepair.

Stalin did not get what he had really wanted, however. He did not make Finland into a Soviet republic. He did not reconstitute what had been the Russian Empire’s northwestern corner during its last hundred years.

Who could have expected such grit and tenacity from the mild-mannered Finns? Certainly not The Great Leader of All Peoples, who had assembled a revolutionary government for Finland to follow Soviet tanks into Helsinki and proclaim the Finnish people’s desire to join the harmonious family of Soviet peoples. Stalin’s plan failed abysmally. Finland was pushed toward an alliance with Hitler, an alliance it probably would have tried to avoid had it not been for the Soviet invasion.

The Finnish authorities did not look kindly at the way the Nazis were going about things, but squeezed from two sides by warring powers, they chose the one that at least had not invaded them. As a result, several Finnish divisions did indeed wind up fighting on Soviet soil outside Leningrad.

The real threat to Leningrad, however, turned out to come not from the Finnish border, the supposedly perilous proximity of which had been used to justify the Winter War. The city’s defenses had been primarily prepared against an invasion from the north, but it actually came from the southwest. The amazing speed with which the Germans reached Leningrad took everyone by surprise, which is why they managed to lay siege to the city for 900 days.

In 1944, Finland made haste to conclude a truce with the USSR and exit the war. For many years afterward, the Finns took pains not to anger their intimidating neighbor, which is why they handed over anyone clueless enough to try to reach the free world by crossing the Soviet-Finnish border. This cooperativeness explains why the very few Western imports that played a role in my Soviet childhood and youth included Finnish sausage (delicious!) and Finnish boots (highly sought after and almost impossible to find). Furthermore, everyone was dancing the letkajenkka, another Finnish import. What war? We didn’t remember any war.

Then came perestroika. Suddenly the Winter War and ensuing Soviet-Finnish War were no longer a secret, and people began to talk and write about them. Today, you can read about the conflict with Finland in textbooks and hear it mentioned in university lecture halls. As to the names of the fallen emblazoned on obelisks – I’m not sure. I’ve never seen changes made to these lists and I simply don’t know whether any such effort might have been undertaken. And it’s not surprising that I wouldn’t know, since although the fact that we were at war with Finland is not a secret anymore, it has never been inculcated into Russia’s collective memory.

It happened, and we’re allowed to talk about it. In 2002 there was even a well received movie against the backdrop of the Soviet-Finnish War: Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s The Cuckoo, about two soldiers – one Soviet, one Finnish – whom the vicissitudes of war bring together under the roof of a Sami woman living in a remote part of Finland.

But it still feels as if this war never happened. We don’t like to recall wars of which we cannot be proud (in this instance, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for its attack on Finland). This is why the war with Finland, the war with Afghanistan, and the wars in Chechnya have never found their place in our history. And we don’t much care to remember the people who suffered in them.

One can only hope that the list of shameful wars won’t grow much longer.