The Winter War

November 30, 1939, marked the start of a war that has been all but forgotten in Russia: the war between the Soviet Union and Finland, commonly referred to in English as “The Winter War.”

The two countries had been negotiating an exchange of borderlands, but were unable to come to terms. Not surprisingly, Finland had no desire to give up territory that included the well-developed city of Vyborg in exchange for undeveloped Karelian forest (albeit a lot of it). After talks broke down, the Soviet people were given the improbable news that little Finland had invaded. Thankfully, the Red Army had turned the table on the shameless aggressor and crossed into Finland.

The assumption was that Soviet tanks would reach Helsinki in no time. At that point, a new Soviet government that was waiting in the wings would be quickly installed and immediately express its desire to become a part of the USSR.

That’s not how it worked out. Soviet forces proved themselves woefully unprepared for this war (to say nothing of the much more consequential one looming on the horizon). They bogged down in the Karelian snows and found themselves encircled. Nevertheless, when a peace accord was concluded a few months later, the exchange of territories did indeed take place, but the idea of a Soviet Republic of Finland had to be abandoned.

What the Soviet Union did achieve was embarrassment and tens of thousands (some historians now estimate hundreds of thousands) of casualties, victims of Finland’s army and brutal winter. As Winston Churchill put it: “The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force.” He was right. Furthermore, Finland, which before the war had been a neutral neighbor, was transformed into a reluctant ally of Hitler.

The history of the Winter War is tragic in and of itself, but it is doubly so for having been forgotten, as if the countless lives lost simply melted away with the snows of that horrific winter. For decades thereafter, almost nothing was said or written about this war. Circumspect mentions in textbooks provided no details. Furthermore, for a long time the memorials to those who fell in the war with Germany that can be found in every city and village of the former Soviet Union did not include the names of those who perished in Finland in what Alexander Tvardovsky calls in one wrenching poem, “that unillustrious war.”

Why is this war so little remembered? Probably the main reason is that Russia does not like to draw attention to its defeats – talking about victories is far more pleasant. Furthermore, this particular defeat happened at a time when the Soviet Union was fighting “on the wrong side.” Everything that happened between Germany’s invasion of Poland (which took place under an agreement with Stalin) and up to the moment when Germany attacked the Soviet Union (which left Stalin so stunned that for twelve days he was unable to take the reins in his country’s defense) – in other words everything that transpired between September 1, 1939 and June 22, 1941 – has been basically swept under the rug of history. 

A simple terminological trick was used to properly frame history: the “War” – not “the Second World War,” a term rarely used in Russia, but rather the “Great Patriotic War” (Великая отечественная война – literally the Great Fatherland War) – began with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Everything that was done on the basis of the Nazi-Soviet Pact – the invasion of Poland, the takeover of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the war with Finland – falls under the heading “the events of 1939-1941” and was somehow separate and had only a tenuous connection with the Second World War as a whole. This is all understandable, since the alliance with Hitler was indeed shameful. Or was it? Even that attitude shows signs of changing.

Take, for example, the current Minister of Culture, whom many Russians consider laughable, although they find themselves laughing through their tears at his comical reinterpretations of history. He has recently written that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a diplomatic triumph for the Soviet Union. If the accord with Nazis was a triumph, we can only imagine what the senseless and shameful war with Finland was – maybe a “great struggle for the security of Leningrad,” which did indeed wind up farther from the Finnish border? This was the supposed justification for taking Vyborg from Finland. Unfortunately, we all know how well blockaded Leningrad fared during the war. Incidentally, the only division that Finland did send to help the Germans was placed right outside the city.

Why did the Russian Empire feel the need to take Finland from the Swedes in 1809, forcing its soldiers to march across the cracking ice of the Gulf of Bothnia, and why did Russia hold on to it for more than a century, paying little attention to it until the early twentieth century, when autonomous Finland became a convenient refuge for revolutionaries? By that time, St. Petersburg’s writers and painters were only just discovering the joys of retreating to dachas along the Finnish coast.

The Soviets were unable to hang on to Finland after 1917, and they also failed to take it back in 1939. But even after the war, and for decades to come, the Soviet Union managed to keep Finland in such a state of intimidation that it was the only country in the free world that returned to the USSR anyone trying to slip through the Iron Curtain, as some did by sneaking across the border through the forests outside Vyborg, now a Soviet city.

The Finns never even bothered to remove a statue of Alexander II in the center of Helsinki – there he stands proudly, his back to the magnificent Helsinki Cathedral. Russia has not reciprocated.

There has been little genuine effort to make sense of the history of relations between Finland and Russia. This year, the 80th anniversary of the war will go unremarked. There might be a few scholarly symposiums, and perhaps the film The Cuckoo will be shown on television, a rare case of a work that tells us something new about the effects of the tangled wartime relations between the Soviet Union and Finland. And that will be that. We can once again forget the frigid terror of that winter and go back to talking about the “diplomatic triumphs” of the past.

May we be saved from such triumphs in the future!