The Finnish War lasted 105 days. During this time, over a hundred thousand Red Army soldiers died, about a quarter of a million were wounded or dangerously frostbitten. Historians are still arguing whether the USSR was the aggressor, and the losses were unjustified.
Looking back
It is impossible to understand the reasons for that war without an excursion into the history of Russian-Finnish relations. Before gaining independence, the "Land of a Thousand Lakes" never had statehood. In 1808 - a minor episode of the twentieth anniversary of the Napoleonic Wars - the land of Suomi was conquered by Russia from Sweden.
The new territorial acquisition enjoys unprecedented autonomy within the Empire: the Grand Duchy of Finland has its own parliament, legislation, and since 1860 - its own currency. For a century this blessed corner of Europe has not known wars - until 1901, the Finns were not drafted into the Russian army. The population of the principality increases from 860 thousand inhabitants in 1810 to almost three million in 1910.
After the October Revolution, Suomi gained independence. In the course of the local civil war, the local variant of the "whites" won; in pursuit of the "red", hot guys crossed the old border, the First Soviet-Finnish War (1918-1920) began. Bleeding Russia, with still formidable white armies in the South and Siberia, chose to make territorial concessions to its northern neighbor: as a result of the Tartu Peace Treaty, Helsinki received Western Karelia, and the state border passed forty kilometers northwest of Petrograd.
How historically this verdict turned out to be fair is difficult to assert; The province of Vyborg, which was inherited by Finland, belonged to Russia for more than a hundred years, from the times of Peter the Great and until 1811, when it was included in the Grand Duchy of Finland, possibly as a token of gratitude for the voluntary consent of the Finnish Sejm to go under the arm of the Russian tsar.
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The knots, which later led to new bloody clashes, were successfully tied.
Geography is a sentence
Look at the map. The year is 1939, Europe smells like a new war. In this case, your import and export mainly goes through seaports. But the Baltic and the Black Sea are two big puddles, all the exits from which Germany and its satellites can clog up in no time. The Pacific shipping lanes will be blocked by another Axis member, Japan.
Thus, only the port on the Arctic Ocean, Murmansk, one of the few year-round non-freezing harbors of the USSR, remains a potentially protected channel for export, for which the Soviet Union receives much-needed gold to complete industrialization, and for the import of strategic military materials. The only railway to which, suddenly, in some places it passes through rugged deserted terrain just a few tens of kilometers from the border (when this railway was laid, even under the tsar, no one could even imagine that the Finns and Russians would fight on different sides barricades). Moreover, at a distance of a three-day crossing from this border there is another strategic transport artery, the White Sea-Baltic Canal.
But that's half of the geographic troubles. Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution, which has concentrated a third of the country's defense-industrial potential, is within the radius of one march of a potential enemy. A metropolis, on whose streets an enemy shell has never fallen before, can be fired at from heavy guns from the very first day of a probable war. Baltic Fleet ships are deprived of their only base. And no, right up to the Neva, natural defensive lines.
Friend of your enemy
Today, wise and calm Finns can only attack someone in a joke. But three quarters of a century ago, when on the wings of independence gained much later than other European nations, forced national building continued in Suomi, you would have had no time for jokes.
In 1918, Karl-Gustav-Emil Mannerheim utters the well-known "oath of the sword", publicly promising to annex Eastern (Russian) Karelia. In the late thirties, Gustav Karlovich (as he was called during his service in the Russian Imperial Army, where the path of the future field marshal began) is the most influential person in the country.
Of course, Finland was not going to attack the USSR. I mean, she wasn't going to do it alone. The ties of the young state with Germany were, perhaps, even stronger than with the countries of their native Scandinavia. In 1918, when intense discussions were going on in the newly independent country about the form of government, by the decision of the Finnish Senate, the brother-in-law of Emperor Wilhelm, Prince Friedrich-Karl of Hesse, was declared king of Finland; for various reasons, nothing came of the Suom monarchical project, but the personnel choice is very indicative. Further, the very victory of the "Finnish White Guards" (as the northern neighbors were called in Soviet newspapers) in the internal civil war of 1918 was also largely, if not completely, due to the participation of the expeditionary corps sent by the Kaiser (numbering up to 15 thousand people,besides, the total number of local "red" and "white", significantly inferior to the Germans in combat qualities, did not exceed 100 thousand people).
Cooperation with the Third Reich developed no less successfully than with the Second. The ships of the Kriegsmarine freely entered the Finnish skerries; German stations in the Turku, Helsinki and Rovaniemi areas were engaged in radio intelligence; since the second half of the thirties, the airfields of the "Land of a Thousand Lakes" were modernized to accept heavy bombers, which Mannerheim did not even have in the project … It should be said that later Germany, already in the first hours of the war with the USSR (which Finland officially joined only on June 25, 1941) actually used the territory and water area of Suomi for laying mines in the Gulf of Finland and bombing Leningrad.
Yes, at that time the idea of attacking the Russians did not seem so crazy. The 1939 Soviet Union did not at all look like a formidable adversary. The asset is the successful (for Helsinki) First Soviet-Finnish War. The brutal defeat of the Red Army by Poland during the Western campaign in 1920. Of course, one can recall the successful repulsion of the Japanese aggression on Khasan and Khalkhin-gol, but, firstly, there were local clashes far from the European theater, and, secondly, the quality of the Japanese infantry was rated very low. And thirdly, the Red Army, as Western analysts believed, was weakened by the repressions of 1937. Of course, the human and economic resources of the empire and its former province are incomparable. But Mannerheim, unlike Hitler, had no intention of going to the Volga to bomb the Urals. Karelia alone was enough for the Field Marshal.
Conversation
Stalin was anything but a fool. If, in order to improve the strategic situation, it is necessary to move the border away from Leningrad, it should be so. Another issue is that the goal cannot necessarily be achieved only by military means. Although, honestly, right now, in the fall of 39, when the Germans are ready to grapple with the hated Gauls and Anglo-Saxons, I want to quietly solve my little problem with the "Finnish White Guard" - not out of revenge for an old defeat, no, in politics, following emotions leads to imminent death - and to test what the Red Army is capable of in a fight with a real, small, but trained enemy by the European military school; in the end, if the Lapps can be defeated, as our General Staff plans, in two weeks, Hitler will think a hundred times before attacking us …
But Stalin would not have been Stalin if he had not tried to settle the issue amicably, if such a word is appropriate for a man of his character. Since 1938, negotiations have been going on in Helsinki neither wobbly nor badly; in the fall of the 39th they were transferred to Moscow. Instead of the Leningrad underbelly, the Soviets proposed twice the area north of Ladoga. Germany through diplomatic channels recommended the Finnish delegation to agree. But they did not make any concessions (perhaps, as the Soviet press transparently hinted, at the suggestion of their "Western partners") and on November 13 they left for home. There are two weeks left until the Winter War.
Casus belliOn November 26, 1939, near the village of Mainila on the Soviet-Finnish border, the positions of the Red Army were subjected to artillery fire. The diplomats exchanged notes of protest; according to the Soviet side, about a dozen soldiers and commanders were killed and wounded. Was the Mainil incident a deliberate provocation (as evidenced, for example, by the absence of a named list of victims), or one of the thousands of armed people who have been tensely standing in front of a similarly armed enemy for many days, eventually lost their nerves - in any case, this incident triggered the outbreak of hostilities.
The Winter Campaign began, where there was a heroic breakthrough of the seemingly indestructible "Mannerheim Line", and a belated understanding of the role of snipers in modern warfare, and the first use of the "KV-1" tank - but they did not like to remember all this for a long time. The losses turned out to be too disproportionate, and the damage to the international reputation of the USSR was heavy.