Winter War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Winter War began on the 30th of November 1939, when the Soviet Union sent 21 divisions and 450,000 men across the Finnish border. Within hours, bombers struck Helsinki, killing around 100 civilians and leveling more than 50 buildings. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov offered a straight-faced explanation: the aircraft were not dropping bombs but humanitarian aid to a starving population. Finns named the bombs "Molotov bread baskets" and kept fighting.

  What followed was one of the most improbable military confrontations of the twentieth century. A nation of a few million, short on ammunition and without a single tank worth mentioning in combat, held off a superpower for three and a half months in temperatures that fell as low as -43 degrees Celsius. The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for the attack. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler watched closely and drew his own conclusions. And the war ended not with Finnish surrender but with a negotiated peace signed in Moscow on the 13th of March 1940.

  How did Finland hold? What did the Soviets actually want? And what did this frozen campaign set in motion for the rest of World War II? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. A Long Border, A Short History

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  Finland's path to independence was faster than almost anyone had predicted. On the 6th of December 1917, the Senate of Finland declared the nation's independence, and Soviet Russia recognised the new government just three weeks later. Full sovereignty came in May 1918, after a four-month civil war in which the conservative Whites defeated the socialist Reds with support from the Imperial German Army.

  Before that, Finland had been the eastern part of Sweden, then a buffer state inside the Russian Empire. From the 21st of February 1808 to the 17th of September 1809, Russia fought the Finnish War to seize Finland from Sweden, justifying the campaign partly as protection for Saint Petersburg. The resulting Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed wide autonomy for most of the nineteenth century, until Russia began a systematic effort to assimilate Finland through Russification. That effort was eventually abandoned due to Russia's own internal strife, but it permanently damaged relations.

  After independence, the two countries signed the Treaty of Tartu on the 14th of October 1920, fixing a border that traced the old boundary between the Grand Duchy and Russia proper. Finland also received Petsamo Province, with its ice-free Arctic harbour. Despite the treaty, tensions persisted. Finnish volunteers crossed the border twice to support Karelian independence movements. Finnish communists in the Soviet Union staged a cross-border raid in 1922. In 1932, both sides signed a Non-Aggression Pact, which they renewed for ten years in 1934. By the late 1930s the Finnish economy was growing and domestic extremism had receded, but the relationship with its eastern neighbour remained wary. Less than one percent of Finnish foreign trade was with the Soviet Union.

• 3. The Negotiations That Failed

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  In April 1938, an NKVD agent named Boris Yartsev met privately with Finnish Foreign Minister Rudolf Holsti and Prime Minister Aimo Cajander. The Soviets, Yartsev explained, did not trust Germany and expected war. The Red Army would not stand idle at the border but would move to meet any threat. He suggested Finland cede or lease islands in the Gulf of Finland near Leningrad. Finland refused and reaffirmed its neutrality. Talks went nowhere through the rest of 1938.

  The mood in Finland toward the Soviet Union was soured further by Stalin's Great Purge. Most of the Finnish communist leadership in the Soviet Union had been executed. When the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, the secret protocol placed Finland inside the Soviet sphere of influence, though Finland did not know this at the time.

  Formal negotiations began on the 12th of October 1939, in Moscow, with Stalin attending in person, a signal of the seriousness of Soviet intentions. Molotov opened with an offer of a mutual assistance pact, which the Finns immediately refused. Molotov then shifted to a territorial exchange: Finland would move its border on the Karelian Isthmus westward to a point 30 kilometres east of Viipuri, destroy existing fortifications, cede islands in the Gulf of Finland and the Rybachy Peninsula, and lease the Hanko Peninsula for 30 years. In return, the Soviet Union would cede roughly twice the land area from Eastern Karelia. Stalin reduced his demands at the meeting on the 23rd of October, cutting the requested garrison at Hanko from 5,000 to 4,000 men and shortening the lease term. The Finnish side read this as a sign that further concessions could be extracted, and declined to offer even the island of Jussarö or the fort of Ino.

  On the 31st of October, Molotov publicly announced the Soviet demands to the Supreme Soviet. That move made further reduction politically difficult. At the final meeting on the 9th of November, Paasikivi told Stalin and Molotov that Finland rejected even the reduced terms. Finnish Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner later wrote that the eyes of the Soviet negotiators "opened wide." Stalin asked: "You don't even offer Ino?" No Soviet officials came to see the Finnish delegation off when it left Moscow on the 13th of November. The negotiations were over, though the Finns did not yet know that war was weeks away.

• 4. The False Flag and the Puppet State

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  On the 26th of November 1939, Soviet reports described an artillery attack near the village of Mainila, close to the Finnish border, claiming four border guards killed and nine wounded. Molotov blamed Finland. Finland denied responsibility and proposed a joint investigation. The Soviet Union renounced the Non-Aggression Pact, severed diplomatic relations on the 28th of November, and invaded two days later.

  Finnish and Russian historians later concluded that the Mainila shelling was a false flag carried out by an NKVD unit from the Soviet side of the border. Soviet war games held in March 1938 and 1939 had already used a scenario in which border incidents at Mainila would serve as the trigger for war. Official Soviet historiography called it Finnish provocation until the glasnost era of the late 1980s.

  On the 1st of December, the Soviets established a puppet government called the Finnish Democratic Republic, headed by Otto Wille Kuusinen and based in the first Finnish town captured by the Red Army, Terijoki. Soviet leaflets dropped over Helsinki on the first day of the war read: "Finnish Comrades! We come to you not as conquerors, but as liberators of the Finnish people from the oppression of the capitalists and the landlords." Working-class Finns stood behind the legitimate government in Helsinki from the outset. In late January 1940, after weeks of military setbacks, the Soviets quietly dissolved the Terijoki Government and signalled that they were willing to negotiate with the real Finnish government.

  Convinced of a quick triumph, Andrei Zhdanov had already commissioned a celebratory piece of music from Dmitri Shostakovich, the Suite on Finnish Themes, intended for Red Army bands parading through Helsinki on Stalin's 60th birthday, the 21st of December. The parade never happened.

• 5. Finland's Improbable Defence

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  Finnish stockpiles of cartridges, shells, and fuel were estimated to last only 19 to 60 days. The country had no functioning tank force. Many reservists arrived without military uniforms, wearing their own winter clothes with a rough semblance of insignia. What Finland did have was geography, cold, darkness, and soldiers who could ski.

  At the Battle of Taipale, which opened the fighting on the Karelian Isthmus, a 40-hour Soviet artillery preparation preceded infantry charges across open ground. One typical Soviet assault lasted just an hour and left 1,000 dead and 27 tanks destroyed on the ice. At Tolvajärvi on the 12th of December, a much smaller Finnish force under Paavo Talvela defeated the advancing Soviet 139th Rifle Division, the first Finnish victory of the war.

  In the forests of Ladoga Karelia and Kainuu, Finnish troops used guerrilla tactics they called the motti, a Finnish word for a cubic metre of firewood, to encircle and isolate sections of Soviet columns. The Battle of Raate Road became the most dramatic example. Soviet Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo and his 9th Division cut off approximately 14,000 troops from the Soviet 44th and 163rd Rifle Divisions, split them into pockets, and destroyed them in detail. Soviet casualties ran between 7,000 and 9,000; Finnish casualties numbered 400. The Soviets had been so confident of victory that a military band, complete with instruments, banners and sheet music, was travelling with the 44th Division for the anticipated victory parade. Finnish soldiers found the instruments among the captured materiel.

  At the Battle of Kollaa, which lasted until the end of the war, the phrase "Kollaa holds" became a rallying expression. Sniper Simo Häyhä, dubbed "the White Death" in Finnish media, was credited with more than 500 kills during the war. Finnish soldiers short on anti-tank weapons improvised solutions: logs and crowbars jammed into tank bogie wheels, and Molotov cocktails, glass bottles filled with flammable liquids, mass-produced by the Finnish Alko corporation and bundled with matches.

• 6. Soviet Reckoning and Reorganisation

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  Stalin had expected the campaign to end within two weeks. Publicly, Soviet propaganda explained the early failures by blaming impossible terrain and extreme cold, and falsely claimed the Mannerheim Line was stronger than France's Maginot Line, and that the United States had sent a thousand of its best pilots to Finland. Privately, Stalin was alarmed.

  The Red Army's problems ran deep. Stalin's purges in the 1930s had removed three of its five marshals, 220 of its 264 division-level or higher commanders, and 36,761 officers of all ranks. Those who replaced them were often less competent but politically loyal. Unit commanders required approval from political commissars for military decisions, evaluated on political rather than tactical grounds. The result was a command structure that struggled to adapt.

  On the 7th of January 1940, Semyon Timoshenko replaced Kliment Voroshilov as commander of Soviet forces. Timoshenko and Andrei Zhdanov reorganised the chain of command, coordinated branches of service, and rehearsed the assault on life-size mock-ups of Finnish fortifications. Soviet troop strength on the Karelian Isthmus was built from ten divisions to 25-26 divisions, supported by six or seven tank brigades, totalling 600,000 soldiers. On the 1st of February, the Soviets fired 300,000 shells into the Finnish line in the first 24 hours of a new bombardment.

  By the 11th of February, approximately 460,000 Soviet soldiers, 3,350 artillery pieces, 3,000 tanks, and 1,300 aircraft were deployed on the Karelian Isthmus. The Mannerheim Line broke. Mannerheim authorised a general retreat of the II Corps on the 15th of February. The Finnish Army was approaching exhaustion, and Field Marshal Mannerheim urged a peace settlement while Finland still retained some bargaining power.

• 7. Peace and Its Consequences

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  The back channel that ended the war ran through Stockholm. Finnish communist Hella Wuolijoki made contact with Soviet Ambassador to Sweden Alexandra Kollontai, and the two women met almost daily for three weeks at Stockholm's Grand Hotel beginning in January 1940. Finnish Foreign Minister Väinö Tanner arrived in Stockholm on the 12th of February to negotiate terms through the Swedish intermediaries.

  The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed on the 13th of March 1940. Finland ceded approximately 9 percent of its territory, including lands along Lake Ladoga and territory to the north. Soviet gains exceeded even the demands that had been on the table before the war began. Finland retained its sovereignty and avoided absorption into the Soviet sphere, unlike Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which had accepted Soviet military bases in October 1939 and would be fully Sovietized the following year.

  Soviet losses were severe. At least 61,506 Soviet troops were recorded as sick or frostbitten during the war. Finnish anti-aircraft guns alone downed more than 300 Soviet aircraft, while Finnish fighter pilots, often flying against formations that outnumbered them 10 to 20 times, shot down 200 more while losing 62 of their own. Soviet air attacks killed 957 Finnish civilians across 516 localities; Viipuri was struck by nearly 12,000 bombs.

  The poor performance of the Red Army carried consequences far beyond the treaty. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler concluded that the Soviet military was weaker than it appeared, a judgment that contributed to his decision to launch Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. After 15 months of an uneasy Interim Peace, the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union began that same month. Dmitri Shostakovich's Suite on Finnish Themes, commissioned for a victory celebration that never came, remained unperformed.