Finns met Stalin’s invading forces with fierce resistance, aided by neighbors, and humiliated the dictator, who expected quick victory.
Finns met Stalin’s invading forces with fierce resistance, aided by neighbors, and humiliated the dictator, who expected quick victory.
T he news from Ukraine is bad and likely to get worse. Experts say that Russia could simply decide to conquer its neighbor by inflicting untold civilian casualties. There is also a danger that the conflict will spread to neighboring countries such as Moldova or that there will be a confrontation with NATO.
But there is one scenario short of an overthrow of Vladimir Putin that isn’t as grim. Jet fighters from Poland and other NATO countries could be handed over to Ukrainian pilots and force Russia into a military quagmire as deepening Western sanctions strangle its economy. A similar situation forced the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Then there is the example of the Soviet-Finnish “Winter War” of 1939 to 1940, when Joseph Stalin invaded the former czarist province of Russia.
Stalin believed that his troops would be marching into the Finnish capital of Helsinki within two weeks. He even had the great composer Shostakovich write a musical piece to be played at the celebration of his conquest. Outgunned, outnumbered, and taken by surprise, Finland seemed bound for a rapid surrender.
But as in Ukraine, the initial advance by the invaders was a shambolic mess. The Finns used guerrilla tactics to isolate the Soviet units, surround them, and then destroy them. Civilians made Molotov cocktails — named after Stalin’s foreign minister — as a cheap way to disable tanks. Many Soviet tanks that made it through the Finnish defenses outran their supply lines and couldn’t proceed.
Finnish historian Janne M. Korhonen noted in a long Twitter thread that the Russian supply problems in Ukraine are even worse today than the Soviets’ were in the Winter War:
In the absence of proper logistics, the Kremlin's vast hordes are far less dangerous than mere numbers suggest. As someone noted, a 40-km long column of military vehicles that isn't moving is not an army but a traffic jam.
— Janne M. Korhonen 🇫🇮🇪🇺🐟🇺🇦 (@jmkorhonen) March 2, 2022
Finland’s neighbors did what they could to help. Some 12,000 volunteers augmented Finnish forces, and other Scandinavian countries supplied aid. Aid from Britain, France, and the United States couldn’t get through because of a blockade by Nazi Germany — a new ally of the Soviet Union.
After three months of fighting, the Soviets had regrouped and resupplied, and they began a punishing pounding of the Finnish lines. With their backs to the wall — and after 70,000 dead, wounded, or missing citizens — the Finns asked for peace. The Soviets lost 350,000 men.
The war had been a painful humiliation for the Soviets, but they had captured enough Finnish territory they could secure terms that satisfied them. Finland conceded 10 percent of its territory, agreed to absorb 400,000 refugees from those lands and to allow the Soviets use of a naval base in the Gulf of Finland. But Finland largely kept its independence and grew into a prosperous member of the European Union.
“Why, in March 1940, did Stalin not order the Soviet army to keep advancing and to occupy all of Finland?” historian Jared Diamond asked in his book Upheaval. “One reason was that the fierce Finnish resistance had made clear that a further advance would continue to be slow and painful and costly to the Soviet Union, which now had much bigger problems to deal with.”
No one disputes that Russia dwarfs Ukraine’s military — just as the Soviet forces dwarfed Finland’s in 1939. In 2020, Russia spent ten times more on its military than Ukraine did.
Nonetheless, historian William Farley recently wrote, “the Winter War offers a hopeful lesson for Ukraine, in that it is possible for a smaller country to badly bloody Russia’s nose.”
Robert Service, a veteran historian of Russia at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told the Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan that he thinks the Ukrainians could well lose the war eventually. But he finds it inconceivable that they will accept subjugation. “The Ukrainians have become more nationally conscious over the 20th century, and they’re a proud people who’ve seen what happened to them when they were subjugated by the U.S.S.R.,” he noted. “They had it in the early 1930s, when millions died under Stalin’s famines. They had it again in the late 1940s, after the war ended. I don’t think they’re going to let history repeat itself.”