oh buddy, i LIVED those stories. the winter war myth is a one of the two pillars of finnish society, the other being massive russophobia
How about that Sisu movie? Poor heckin chungus Finns just wanted to be left alone, but the mean Russians and Germans wouldn’t leave!
Reminds me of the “joke” my Finnish coworker said about Finnish tourists in Russia, how the <insert slur> Slavs would freeze the fish in Lake Ladoga to “lower the mercury” in the fish to levels safe for consumption.
Do you have any recommendations for sources on the winter war. Wikipedia lists the casualty ratio at ~1:5 in Finland’s favor, and ofc they include sick and frostbitten amongst the soviet losses and don’t appear to for the Finns.
Yeah, I would also be interested. I was speaking to someone recently who was saying the Soviet Army was so poorly prepared without skis and white camo that they were just laughably destroyed by Finland.
I found War and Peace in Finland but it seems dated and I also haven’t read through it, honestly.
wrote up some stuff in https://hexbear.net/comment/4872372, no modern literature in english atleast, sorry about that.
Some articles: Espressostalinist and Lalkar
then there’s this from a yank general, working closer to the time so the propaganda hasnt had time to fester yet
“In Finland, the Red Army, in a race against time, achieved what no other modern army has yet dared to attempt, that is, it attacked and broke a modern defensive system of fortifications by frontal assault. The campaign was won in what is perhaps the most difficult terrain in Europe, in a sub-arctic climate and during mid-winter, the severest winter experienced for 70 years. As a feat of arms it stands out in all history as unique. Only military ignorance or political prejudice would dare to deny it” (Major A S Hooper, The Soviet-Finnish campaign, self-published, London 1940).
The whole myth is very similar to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae one. Facing against impossible odds the heroes managed to stop the asiatic hordes until they gave up on their dreams of conquest and settled for only small territorial changes. In the spartan case, they lost the most defensible location that was supposed to hold for months if not years in a few days and lost their king along with his elite guard. In the finnish case the Mannerheim line was the most heavily entrenched fortified line, apparentely even better than the Maginot line, but the soviets smashed through it in horrifying conditions in 3 months. Same in the continuation war actually, our brave heroes built fortifications for years, but the red army went through them in 2 weeks. The cope in both is always that, we were causing them so many casualties that they had to sue for peace instead of total conquest, which is just hilariously untrue in both cases.
The “War of Independence” literature has since fallen out of the mainstream for two reasons:
- Too many facts prove the falsehood of the “war of liberation” books. It would take an enormous amount of extra work to maintain a falsehood of that magnitude.
- The “War of Independence” has been replaced by the Winter War mythology, which is far better suited to the propagandistic purposes of the capitalists.
Translated with DeepL.com (its good with finnish, folks)
After the March Revolution of 1917, there was no ethnic hatred between different nationalities in Finland, and the liberation from Tsarist rule was celebrated with Russians all over the country. There were no divisions at this stage.
Within a few months, demands for the removal of Russian troops from Finland began to grow. The mood in Finland was one of crisis, and the Russians were found to be the scapegoats for the crisis, and their behaviour was increasingly blamed.
Karemaa notes that the stigmatisation of the Russians as untidy barbarians and “enemies of the heir”??? (archenemies) contributed to the demands of a bourgeois-minded section of the population to expel the troops. The media exaggerated the extent of the trouble caused by the Russian soldiers. The bourgeoisie feared that the Russians would ally themselves with the Finnish working class.
Translated with DeepL.com (ok it’s “pretty” good, if you get weird sentences you need to click on the words to see what the alternatives are and hope that makes more sense)
Is the whole thing were you build concentration camps for Finnish Communists part of that myth?
that goes into russophobia actually, the reds were “ryssänhuoria ja juoppoja r#iskaajia” (whores of the russkies and drunkard r*pists). no facts are allowed, our anti-communism is neatly packeged into the russophobia.
now libs pretend to be big sad about all the deaths, but it was worth it because our current state of living is so great, besides commies are bad anyway.
