Zep said:
So some sort of pact between the Soviet Union and the Allies that this would NOT happen wouldn't have been successful?
I fail to see how the Finnish government could have made a pact between the Soviets and the Allies. Also, one of the reasons why Stalin made a pact with Hitler instead of Western Allies is that Hitler promised that he wouldn't interfere with Stalin's grab of the Baltic. Something that the Western Allies were not ready to do. And of course, if they had sacrificed their principles and agreed to Stalin's conditions, that wouldn't have been too good news for Finland, either.
Kind of a draw? So, apart from some slight border shifting, all those people got killed for no real gain on either side? Or was the body-count how the war was "scored"?
Well, the most important thing for Finns was that we didn't become the "Autonomous Fenno-Karelian Soviet Republic" in the great Soviet Union. Since this was the situation also before the war, you could say that there was no real gain for Finland for the war. Though, given that without the war we
would have become just that, I'd say that the outcome was very favourable even if we lost 23,000 men and Karelian Isthmus. I have also very selfish reasons for preferring that outcome since my grandfather would have been in the list of people to execute for being "an enemy of the people" had Soviets been able to impose their rule. (He was a member of
Suojeluskunta, a nationalistic paramilitary organization).
So it didn't work out so well for the Soviets after all. They should have just left Finland well enough alone in the first place, do you think?
I agree wholeheartedly. The gains of Soviet Union from that war were miniscule compared with their losses, in particular if you consider that the abysmal performance of the Red Army in Winter War was one of the reasons why Hitler later thought that he could crush SU easily in a couple of weeks. So, it is possible that if Stalin hadn't ordered the invasion, Hitler wouldn't have attacked as early as in 1941 when the reorganization of the Red Army was still incomplete.
But the problem from the Finnish side was that the Soviet Union didn't see the outcome of the war from start (or, more properly, Marshal Shaposnikov was the only one to expect trouble and he was not listened). Stalin believed that the operation would work as well as the occupation of Eastern Poland before, that the Red Army would basically just march through Finland. This belief was further reinforced by emigrant Finnish communists who claimed that the Finnish workers would gladly seize the opportunity to cast their shackles away and join the Red Army en masse. This might have happpened in early 1920s but in 1939 the communists were way out of touch of the current situation in Finland.
So, the decision to start the war was in the end made by Stalin. And when a neighbouring super-power with 50 times more population than you wants to start the war, there is not much that you can do about it. Either fight it and hope a miracle or capitulate. And when the said neighbour has a 20-year history of murderous tyranny and it is led by the one of the worst mass-murderers that ever lived, capitulating doesn't seem to be so attractive option. In this case miracle happened: Stalin's purges had removed almost all competent commanders from the Red Army and the incompetent buffoons who were left [*] couldn't manage to use their numerically overwhelming army to crush Finland fast, and in the end Stalin agreed with a negotiated peace just when Finnish army was on the brink of final defeat.
[*] It has to be admitted that there were also some very capable commanders fighting in the Red Army in the Winter War such as Vasily Chuikov who later stopped Germans in Stalingrad or Dmitri Lelyushenko who later led the 4th Guards Tank Army to Berlin, but they were a drop in a sea of incompetence.
