WI: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics looses winter war
- Thread starter Alvar_13
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IOTL the USSR lost as much in the Winter War as was realistic. Its losses, in both human and material terms, were massive in comparison to the small territorial gains from the war. It is pretty much impossible to make Finland do better alone, and it is hard to see a successful outside intervention that could have made a difference to help the Finns without a pretty early POD. Any intervention plans that are only kickstarted when the war breaks out probably won't result in the realisation of strong enough foreign troops in Finland in time to make a difference during the short war - as evidenced by the Anglo-French plans. Just the logistics of the thing alone, in the dead of winter when Germany controls the access to the Baltic Sea, is a formidable hindrance to any intervention - apart from one where Sweden and Germany are both fully involved in (through some ASBish intervention, that is).
The only easy way to make the USSR "lose" the Winter War is for it to win it, and win easily, say because of some huge Finnish blunder. That way the Red Army would never learn about its deficiencies that became clear when it was bashing its collective head against the much-vaunted Mannerheim Line or getting frozen to death and cut to pieces in some God-forsaken patch of Karelian wilderness. Winning the Winter War easily would cause the Red Army to hurt plenty in the opening parts of TTL's Barbarossa, even if controlling the Finnish areas would arguably give some benefits to the USSR.
The only easy way to make the USSR "lose" the Winter War is for it to win it, and win easily, say because of some huge Finnish blunder. That way the Red Army would never learn about its deficiencies that became clear when it was bashing its collective head against the much-vaunted Mannerheim Line or getting frozen to death and cut to pieces in some God-forsaken patch of Karelian wilderness. Winning the Winter War easily would cause the Red Army to hurt plenty in the opening parts of TTL's Barbarossa, even if controlling the Finnish areas would arguably give some benefits to the USSR.
I agree with DrakonFin's post; The Soviet Union's initial war goal was the conquest of Finland and the country's incorporation into the multinational Soviet state, a goal which frankly coincided with the annexation of the Baltic states and Bessarabia.
That the Soviets managed to gain territory from Finland at all (Karelia, Salla, Rybachi Peninsula, etc.) was partially due to the numerical superiority of the Red Army and the lack of foreign intervention on Finland's behalf.
w/o the purges of the Red Army IMHO the Soviets may have been able to seize the entirety of Finland, but otherwise IOTL the Soviets could only achieve a limited victory.
So in a way, the Soviets did not "lose" the Winter War nor did they truly "win" it either.
Finland was fortunate IOTL that it had been spared annexation by the Red Army, while the Soviets were fortunate to have gained considerable territory from Finland as part of the ensuing peace treaty.
That the Soviets managed to gain territory from Finland at all (Karelia, Salla, Rybachi Peninsula, etc.) was partially due to the numerical superiority of the Red Army and the lack of foreign intervention on Finland's behalf.
w/o the purges of the Red Army IMHO the Soviets may have been able to seize the entirety of Finland, but otherwise IOTL the Soviets could only achieve a limited victory.
So in a way, the Soviets did not "lose" the Winter War nor did they truly "win" it either.
Finland was fortunate IOTL that it had been spared annexation by the Red Army, while the Soviets were fortunate to have gained considerable territory from Finland as part of the ensuing peace treaty.
katchen
Banned
Now here's an interesting question. If the Soviet Union had beaten Finland handily, would it had gone further?
Gone for part or all of Sweden ignoring Swedish neutrality because the prize of control of the entrance to the Baltic Sea was just that strategically important?
Opened a front in Lapland after 1942 and taken all or part of Northern Norway? Maybe the ports of Narvik and Bodo to supplement Murmansk in a postwar peace settlement?
Possibly push all the way to Oslo and set up the makings of a Norwegian People's Republic, breaking the nascent Soviet Bloc out of containment on the Atlantic (and giving the USSR forward naval bases as far west as Svalbard and Jan Mayen)?
Gone for part or all of Sweden ignoring Swedish neutrality because the prize of control of the entrance to the Baltic Sea was just that strategically important?
Opened a front in Lapland after 1942 and taken all or part of Northern Norway? Maybe the ports of Narvik and Bodo to supplement Murmansk in a postwar peace settlement?
Possibly push all the way to Oslo and set up the makings of a Norwegian People's Republic, breaking the nascent Soviet Bloc out of containment on the Atlantic (and giving the USSR forward naval bases as far west as Svalbard and Jan Mayen)?
I believe that Soviets "loosing" the war means negotiated peace. Finns did the best they could with resources available at the time. I don't see Finns marching on Leningrad anytime soon.
What is worth remembering - any negotiated peace with Stalin's Soviet Union is effectively a cease-fire as interwar Poland learned. So if the Soviets "loose" the war with Finland they will come back. With a vengeance.
EDIT: Offtopic but... TBH Soviets vassalizing Finland into one of their Soviet Republics is a cool idea. It's a crappy deal for the Finland, sure, but it would give some nice butterflies, come Barbarossa. Would Germans even attack in 1941? Time is working in Soviets favor - the more Germans delay their attack, the more RKKA is able to overhaul their equipment, training and military doctrine.
What is worth remembering - any negotiated peace with Stalin's Soviet Union is effectively a cease-fire as interwar Poland learned. So if the Soviets "loose" the war with Finland they will come back. With a vengeance.
EDIT: Offtopic but... TBH Soviets vassalizing Finland into one of their Soviet Republics is a cool idea. It's a crappy deal for the Finland, sure, but it would give some nice butterflies, come Barbarossa. Would Germans even attack in 1941? Time is working in Soviets favor - the more Germans delay their attack, the more RKKA is able to overhaul their equipment, training and military doctrine.
I'd say that is highly unlikely. For Stalin the war was all about divvying up Eastern Europe with Germany, as detailed in the MR pact's secret protocol. The USSR followed the protocol pretty closely in its expansion in 1939-41, and Sweden wasn't part of the deal. I believe Stalin understands that both Germany and the Western Allies would be very much opposed to a Soviet takeover of Sweden, and IMO would not be ready to take such a risk yet in 1939-40. IOTL, the orders given to Red Army soldiers for the war against Finland included a strict caution not to enter Swedish territory and detailed how Swedish border guards should be greeted in a cordial manner... I'd only see a Soviet invasion of Sweden in the cards if Sweden explicitly joins the Axis and becomes a combatant in WWII.
A front in Lapland is definitely likely if the Red Army has all of Finnish Lapland as of early 1940. But under what circumstances would Stalin annex any parts of Norway? IOTL the Red Army did take over a large part of Finnmark in 1945 but then withdrew after the war.
If it is a straight-up occupation that goes well for the USSR from the get-go, then we'd get a "Finnish Democratic Republic" under a government led by Otto Wille Kuusinen, a Finnish emigré Communist living in the USSR at the time. Most of the other ministers would similarly be Finnish Communists who fled to then-Petrograd after the Reds lost the Finnish Civil War in 1918, or then Soviet Communists of Finnic nationalities such as Karelians.
It is hard to say whether this Democratic Republic would stay as a nominally independent state for an extended period of time, or whether it would be incorporated into the Soviet state as a Finnish SSR in an expedited schedule like, say, Estonia was in 1940. I'm myself in two minds about that - the second option is more likely, but the first one is not impossible either as long as the Democratic Republic is firmly in de facto Soviet control.
I see. Thanks for the info.
I actually had an idea that Finland would remain nominally independent, but with loyal communist "verkhushka" at the key positions reporting directly to Moscow and country firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence. Of course it would be one-party people's republic and Finnish military would be part of Soviet strategic plans - basically same deal as Warsaw Pact countries after the war.
OTOH I honestly don't know if Finland was that strategically important for the Soviets for them to go to such lenghts. Giving a good beatdown and taking land concessions - certainly. But completely overturning Finnish applecart - debatable.
I actually had an idea that Finland would remain nominally independent, but with loyal communist "verkhushka" at the key positions reporting directly to Moscow and country firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence. Of course it would be one-party people's republic and Finnish military would be part of Soviet strategic plans - basically same deal as Warsaw Pact countries after the war.
OTOH I honestly don't know if Finland was that strategically important for the Soviets for them to go to such lenghts. Giving a good beatdown and taking land concessions - certainly. But completely overturning Finnish applecart - debatable.
It seems pretty clear that the original Soviet goal was a quick, victorious war in which the Finnish forces are trounced and a puppet government is installed. While no "smoking gun" documents with Stalin ordering it with those exact words has surfaced (and probably never will), I think at least the amount of circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion is exhaustive.
The Red Army orders were to occupy Finland and Stalin seems to have fully expected it to be a cakewalk. And after the Red Army takes Helsinki, there would really be no reason for it to leave - in that case letting Finland off with a mere slap on the wrist would have been out of character for Stalin, and in fact for the USSR too. And let us not forget that during the war the USSR did broadcast to the world that it will not accept the Finnish government as legal but has made a peace with a new Finnish government, the aforementioned puppet regime under Kuusinen.
Stalin was playing for keeps. Unfortunately for him, the Finns resisted too successfully, the war dragged on without a decisive victory, and it started to look like the war will escalate with an Anglo-French intervention. This all ruined the Soviet plans, and before a suddenly bad situation turned to catastrophic, Stalin proved his political acumen by ditching the Kuusinen regime, making a quick peace with bourgeois Finns and squeezing off some concessions to save what face he could. This was a lot less than he would have wanted, originally, but it was a lot better than the worst possible scenario for that trainwreck of a war - the thing Stalin feared the worst, encirclement by the Western Allies and a Germany that has suddenly made a peace with them to attack their common enemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
When I read what you wrote and actually the more I read about Stalin, the more I am surprised how (in addition to being cold, calculating and brutally ruthless) intelligent and frighteningly politically competent Stalin was. Hitler was just another murderous and insane visionary. Stalin was thoroughly ruthless politican for whom starving whole nations was nothing else than signature on document.
With this I can conclude that there is no way for USSR to "lose" the Winter War. The numbers are simply to overwhelming for Finland to declare victory in the conflict. And no matter how good are the Finns and how many military blunders Red Army commits with the Stalin at helm they will always manage to snatch some cookies from the table.
With this I can conclude that there is no way for USSR to "lose" the Winter War. The numbers are simply to overwhelming for Finland to declare victory in the conflict. And no matter how good are the Finns and how many military blunders Red Army commits with the Stalin at helm they will always manage to snatch some cookies from the table.
I totally agree. Finland's chances to win the war was not. The only thing they could do - bring myself to respect what the Finns turned out.
But we must not exaggerate the ruthlessness of Stalin. He could ruthlessly apply to individual people, and even to the whole social groups, but not to the people as a whole.
Here's an example: during the war, writer Ehrenburg (who is Jewish) has published an article calling for to destroy all the Germans . For this he received a severe rebuke from Stalin himself. "Comrade Ehrenburg is wrong - it was written in an article in the newspaper" Pravda "(unsigned, but all knew who the article says.) - Hitlers come and go, but the great German people remain."
Probably in the Winter War the Finns could hardly do any better than it happened OTL. I would say that original score was all in all much better for Finland than what could have been.
Stalin knew that at least parts of Germany would be under direct Soviet control so he would not want to inflame Russian hatred toward Germans more than it was necessary for war effort. As DrakonFin noted - Stalin was always playing for keeps and he was a very shrewd diplomat. He could and would be fatherly and forgiving if case demanded it, but it was all calculation.
I don't know much about Stalin's personal life, but he doesn't strike me as too caring or emotional person.
Yes, our army moved to Finland expecting an easy victory (as they say in Russian: hoping bombard them with their hats). Hence the huge loss in both men and materiel in - no one thought that the Finns decide to fight back with such a huge inequality. Just received a harsh lesson, the Red Army began to fight by the rules and eventually won, although from the point of view of world politics was too late.
I'm not a fan of Stalin, but I can say that he did much to improve the lives of the people. Sometimes it's even funny: after the war, Stalin came to the factory in the Urals city and saw that in the new houses for the workers, standing along the road there is no railing on the balconies. Asks: Why? He replied: Not enough people, not enough metal, and indeed balconies are not essentials.
-Well, - said Stalin. - Tomorrow, when I go back, let all the bosses and their families on the balcony and waved his arms to me.
For a night on the balcony railing magically appeared.