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The russians, who had a variety of quarells with the Fins did not assume they would not attack them. Every country in Europe who did adjut the Soviet Union joined in the invasion.
Why do I keep taking valuable time to remind you that the USSR invaded Finland well before Finland joined the invasion of the USSR? Do you just pretend the 1939-40 Winter War never occurred? Except for Slavophile nationalists, I don't think I've ever before heard someone try to make excuses for the Soviet bullying and invasion of Finland, or paint Finland as the bad guy for violating the armistice in 1941. The United States actually refused to declare war on Finland, even though it was an Axis co-belligerent. Good for us.
Just because Stalin was a paranoid bully doesn't make his paranoid bullying justified.
After Finland declared independence from Russian domination in 1917, there were frictions and occasional border hostilities between the Russians and Finns throughout the 1920s and 1930s. A non-aggression pact was signed between the two countries in 1934, As Germany started a military buildup, Stalin looked for buffer zones against possible German aggression. Demands were made on Finland to give up much of the Karelian Isthmus and demilitarize the Mannerheim Line, which Finland refused to do. Soon after in October of 1939, the Russians claimed that a guard post near the village of Mainila had been fired on with loss of life. Years later a report made from results of a joint Finnish and Russian investigation revealed that the NKVD actually instigated the attack as a casus belli to attack Finland. Nikita Khrushchev is said to have confirmed this report as true.
The Russian-Finnish war has always been of great interest to me. Perhaps it was the Life Magazine photos and the strange sounding names that captured my boyhood mind. I've never understood the seeming detachment of the western powers while Finland was being mauled. (BTW, Finland was one of the few nations to ever pay the US its WWI debt.) Few countries other than Sweden offered much in the way of materiel assistance. Over 8o00 Swedish volunteers joined the Finns in the defense of their homeland. The Russians expected an easy victory, but they found that the Karelian bogs and thick forests were a great obstacle to mechanized equipment.
Although often outnumbered by three and four to one, the Finns put up a fierce defense and improvised in unique ways. It's said the Molotov cocktail was invented to destroy Russian tanks, and the Finns jammed steel bars in gearing to dislodge tank treads. However, even though the Russians lost a quarter million men, the attrition of manpower was more than the Finns could stand, and they had to accept peace terms in the spring of 1940. As it was, over half of the comparatively small Finnish army had been killed or wounded. The Finns had virtually no tanks, but they had some fine hand weapons and excellent hit-and-run tactics that were very effective. One more unfortunate outcome of the war is that it made Russia look like a paper tiger and emboldened Hitler.
I pretend that it was rational to assume that a nation who had a quarrel with you might attack you. That is reasonable even for a sane country - and indeed the Bush doctrine, firmly supported by 300 million democratic, peace loving Americans specifically states that the US would preempt attacks on itself (even one that would occur far in the future, that is not being planned at present) by attacking first.
I pretend that it was rational to assume that a nation who had a quarrel with you might attack you. That is reasonable even for a sane country - and indeed the Bush doctrine, firmly supported by 300 million democratic, peace loving Americans specifically states that the US would preempt attacks on itself (even one that would occur far in the future, that is not being planned at present) by attacking first.
Numerous flawed assumptions here, even in the attempted irony.
You should cite the logic flaws. I disagree there are any. Finland and Russia had a troubled history after the first world war. It was not unreasonable at all to assume that they might join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union to gain disputed territory. And the Bush preemptive doctrine, like the Winter War, specifically states that nations that might attack the US in the future may be attacked by the US. Its the whole point of preemeption.
I think you favor one state, and apply different standards to it as a result.
Thanks in advance for insights provided so far on this topic. I have a few follow-up questions for further insights.
1. I still have hard time believing how such an enormous casualty figure could be sustained by one nation. I keep thinking, "O.K. I know how large of a number one million people is. 27 million casualty by one nation is just incredulous. That is even more than the entire population of Korea at the time (20 million)."
How did losing that many number of people affect the post-WWII Soviet Union economically, psychologically and and as a nation?
2. I personally believe the revenge upon revenge is wrong but it is incredibly hard to forgive someone who slaughtered your countrymen and treated you as "sub-human."
Before the battle of Berlin, was the German population afraid of Russians because of mere propaganda by Goebbels or because of what the Nazi troops had done in Soviet Union and the revenge was coming?
3. I realize there were number of conscientious, good, and moral Germans during WWII who were in disgust of Nazi leadership. There were multiple asassination attempts to get rid of Hitler in Germany. But there were number of concentration camps inside Germany itself notably Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Even if the Nazis tried to hide the atrocity from the public view, the German population at least must have sensed something sinister was going on with all the trains carrying malnourished, overworked men, women, children, and elderly.
Could German population have done more to save more Jews from harm's way or even put up a massive protest decrying the brutality of the Nazi regime?
As far as number 3 is concerned, it is one of the great fictions of the war that the German population didn't know what was happening in concentration camps. They may not have known of the extent of the depravity, but they certainly knew about the evil. We helped foster this fiction after the war because we needed the Germans during the Cold War.
The other great fiction, by the way, is that all of the Nazi atrocities were committed by SS troops and that the Wehrmacht wasn't responsible for any. Absolutely untrue.
One of the jokes that went around occupied Germany after the war was that it was a miracle that all of the Nazis had been killed and only those Germans who were opposed to the Nazis survived.
How did losing that many number of people affect the post-WWII Soviet Union economically, psychologically and and as a nation?
2. I personally believe the revenge upon revenge is wrong but it is incredibly hard to forgive someone who slaughtered your countrymen and treated you as "sub-human."
Stalin was frightened , the national consciousness was very high. He had to drink wine and to speak "glory to Rus people ". I saw photos, there on a wall have been written: "glory to Rus people". Now (for struggle against racism) not this inscription .
3. I realize there were number of conscientious, good, and moral Germans during WWII who were in disgust of Nazi leadership. There were multiple asassination attempts to get rid of Hitler in Germany. But there were number of concentration camps inside Germany itself notably Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Even if the Nazis tried to hide the atrocity from the public view, the German population at least must have sensed something sinister was going on with all the trains carrying malnourished, overworked men, women, children, and elderly.
Could German population have done more to save more Jews from harm's way or even put up a massive protest decrying the brutality of the Nazi regime?
Without the selective avoidance of inquiry, passive acceptance, desire not to know, and active participation of the German and other populations, the Holocaust would not have been possible. In my view, the Holocaust was simply the general European (especially Polish and Russian) hostility toward Jewry, taken to a much greater extreme than previously contemplated, and extended to other groups which had also historically been persecuted or marginalized.
Not that it made the Holocaust something to be pleased about in any way, of course, but evidently it took a program so monstrous to make anti-Jewish sentiment all of a sudden seem repulsive to Europeans. (Obviously, not all Europeans. And, by the way, a lot of Americans. Even after WWII, a lot of private clubs were 'restricted' (translation: no Jews, please).) It marked one of the first times the Jewish people had gotten any sort of near-universal sympathy for the crap, abuse and random murder they had to put up with for many centuries. Suddenly even casual (as opposed to homicidal) anti-Judaism was out of fashion, a status most Jews of the post-WWII era had never experienced.
The pendulum from an extreme event usually swings pretty far the other direction, of course, which has led to the modern State of Israel (very foolishly, in my view) branding any critic of its actions as an anti-Semite, and created hypersensitivity today on anything remotely pertaining to Judaism or Israel. That oscillation is an extreme as well. And it will probably persist as long as most of the people who point it out so often seem to be the same ones who, when you drill down a little, really are anti-Jewish, really do believe in some zany world Jewish conspiracy, and really do try and minimize or deny the Holocaust. (Happens often on here, for example.) The modern platform on which to stand to propose a balanced, historically defensible view of both ha'Shoah and Medinat Isra'el is a tiny one and both extremes seem to do their best to dismantle it.
At least 289,000 southern soldiers died in the civil war (estimates are incomplete). In 1860 there were about 5,600,000 non-slave southerners, about half of them male. So more than a tenth of the white male population died in the war - and far more of those actually of the age to be soldiers. This says nothing of those that died because of the economic and political dislocation created by the war of which there obviously were quite a few.
Nations will take very high casualities if they are fighting for an important issue. In the case of the Second World War, Russians either had to fight or be detroyed by a nation that left little doubt what there fate would be under German control.
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