Russia has Forgotten the Hard Lessons it Learned Invading Finland

Russia learned some hard lessons when it invaded Finland in November 1939. Today in Ukraine, it’s become clear that those lessons didn’t “stick,” at least not among Russia’s decision-makers.

In the winter of 1939, Russia – having just conquered half of Poland after Germany had already knocked that country out of the war – decided that war was good business. So they invaded Finland. In Poland, the Soviets re-took land that had been under the control of Czarist Russia for two centuries before it was divided away from Russia at the treaty of Versailles. Repeating that strategy, on November 30, 1939, Russia attacked Finland, intending to recover land that had also been part of Czarist Russia before Versailles.

Like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Finland was a Baltic state that had existed for centuries, before becoming a Czarist vassal state. But unlike Poland, Finland had a strong army that had not been defeated in battle. In the Kremlin, the Soviets decided the time was right to take that territory back, thinking it would be another piece of cake as Poland had been two months earlier.

Indeed, this invasion should have been a cakewalk for the Soviets. After all, the Soviets had more soldiers in their army – 1.8 million – than Finland had males of all ages – 1.75 million – in its entire country in 1939. However, after two serious but little-known border wars earlier in 1939 with Japan along the Manchurian-Mongolian border, many of the Red Army’s best troops were still stationed along that battle line. On November 30th, the Soviet force – 450,000 men in 21 army divisions – crossed the border. Known as the Winter War, this invasion focused on the Karelian Isthmus, a strip of land that separated the Baltic Sea from Lake Ladoga. Karelia seemed to offer a “highway” between Leningrad and the Finnish capital, Helsinki. Most of the invading army – 250,000 Soviet troops – attacked along that narrow strip of land. Facing them on all fronts were just 130,000 Finnish soldiers.

However, the Red Army committed two cardinal sins – both of which they are now repeating in Ukraine. They sent in an army largely made up of newly conscripted men, virtually just out of training and ill-equipped for a long war along the Arctic Circle. Then they divided their forces, sending nearly half their army – around 200,000 men – to invade central and northern Finland, territory with no strategic value to the Soviet Union. Their divided forces were then defeated in detail.


While some of these Red Army troops had invaded Poland in September, there was a decided – and decisive – difference between Poland and the attack on Finland. First, the Polish Army had already been defeated by the German Army, which invaded 17 days earlier. What the Russians did was less of an armed invasion and more of a peaceful occupation of undefended territory. While they experienced the invasion, none of those soldiers had experienced real combat.

Against Finland, most of the Soviet soldiers – even veterans of the Polish occupation – were relatively recent conscripts, drafted into the Soviet Army and given little training before being thrust into combat. Worse, they were not prepared for...

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