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Four The Winter War and the Great Patriotic War, 1939–1945 I n early J an u ary 1 9 4 0 , a dispatch from James Aldridge, war correspondent for the New York Times covering the Soviet invasion of Finland , detailed a gruesome landscape along the forest roads just west of the Russian border. As he accompanied an advancing ski patrol in pursuit of survivors of the 163rd and 14th Red Army Corps, Aldridge was aghast at the carnage: “I came upon a sight I never want to see again. It was the main battle scene. It began with a smashed Russian tank, which had held up a four-mile-long super-mechanized battalion. . . . I squeezed my way along between the tanks, stepping over dead Russians and frozen horses . . . it was a kaleidoscope of bodies—bodies everywhere, tangled up with tippedup and scattered guns, tanks, armored cars . . . and machine-guns splattered with blood.”1 The Finnish army’s idiosyncratic form of guerrilla-style combat had already thwarted Stalin’s proposed blitzkrieg toward Helsinki across the fortified Mannerheim Line northwest of Leningrad. Now, far to the north, Soviet military leaders were learning another costly lesson in winter warfare during the protracted Battle of Suomussalmi. Between 7 December 1939 and 8 January 1940, the Red Army lost two divisions to a greatly diminished but determined battalion of Finnish ski troops.2 That winter, the world press heralded the Finns’ well-executed series of maneuvers at Suomussalmi as a courageous and monumental display of military skill.3 The Soviet Union only defeated a battered and isolated Finnish defensive force of 200,000 in February of 1940 after three months of devastating warfare, during which the Red Army employed the efforts of 1.2 million troops, while suffering huge casualties.4 Although the Soviet Union ultimately claimed victory over Finland in March, its leaders realized that, in this conflict, the Finns had outmatched the Red Army. The invasion of Finland transformed the Soviet military from an inefficient , ideologically burdened body into one of the world’s most powerful The Winter War and the Great Patriotic War, 1939–1945 89 fighting forces. By the spring of 1940, the Soviet General Staff began to pay careful attention to the details of the disastrous invasion, known subsequently as the Russo-Finnish War, the Soviet-Finnish War or the Winter War, and especially to the debacle at Suomussalmi. Contemptuous of the Finns in the first weeks of the campaign, the military leaders of the Soviet Union came to value the effectiveness and mobility of their ski troops. During the fifteen-month period after the peace settlement with Finland, the Red Army incorporated the Finnish methods by making general organizational and tactical changes, improving winter clothing and equipment and training ski troops with renewed fervor. Eventually, these Soviet ski troops developed guerrilla-style combat tactics on a scale unprecedented in the history of winter warfare, waging numerous successful campaigns against the Germans, especially in the winter of 1941–1942 during the counteroffensive to Operation Barbarossa. Nevertheless, the image of plucky Finnish skiers thwarting the masses of the Red Army remained a powerful trope throughout the Cold War era.5 Significantly, the reversal of fortunes in Finland fostered a mass ski mobilization effort in the Soviet Union beginning in the autumn of 1940. It embraced every sector of society: the military, the government, the educational system, industry, Communist Party organizations and the press, poets, musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers and athletes. The momentum generated by the ski mobilization campaign continued throughout the years of the Great Patriotic War. As one of the most successful shock movements of the Stalinist era, it had an enormous effect on the Soviet military and the development of winter sports during the Cold War. The Winter War, 1939–1940 The quagmire that evolved in the snows of Finland from the winter of 1939 through early spring of 1940 caught the Soviet Union completely off guard. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s First Secretary of Ukraine during the Winter War, recalled the consensus within the Kremlin before the invasion : “All we had to do was raise our voice a little bit, and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work, we could fire one shot and the Finns would put up their hands and surrender.”6 The USSR intended to dominate the Baltic states and the bulk of Scandinavia with minimal resistance, bolstering the defenses of the country’s northwestern border while receiving the accolades of the masses...

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