Red Army 1939-40

Lessons of the Winter War: A Study in the Military Effectiveness
of the Red Army, 1939–1940

Roger R. Reese
The Journal of Military History, Volume 72, Number 3, July 2008,

pp. 825-852 (Article)
Published by Society for Military History

DOI: 10.1353/jmh.0.0004
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jmh/summary/v072/72.3.reese.html
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Lessons of the Winter War: A Study in the
Military Effectiveness of the Red Army,
1939-1940
I
Roger R. Reese
Abstract
The Soviet war against Finland (1939-40) is generally seen as a fi-
asco because the U.S.S.R. failed to conquer and absorb Finland, as
Joseph Stalin had planned; and the Finns inflicted losses on the Red
Army that were far out of proportion to the small size of their army and
their own casualties. Access to fresh sources, archival and memoir,
suggest that although the Soviets fell short of their political goals and
performed dismally in combat, the Red Army was far more militarily
effective than was appreciated by the Soviet military and political lead-
ership, the German armed forces high command, and contemporary
observers.
T he Soviet Union’s war with Finland, commonly referred to as the Winter War,
began on 30 November 1939 with an unprovoked attack by the U.S.S.R. and
ended on 12 March 1940 with a negotiated peace that vastly favored the Soviet
Union. Nevertheless, the Soviet war against Finland is universally seen as a fiasco
for two reasons: first, Joseph Stalin’s secret goal was to conquer the country and
absorb it into the Soviet Union, yet Finland remained an independent and sover-
eign state; and second, the losses the Finns inflicted on the Red Army were far out
Roger Reese is Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He specializes in the study
of the social-historical aspects of the Soviet Army. He has written Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers:
A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941 and Red Commanders: A Social History of the
Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918-1991. He is currently working on a book on the military
effectiveness of the Soviet soldier during the Second World War.
The Journal of Military History 72 ( July 2008): 825–852.

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★ 825
ROGER R. REESE
of proportion to the small size of the Finnish army and the casualties it suffered.
The perspectives offered by time and access to fresh sources, archival and memoir,
suggest that although the Soviets fell short of their political goals and performed
dismally in combat, the Red Army was far more militarily effective than appreci-
ated by the Soviet military and political leadership, Adolf Hitler and the German
armed forces high command, contemporary observers—most notably Winston
Churchill—and, in the generations since, historians. Contemporaries such as news
correspondent Alexander Werth and Soviet generals, as reflected in their memoirs,
viewed the Winter War in overly pessimistic terms.1 Later, historians John Erick-
son, David Glantz, and Albert Seaton, to name a few, followed the initial trend in
missing the clues of Red Army effectiveness offered by the Winter War, reporting
only the negative aspects of Soviet military efficiency in that conflict.2
The conclusion that, in fact, the Winter War showed the Red Army to be
effective is derived from using, as a baseline, the following criteria of military
effectiveness: the army overall as an institution, the forces in the theater of
operations, and most if not a majority of individual soldiers never lost the desire
to overcome the foe; unit cohesion, although seriously challenged, remained for
the most part intact, while morale waned and wavered but never collapsed; the
soldiers’ investment (interest) in the success of the mission never failed; and dis-
cipline, if sometimes tenuous, did not give way. Beyond that, the military’s staying
power proved robust, the ideological commitment of the majority of soldiers and
members of the general military organization never faltered, and their and civil-
ian support of the war remained strong in the face of massive casualties, localized
disasters, and visibly incompetent leadership, along with poor planning, chaotic
organization, unexpectedly severe weather conditions, and a resilient, resourceful
enemy. That is all the more surprising considering that by all objective indices
of the preparedness of the Red Army in 1939 in the months leading up to the
war and into the first six weeks of fighting, this was an army that one would
have the right to expect to collapse when put up against a competent foe. Yet it
did not. The most salient question from the standpoint of “virtual history” and
causal analysis is whether Hitler and his generals, had they appreciated the fiber
of the Red Army, might have planned their war against the U.S.S.R. in 1941
1. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1964), 74-80;
Sergei Shtemenko, The Soviet General Staff at War, 1941-1945 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1985), 23-25; Seweryn Bialer, Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs of World War II
(New York: Pegasus, 1969), 130-37.
2. John Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941, 3rd
ed. (London and Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2001), 541-48; David Glantz and Jonathan House,
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1995), 18-23; Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 1941-45 (New York: Praeger, 1971), 47.
826 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

Lessons of the Winter War, 1939-1940
much differently, not as a blitzkrieg, but as a longer and more extended and more
incremental series of campaigns, lasting into the winter and perhaps for years—or
they might have been deterred altogether.

For several months preceding the invasion in November 1939, Soviet dip-
lomats had engaged in negotiations with Finland about transferring Finnish
territory to the U.S.S.R. to build air and naval bases, granting the Soviet Navy
Finland’s Hanko naval base, and ceding Finnish territory north of Leningrad for
“security” purposes. Stalin also insisted Finland sign a mutual assistance treaty,
which would allow the Soviet military the right to enter Finnish territory to
assist in its defense. The Finns proclaimed staunch neutrality and refused all
Soviet demands. The Soviet motivation may have been two-fold: first, Stalin had
mounted a campaign to restore the pre-World War I boundaries of the Russian
Empire, beginning in Poland, then in Finland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia;
and second, Stalin had a genuine fear of attack by Nazi Germany and suspected,
quite incorrectly, that Finland would ally with the Germans and provide a spring-
board for a Nazi attack on northwest U.S.S.R. and Leningrad in particular. That
Stalin sought more than just air and naval bases but intended to absorb Finland
in toto is reflected in his creation of a puppet government in exile of communist
Finns to be installed after the victory, and in Soviet invasion plans, which called
for the complete conquest and occupation of the country. In the end both diplo-
matic and military intelligence failed in the war with Finland. Until attacked by
the U.S.S.R., the Finns had had no desire or intention to join the Axis or allow
Germany to use their territory to attack the Soviet Union. After the Winter War
Finland did indeed reluctantly ally with Germany out of fear of further Soviet
aggression and a desire to regain its territory lost to the U.S.S.R..
The Ministry of Defense, headed by Stalin’s longtime crony Marshal Kli-
ment Voroshilov, and the staff of the Leningrad Military District, under the
command of General Kirill Meretskov, began planning the invasion in Septem-
ber 1939. They envisioned the forces of the Leningrad Military District, which
had been augmented by twenty divisions comprised primarily of conscripts and
reservists, quickly overrunning the Finns and crushing whatever resistance might
be offered.3 The depth of their fantasy was reflected by plans positing total defeat
of the Finnish military and occupation of the country in only twelve days, which
is made all the more damning by Meretskov’s claim in his memoirs that in late
winter 1939 he had toured the border and, after his staff car became stuck in the
deep snow, concluded that “should hostilities break out in the winter it would
3. N. I. Baryshnikov, ed., Istoriia ordena Lenina Leningradskogo voennogo okruga (Moscow:

Voenizdat, 1988), 126-31.
MILITARY HISTORY ★ 827

ROGER R. REESE
be very difficult to conduct military operations in this region.”4 He claims to

have initially raised objections to the short timetable; however, he proposed no
alternate plan, though General Boris Shaposhnikov did submit a plan, rejected by
Stalin, calling for a campaign of several months’ duration.5
Meretskov and his planners divided the war zone into four main areas and
assigned each to an army: the Seventh Army was to attack just north of Lenin-
grad on Finland’s southern border between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga;
the Eighth Army was positioned on the northeast side of Lake Ladoga; the Ninth
Army was situated on the Eighth Army’s northern flank along Finland’s eastern
border; and finally, the Fourteenth Army, astride the Ninth Army, was assigned
the northernmost stretch of the Soviet-Finnish border up to the Barents Sea. The
Seventh Army was to attack northward, capture Viipuri, then swing westward,
capture Helsinki, and continue to the port of Hanko. The Eighth Army was to
cover its flank by attacking westward. The Ninth Army was to cut Finland in half
at its narrowest point by driving all the way from Soumussalmi on the border to
the Gulf of Bothnia, capturing the port of Oulu. The Fourteenth Army, based in
Murmansk, would move against Finland’s northernmost port of Petsamo and the
city of Rovaniemi.6
When the war began, much went awry. Instead of the anticipated weak and
ineffectual resistance, the Seventh Army ran into the Mannerheim Line, a system
of fortified strong points of well-camouflaged, reinforced concrete bunkers and
trench networks conceived along the lines of the French Maginot Line, named
for General Karl Mannerheim, former tsarist general, hero of Finland’s war of
independence against the Soviets in 1918, and commander-in-chief of Finland’s
army. Soviet forces suffered casualties on a scale reminiscent of the First World
War trying to break this line, which took until late February 1940, and by the time
of the armistice on 12 March, Seventh Army had just barely reached Viipuri. And
even though the Eighth Army did not face such formidable defenses, it advanced
only a few miles, and never got around the north shore of Lake Ladoga. Ninth
Army also paid a steep price in blood for minimal gains against much smaller
Finnish forces. In the end, as an astonished world looked on, no Russian army
reached its designated goal.
4. O. Manninen, “Pervyi period boev,” in Zimniaia voina 1939-1940. Kniga pervaia. Politicheska-
ia istoriia (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 145-47; N. N. Voronov, Na sluzhbe voennoi (Moscow: Voenizdat,
1963), 136-37; Kirill Meretskov, Serving the People (Moscow: Progress, 1971), 100-101.
5. Meretskov, Serving the People, 105-6.
6. Allen F. Chew, The White Death: The Epic of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1971), 7-9; Baryshnikov, Istoriia ordena Lenina Leningradskogo
voennogo okruga, 130-31.

Barents Sea
Petsamo
Murmansk
Fourteenth
Army
Rovaniemi
Suomussalmi
Ninth Army
Eighth
Army
Seventh Army
The winter war in Finland, 1939-1940 (Map: James R. Arnold)

ROGER R. REESE
At the end of December 1939, after replacing and reassigning many high-
ranking officers including Meretskov, and putting Marshal Semen Timoshenko
in charge, Stalin called for a new approach to the war, with far-less-ambitious
goals. Timoshenko did indeed devise a new strategy that took advantage of the
strengths of the Red Army. Rather than attack in all areas, he concentrated the
war on the Karelian Isthmus with the goal of breaking the Mannerheim Line
and seizing Viipuri, using massed artillery and tanks to support infantry attacks.
The Stavka, the wartime organization of the armed forces high command, subse-
quently strengthened the forces at his disposal by an additional twenty-one rifle
divisions, twenty artillery regiments, four super-heavy artillery battalions, six tank
brigades, and fifteen air regiments, which he concentrated in Seventh and Thir-
teenth Armies.7 It was a conscious plan to create a war of attrition rather than
maneuver, which implicitly accepted suffering large numbers of casualties. This
strategy ultimately succeeded. In February 1940, the Red Army, in what historian
John Erickson termed “its second war with Finland,”8 broke the Mannerheim
Line and advanced on Viipuri, forcing the Finns to the peace table, where the
U.S.S.R. achieved its revised war aims of acquiring Karelia up to and including
Viipuri and the entire north and west shores of Lake Ladoga, some islands in the
Gulf of Finland, an airbase at Porkkala, and territory in the north around Petsamo
and Salla.
All told, the Red Army is estimated to have lost 131,476 dead and missing,
264,908 wounded and injured, 132,213 frostbitten, and 5,486 captured (534,083
total) out of over 900,000 men involved in the war (just under 60 percent casual-
ties). The Finns lost around 22,430 killed and missing, 43,357 wounded, and 847
soldiers captured by the Soviets. A further 1,029 Finnish civilians were killed.9
The Winter War lasted 105 days, producing an average daily casualty count of
5,086 Soviet servicemen; in comparison, one of the bloodiest battles during the
Great Patriotic War (the Soviet war with Germany, 1941-45), the battle of Stalin-
grad - from its beginning on 17 July to 18 November 1942, when the Red Army
7. F. 34980, op. 10, d. 7, ll.1-2, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (henceforth,

RGVA), Moscow.
8. Erickson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941, 547.
9. F. 34980, Op. 15, d. 200, 203, 204, 206, 208, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, RGVA; G. F.
Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti sniat: Poteri Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviiakh
i voennykh konfliktakh: Statisticheskoi issledovanie (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993), 93-126; “O Na-
koplenii Nachal’stvuiushchego sostava im Raboche-Krest’ianskoi Krasnoi Armii: Iz spravki-
doklada Upravleniia po nachal’stvuiushchemu sostavu RKKA Narkomata Oborony SSSR E.
A. Shchadenko, 20 Marta 1940 g.,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 1 (1990): 181; Evgenii Balashov,
Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-1940 gg. Chast’ I (St.
Petersburg: Galeia Print, 1999), 176, 180; O. Manninen, “Moshchnoe sovetskoe nastuplenie,”
in Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 1: Politicheskaia istoriia, ed. O. A. Rzheshevskii and O.
Vekhviliainen (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 324-35.

completed the counteroffensive to encircle the city - produced a daily casualty

count of 3,280 Soviet soldiers.10
The course of events in 1939-40 raises several questions in respect to the
ability of the Red Army to maintain momentum and cohesion when caught by
surprise by the scale and tenacity of enemy defenses and especially severe weather
conditions. How, in the face of widespread disorganization, mission failure, and
stunningly high casualties, did morale, motivation, unit integrity, and discipline-
the bedrocks of military effectiveness - remain strong enough for the Soviets to
prevail? Clearly, the Red Army frequently faced grave problems with morale and
discipline during the Winter War, difficulties which underlie the framing of any
hypothesis about its ultimate success. Beyond defeat and extreme discomfort, the
major cause of low morale and indiscipline was the high casualties from both
combat and weather. Although Soviet soldiers did retreat, desert, surrender, shirk,
and inflict wounds on themselves to get out of combat,11 and units were often
deployed in disarray, none of these factors escalated to the point that they threat-
ened to destroy the overall military effectiveness of the Soviet forces.
The real test of military effectiveness came once the Red Army was in combat
and the men had to decide if they were to persevere, and risk their lives and safety.
These decisions were made more difficult than one would expect because at the
beginning of the war, before many units had gotten into combat, most men had
been led to assume the war would be short and victory would be easy. The official
line imparted by the commissars of the Leningrad Military District was that
“victory over the enemy shall be achieved with little blood.”12 The stark reality
was quite the opposite. In the first three weeks of the war, in the south, several
Finnish regiments all but destroyed the Seventh Army’s 75th, 139th, and 155th
Rifle Divisions, inflicting over 10,000 casualties well before these units even
reached the Finns’ solid fixed defenses.13 Simultaneously, farther north, the Ninth
Army’s 163rd and 44th Infantry Divisions were both decimated in their attempts
to cut Finland in half, between them losing to the Finns many thousands of dead
and wounded, over 2,000 prisoners, 53 tanks, and 114 artillery pieces.14 In both
instances the Soviets heavily outnumbered their opponents. In the far north, the
Fourteenth Army’s two divisions, the 52nd Rifle and 104th Mountain, advanced
deep into Finland unopposed. When Finnish forces did arrive, they forced back
10. Evgenii Balashov, Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu

1939-1940 gg. Chast’ II (St. Petersburg: Galeia Print, 2000), 55.
11. E. N. Kulkov and O. A. Rzheshevskii, eds., Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2: I.
V. Stalin i finskaia kampaniia: (Stenogramma soveshchaniia pri TsK VKP (b)) (Moscow: Nauka,
1998), 36, 52-53, 61, 91.
12. O. Manninen, “Pervyi period boev,” 149. He cites f. 34980, op. 5, d. 269, l. 15, RGVA,
for the quote.
13. F. 34980, op. 10, d. 1242, l. 25; d. 2935, l. not listed; d. 2990, l. 14, RGVA.
14. F. 34980, op. 14, d. 283, l. 32; op. 5, d. 292, l. 34, RGVA.

ROGER R. REESE
the Red Army units several miles, though with only light casualties. Once they
stopped retreating, these forces dug in and remained immobile for the rest of the
war.15 Elsewhere, on Finland’s southeastern border, numerous Soviet divisions
were encircled and carved into smaller pockets of resistance, called mottis by
the Finns. By the first week of January 1940 it was clear that Meretskov’s initial
plan had failed and that he, Stalin, and the Red Army high command had mas-
sively underrated their enemy and overestimated the abilities of their own forces.
Nevertheless, somehow, despite tens of thousands of men killed, wounded, and
captured, and vast losses of matériel, Soviet forces remained on the field of battle
and continued to fight, although, with a few notable exceptions, more fiercely
than well.

The first indication of how motivation, morale, cohesion, discipline, invest-
ment in the war, and staying power would hold up came during the disasters of
December 1939. To the Red Army’s credit they all held up, though at times tenu-
ously. There were no mass surrenders, and few refusals to fight. There were, how-
ever, some panicky headlong retreats of battalions and regiments, and breakdowns
in authority, which is almost to be expected of poorly trained, poorly led, and
unblooded conscripts. There also were occasions where men hesitated to move
forward and officers had to plead, cajole, or use threats to get the men to advance
under enemy fire. The high command after the war blamed these problems on
insufficiently rigorous peacetime training of both soldiers and officers.16
The low number of men who surrendered or were captured raises the ques-
tion of why so few went into captivity, given the plethora of tactical situations
that occurred in which one would expect large numbers of prisoners. The first,
but superficial, answer would be that the Soviet state considered surrender to
be a crime. In the 1926 criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federated Social-
ist Republic (RSFSR), Article 193 “Voluntary Abandonment of the Battlefield”
listed surrender to the enemy not caused by combat action as a crime punishable
by death. On this basis officers and politruki (political officers) taught their men
that capture by the enemy amounted to treason.17 This would seem to provide
a fairly effective deterrent to surrender. However, it is questionable how seri-
ously average soldiers took this proscription, and also how thoroughly they were
instructed on it. If the 5,486 men captured by the Finns really had believed they
would be prosecuted upon repatriation, certainly more than just 74 would have
requested asylum in Finland. In fact, 4,704 repatriated men were secretly pros-
15. F. 34980, op. 7, d. 24, l. 19, RGVA.

16. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 21, 72.
17. Aleksei G. Maslov, “I Returned from Prison,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 19, no.
4 (December 2006): 752.

ecuted and either executed or sent to camps.18 To desert the front in time of war
was also a crime, punishable by execution, yet thousands of soldiers chose to take
that risk as well. Those who surrendered may have very well weighed the option
between death and imprisonment and decided in favor of their chances at trial.
So it is not clear that these abstract threats served as a deterrent to the majority
of Red Army men.
Given the above qualifications, the dearth of surrenders was especially
remarkable for several reasons. First, weather conditions were absolutely fright-
fully cold, and surrender meant warm shelter and hot food. Second, the Russians
had no fear of being murdered or mistreated by the Finns if they gave up. Third,
the Russians had little if any hatred of the Finns that would drive men to fight to
the death in hopeless situations. Fourth, although there were the official sanctions
against surrender, being surrounded with little or no capacity to resist seemed to
offer a legitimate excuse to give up. Fifth, there were many opportunities and situ-
ations where surrender seemed quite reasonable; from a tactical standpoint they
could be interpreted as being caused by the combat situation, such as the battles of
the mottis. Finally, liberal and modern Finland looked very inviting indeed if a sol-
dier were disaffected by the Stalinist state’s social policies, and according to Sarah
Davies many people were indeed disaffected by the regime’s failure to implement
the promises of the socialist revolution19 - the miseries of collectivization, rapid
urbanization or industrialization and the very difficult conditions of life they had
created, or the terror of the purges and Gulag camps, or political alienation. Yet,
few Red Army soldiers pursued that alternative.
The mottis, located primarily in the area of the Eighth Army, seemed likely
candidates for surrender, yet they either fought to the last man, or held out until
the end of the war. Only a few managed to break out and rejoin the main body
of Soviet forces. There are no examples of mottis surrendering. The men in these
encirclements suffered serious privations: shortages of food, water, and medical
supplies. Examples of the stalwart defense against all odds put up by some Red
Army men is recounted by Finns who reported that one company-sized motti
of the 18th Rifle Division suffered the death or wounding of 83 of 85 soldiers,
but the last two unwounded men still refused to surrender. Another annihilated
18. Of the over 5,000 Red Army men captured by the Finns who were repatriated in 1940,
350 were summarily executed and 4,354 were sentenced to hard labor in the camps for terms of
five to eight years. The majority of these men came from the destroyed 44th and 163rd Rifle Di-
visions. Yet, during and after the Great Patriotic War, being captured in an encirclement was not
grounds for punishment. See Manninen, “Moshchnoe sovetskoe nastuplenie,” 326; and Mikhail
Semiryaga, The Winter War: Looking Back after Fifty Years (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 29-30.
19. Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 1-19.

ROGER R. REESE
motti, that of the encircled 34th Light Tank Brigade, yielded 2,050 dead Russian
soldiers, but only 58 prisoners.20
Considering the mindset and conditions under which the Soviet soldiers
fought in the Winter War offers perspective on the degree of motivation and
discipline that held the army together during this war despite the tensions that
threatened to rend it apart. Beyond most soldiers’ sense of shock when they
realized how unprepared they were for the type of fighting they were engaged
in, they were further dismayed at suffering high losses for little or no tactical
gain. Dmitrii Krutskikh, assigned to the engineers as a platoon leader at the last
minute and constantly on the front lines, had meager training - two years in a
military-political school to become a commissar. He recalled that only he and
seven other men in his unit came through the war unscathed. The problem was
that they had not been properly trained for combat and had to learn under fire:
“Learning in combat means losing people. It must be said - our experience was
earned through a lot of blood. In my unit, I practically had to replace everybody. I
had 18 people killed in my unit.”21 Lieutenant Aleksei Shilin had a similar story.
In December his infantry regiment attacked over and over for days: “Our losses
were enormous, but there was no gain”; however, in February, “it was a new war,”
but by then “many of my friends were already dead.”22 When the soldiers became
disillusioned with the idea that the war would be short and learned that they were
not well prepared for it, their two most prevalent responses were a deep fear of the
Finns’ prowess, or firm determination to find ways to beat them.
20. Chew, The White Death, 137-38; V. Zenzinov, Vstrecha s Rossiei: kak i chem zhivut v sovetskom
soiuze: pis’ma v Krasnuiu Armiiu, 1939-1940 (New York: 1944), 39-40. Zenzinov refers to the unit
as the 34th Tank Battalion, but this is incorrect. Soviet sources identify it as a brigade.
21. Dmitrii Krutskikh, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com. This interview,
and the ones from this web site that follow herein, are among the more recent sources of oral
history on the worldwide web. Bair Irincheev, Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of
Helsinki, founded this site in 2000. Despite the fact that the interviews were conducted forty or
more years after the war, the lucidity of the testimony indicates that the interviewees’ experiences
and thoughts about the war ought to be taken as valid, even if not precisely accurate in every
detail, because the war was the most significant event of their lives and made an indelible impres-
sion on them. Nevertheless, I have employed them with some caution and used them primarily
for their descriptive nature, and not for interpretive or analytical purposes except where there are
corroborating sources.
22. Aleksei Shilin, interview at www.iremember.ru. This interview and the ones that follow
herein are also from a recent source of oral history on the worldwide web. The site www.iremem-
ber.ru was founded in 2001 by Oleg Sheremet and Artem Drabkin with the support of a grant
from the Russian Federation Ministry of Print Media, Television, and Radio. I stand by the use
of these interviews for the same reasons given in note 21. Although Sheremet and Drabkin are
not historians, they have conducted their interviews using an instrument prepared for them by
noted scholar Konstantin Simonov, who heads a Russian World War II memory project, and
by eminent social-psychologist Elena Seniavskaia of Moscow State University, who studies the
effects of war on soldiers. The instrument is available for viewing at the website. Seniavskaia
conducted several of the interviews herself.

Despite the losses, neither of these young lieutenants or their superiors con-
sidered the war to be hopeless or believed that the invasion should be abandoned.
Some, like Lieutenant Ponomarenko, an artillery forward observer, were able to
rationalize the high casualties. The Finns inflicted large numbers of losses on the
Soviet infantry in part because of their highly accurate mortar fire, but more so,
according to Ponomarenko, because of the laziness of the Soviet soldiers. Instead
of digging foxholes in the hard ground, the infantry built one-meter-high above-
ground shelters of earth and ten-centimeter-wide logs. When a bombardment
started, “infantry would dive into those shelters and stick in them like herrings in
a jar.” Once Ponomarenko observed a mortar round score a direct hit on one of
these shelters, destroying it and killing all twenty men inside: “To be short, it was
one big lump of human flesh. So the infantry of the 90th Rifle Division could
blame themselves for such high losses.”23 More accurately, officers were equally to
blame for not making their men prepare proper defensive positions.
Still others, like Mikhail Lukinov, an artillery lieutenant, found ways to place
specific blame for crippling losses. He recounted that the division commander
had planned to rotate his three regiments in and out of combat every ten days. The
soldiers in his regiment, the 306th Rifle Regiment, went in first, and expected to
be relieved after they had been in combat for ten days; however, when the division
commander saw how serious the casualties were, he decided not to wear down
his other two regiments the same way so he kept the 306th in the line until it
was utterly worn out. The regiment stayed in constant battle for twenty-two days.
According to Lukinov, “We turned into some half-beasts: frostbitten, dirty, lice
infested, unshaven, in clothes burned from the fires, unable to say a single phrase
without obscene cursing.”24 Yet, the regiment held together, maintaining its cohe-
sion and the will to fight.
Lieutenant Gleb Chistov gives testimony of the sometime catastrophic num-
ber of casualties. On 12 February, during the main offensive against the Man-
nerheim Line that began that month, the Chief Medical Officer of the Corps
told him to tally the number of wounded he evacuated. He recalled, “During the
day of February 12, I counted 1200 wounded that our platoon evacuated to the
medical battalion of the 123rd Rifle Division. I do not know who was counting
the wounded after that, probably a clerk or someone. But I remembered this
number - 1200 wounded — very well. This is the number that we evacuated
from morning till evening.”25 Experiencing such a bloodletting must surely have
tried men’s souls.
Red Army personnel policies proved to be challenges to cohesion and con-
tributed to high casualties. Because of the huge losses and the need to keep troop
23. Nikolai A. Ponomarenko, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

24. Mikhail Lukinov, excerpt located at www.mannerheim-line.com.
25. Gleb Chistov, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

ROGER R. REESE
strength up, in the course of the war the army threw in thousands of untrained
or undertrained replacements who, once at the front, had to be taught such basic
tasks as marksmanship and throwing hand grenades. Late in the war one corps
received over 5,000 replacements who had not yet been taught to handle a rifle.26
Many replacements were in their thirties and forties, men who had not seen
military service for a decade or more, and who were physically unfit and reluctant
to undertake strenuous efforts or risk their lives. Such throwing of untrained and
physically unprepared men into the fray reduced unit morale and cohesion and
increased casualties, rather than easing them. The United States Army used the
same replacement policy during the Second World War with similar results.
Gregory Ugryumov was a reserve officer called up in summer 1939. His
example illustrates the organizational and tactical practices that yielded high
casualties, meager results, and low morale, as well as the ability of units to main-
tain their effectiveness despite such problems. His battalion, lacking artillery and
with only a few machine guns in support, had orders to attack a Finnish village
early in the evening by charging across a frozen lake. When they were less than
100 meters from the houses the Finns opened fire, massacring them in the open.
After lying in the snow for an indeterminate amount of time, shooting indiscrim-
inately, men began to fall back without orders, Ugryumov and the surviving offi-
cers joining them. Subsequently, the battalion commander gathered the surviving
officers together and ordered them to attack once more: “And let’s not lie in the
snow dreaming of warm beds. The village must be taken!” He instructed company
commanders to shoot anyone who fell back or turned around. Ugryumov, with
only 38 men left of his original complement of more than 100, was skeptical that
this second attack would succeed, and thought: “One didn’t have to be a psycholo-
gist to know that the new attack, in which the soldiers would have to climb over
the bodies of their killed and wounded comrades, would fail.”27
The attack did fail at the cost of more dead and wounded soldiers. The divi-
sion commander, when informed that the attack had failed, ordered a third try
and warned the officers that if they were again unsuccessful and they lived, it
would not be for long. The third attack, carried out dutifully, but unenthusiasti-
cally, failed too, but when the wounded battalion commander explained to his
regiment commander that the extent of the losses left so few soldiers that making
a fourth attack would be meaningless, he allowed them to withdraw. Ugryumov,
because of the senselessness of the losses and the tenacity with which the Finns
defended their country against the Soviets, became one of the few who began to
question the war and the political leadership.28
26. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 22.
27. Gregory Ugryumov, “Faith Betrayed,” in Thirteen Who Fled, ed. Louis Fischer (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 215-18.
28. Ibid., 219-20.

In contrast to the fatalistic resolve shown by Ugryumov’s battalion, the com-

mander of the 142nd Rifle Division reported numerous problems with men going
to ground and staying down during attacks: “I remember the attack I led person-
ally at Kiviniemi. As soon as we got under machine-gun fire, the men hit the
deck and much energy was spent getting them to fulfill the task set by the army
commander.”29 Because of the inexperience and ineptitude of many low-ranking
leaders, senior officers often went up front to rally the troops. As a result high-
ranking officers suffered heavy casualties, to include regiment and even division
commanders.30
The wretched weather also caused casualties, weakened morale, and tested
the troops’ commitment to the war. According to available data, the temperature
rose above freezing only ten times during the entire campaign.31 Georgi Prusa-
kov, whose unit fought along the coast against fortified islands, remembered that
only 136 of 764 men of his battalion made it back from the war intact, but not all
losses were related to combat: “Many suffered frostbite, although we had goose
fat against frostbite. Many men suffered frostbite due to their own negligence -
during short breaks during the advance, why not pull out warm valenki felt boots
from your bag and change? No, they preferred to stay in jackboots, and there
you go.”32 In this case, poor training and leadership were as much to blame for
frostbite casualties as the cold itself. The top leadership was also to blame for not
thoroughly equipping the men with winter gear before the war. Few soldiers had
the option of warm valenki boots in December, and many were without gloves
and mittens. Lieutenant Aleksei Shilin complained that his infantry unit had not
been supplied with winter uniforms before being transferred from the Ukraine,
and that “I froze like I never have at any other time in my life!”33 Units like his
arrived in the battle zone in summer uniforms and worn-out boots, supplemented
only by their greatcoats, which proved cumbersome in deep snow. Commanders
appealed to the Ministry of Defense for appropriate winter wear only when cold
injuries began to mount. All told, the Red Army recorded over 132,000 frost-
bite casualties - men frostbitten to the degree that they had to be evacuated to
hospital, and in many cases lost toes, fingers, or ears. In Private Nikolai Guzhva’s
opinion, “There, not many died from fire, more died from freezing.”34
30. Vasilii Davidenko, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.
31. “Meteousloviia vo vremia voennykh deistvii na Karel’skom peresheike,” in Balashov, Prin-
imai nas, suomi-krasavitsa! “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-1940 gg., Chast’ I, 181.
32. Georgi Prusakov, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.
33. Aleksei Shilin, interview located at www.iremember.ru.
34. Nikolai A. Guzhva, interview located at www.iremember.ru.

ROGER R. REESE
Morale was seriously challenged at times not only by the casualties and the
weather, but also by inadequate logistical support. The army soon ran critically
short of trucks due to combat action, wear and tear, the effect of the cold on trans-
port, and not being at full complement at the start of the war.35 The shortage of
trucks hampered delivery of food, fuel, and ammunition, as well as the evacuation
of casualties. To complicate matters, horse-drawn transport was also in short sup-
ply because the cold killed and disabled horses, and hindered their mobility.
The everyday difficulties of life in the brief fight with Finland challenged
morale. Meager rations of a daily hardtack biscuit and piece of horsemeat sus-
tained the men. If they were lucky they might occasionally get canned meat.
Frontline troops went the whole war without bathing. Consequently lice plagued
the men. More serious, the logistical services seemed to have forgotten the need
to provide fresh water, so men had to improvise to keep hydrated. One soldier
reported: “There was no water at our positions. There was only a small brook in
no-man's land where both sides drew water.” When his unit’s political officers
found out the shared nature of the water source, they made the soldiers shoot
at the Finns gathering water, who naturally thereafter shot at the Soviets when
they tried to get water, thus depriving both sides of the use of the stream. Then,
“we melted and boiled snow but there must have been something wrong with the
snow water - we suffered stomach pains and diarrhea.”36
Lieutenant Lukinov recalled his artillery battalion being fairly well fed.
Horse-drawn field kitchens made daily trips from the rear to the front to feed the
men hot chow: “The cooks hastened to give out the food and leave the way they
came from under mortar fire. They were not allowed back with any food remain-
ing. They said that one cook had been shot on the spot because he emptied the
tank of his kitchen into the snow in order to get away from the front line as soon
as possible.” On the days the field kitchens did not make it to the front line, the
men melted “tasteless snow for tea, warmed the frozen ice-covered bread in the
smoke of a fire, and boiled wheat concentrate in mess tins.”37 Toivo Kattonen, a
private in a ski battalion, remembered: “We mostly ate hard tack, as there was no
place to boil or cook food. We had a field kitchen with a horse in the beginning,
but it was destroyed - hit a mine on the road. We mostly ate biscuits.”38
35. “L. Z. Mekhlis-E. I. Smirnovu, 14 Ianvaria 1940 g.”; “L. Z. Mekhlis-E. A. Shchadenko,
F. F. Kuznetsovu, 14 ianvaria 1940 g.”; “L. Z. Mekhlis-M. V. Zakharovu, 21 ianvaria 1940 g.”;
“L. Z. Mekhlis-V. I. Vinograodovu, Paramonovu, 14 ianvaria 1940 g.”; “L. Z. Mekhlis-A. V.
Khrulevu, N. I. Trubetskomu, marta 1940 g.,” in “Takaia oopeka razvrashchaet komandirov,” ed.
M. F. Riazonov, Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 2 (2005): 95-100.
36. Dmitrii Krutskikh, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.
38. Toivo Kattonen, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com. Kattonen was an
ethnic Finn, but a Soviet citizen.

Soldiers instinctively sought out warm, safe places to get enough sleep to pre-
serve their lives and health, and to remain effective. “We tried to use burnt down
ruins, cellars and so on,” remembered one soldier. “Sometimes we slept on pine
tree branches, sometimes, when it was windy, we would dig holes in snow to hide
from the wind. We did not set up tents, although we had them in our backpacks.
We were not allowed to light fires during the night.”39 Being under fire made it
doubly difficult to dig into the already rock-hard frozen ground.

Although competent leadership seems to have been the exception rather than
the rule in the Winter War, some officers were able to fuel military effectiveness
by inspiring the men and making them feel they were in competent hands. More
often, however, officers proved incompetent or uncaring, and morale and disci-
pline suffered. Lieutenant Dmitrii Krutskikh, a platoon leader during the war,
claimed to have been friends with his subordinates—but not to the point of being
unprofessionally familiar. He recalled: “The soldiers took care of me. Everything
was in the open. Any rowdiness by an officer would end up by his death in the
first combat. I have no doubt about that.” By “rowdiness” he means abuse of the
soldiers by the officers, which was not the norm, but was by no means uncommon.
“As far as our command, we had a good relationship with our battalion com-
mander. This was the guy who led us in combat, along with his staff commander
and commissar. We also had good rapport with the regimental officers.”40
Other officers, however, thought less of some of their superiors and blamed
them for the heavy losses. One lieutenant observed the results of unimaginative
leadership in an action in which an infantry unit assaulted a pillbox from the
front, taking huge casualties: “But it could've been bypassed and taken from the
rear, where it didn't have any embrasures with artillery and machine guns. But
you couldn't criticize the superiors. They were infallible like Caesar's wife.”41 The
most serious problem with leadership was the youth, lack of training, and inex-
perience of the battalion-level officers. The vast majority of platoon and company
commanders were between nineteen and twenty-three years of age and graduates
of abbreviated training courses lasting about eighteen months, rather than the
otherwise prescribed three or four years.42 Many others were junior lieutenants,
men promoted from the ranks and given officer’s training of three to six months.
Poor leadership was for the most part an institutional problem. Decades after the
war a lieutenant remembered, “Those days it was considered that a commander
should only be in front of his troops, shouting: ‘Forward! Hurrah!’ and so on.”43

42. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 16-17.

ROGER R. REESE
This style of leadership contributed to high losses of officers; some 29,000 became
casualties.
Regarding the weak leadership and lack of military expertise at higher levels,
Commissar Semionov of the 50th Rifle Corps reported, “Regiments and divi-
sions were sometimes given to incompetent, inexperienced and poorly trained
people who failed at the slightest difficulty in battle.”44 Feeling that they were
in the hands of leaders who would get them killed for nothing might logically
compel men to shirk or desert. Effective leadership was made doubly difficult by
the late formation of the units officers were to lead. At the onset of the invasion,
on 30 November, the Leningrad Military District had still not finished forming
its forces or filling out existing regiments and divisions. For several weeks the
district underwent a chaotic shuffling and reshuffling of men and equipment
as tens of thousands of reservists reported for duty.45 As officers were assigned,
then reassigned in the weeks and days before marching into Finland, most were
virtually strangers to their men. Their late arrival and unfamiliarity with their new
units weakened command, control, and cohesion in the initial weeks of combat.
Many divisions had been formed and relocated to the Leningrad Military district
only in the six weeks to three months before the war began and fell far short of a
reasonable level of cohesion.
It should come as no surprise that as a result of the hardship, incompetent
leadership, and the scale of death, the problem of desertion from the front lines
and self-inflicted wounds reached serious levels in some units. General Aleksandr
Zaporozhets, of the Thirteenth Army military council, characterized the desert-
ers primarily as peasants, some of whom fled all the way back to their villages.
Others fled only to the rear areas, often in small groups, hiding in the woods or
dugouts sneaking meals from field kitchens and then disappearing into their lairs.
The Thirteenth Army also experienced numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds.
The 143rd Rifle Regiment is a case in point. At the end of one day in combat, the
regiment incurred 105 cases of self-inflicted wounds, mostly bullet wounds to the
left hand or its fingers, or the fleshy part of the leg.46
Within the army’s structure, the political officers - commissars and politruki
- of PUR (the Political Administration of the Red Army) were responsible
for morale and discipline, yet political officers seem to have done little political
indoctrination along the lines of Marxism-Leninism during the Winter War as
they strove to motivate the soldiers. As a consequence, many problems of morale,
of discipline, and of a political nature were blamed on the failure of the politruki
to properly indoctrinate soldiers. General Vladimir Grendal, commander of Thir-
teenth Army (formed and committed to the war in late December 1939), stated
44. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 21-22.
45. Ibid., 26-27, 244, 254-55.
46. Ibid., 242.

after the war: “I would say that the political instruction of our soldiers also left
much to be desired. Reports from the special [political-agitation] units revealed a
mass of riff-raff, and some cases of a counter-revolutionary nature. We must not
close our eyes to this, because it did happen. Twenty-two years of Soviet power
have not yet knocked sense into them.”47 One of the problems of indoctrination,
which was perhaps the root of the difficulties in Thirteenth Army, was that only
the forces of the Leningrad Military District that were originally scheduled to
attack Finland had been subjected to intense anti-Finnish propaganda before
the war. The replacement troops and new formations sent to the front, such as
the Thirteenth Army, coming largely from Ukraine, had not been as thoroughly
indoctrinated into the need for the war.48
Georgi Prusakov recalled: “I do not remember any propaganda materials,
there were no leaflets nor loudspeaker speeches. The politruki did have some
work with the Komsomol [All-Union Leninist League of Youth] members, but
you could not do much in those conditions.”49 One soldier said that in his regi-
ment, the commissars “conversed well with the soldiers, often making small talk
about life, asking who was writing from home, how we were fed, and they never
crammed agit-prop ‘party of Lenin-Stalin’ stuff into us.”50 They did, however,
propagate the slogans “For the Motherland!” and “For Stalin!” Some soldiers,
however, clearly aware of the general line of propaganda, reiterated it in their
letters home, for example, referring to the Finns as “white bandits” in the service
of foreign imperialists. Others internalized and clung to the idea that they were
on a liberating mission to free the Finnish people from capitalist exploitation just
as they had freed the Poles and Ukrainians in the western Ukraine and Belorus-
sia.51
Some soldiers’ morale and discipline problems stemmed from moral or
political bases. Not every soldier accepted the party line on the war. When a pri-
vate in a signal company arrived at the front in January 1940, he protested that
the war with Finland was not right and he could not engage in operations against
the Finnish Army. He was turned over to a military tribunal, declared guilty of
violating both his commander’s orders and discipline, and shot.52 The staff of this
47. Ibid., 236. Politruki (political officers) ranked below political comissars.
48. N. F. Ksenofontova, “Sovetsko-Finliandskaia voina v osvenshchenii sovetskoi pro-
pagandy (1939-1940 gg.),” in Velikaia Otechestvannaia voina v otsenke molodykh: Sbornik statei
studentov, aspirantov, molodykh uchenykh (Moscow: Ros. Gos. Gumanit. Un-t., 1997g.), 38-45;
Semiryaga, The Winter War, 61.
50. Nikolai Shishkin, interview located at www.iremember.ru.
51. Zenzinov, Vstrecha s Rossiei: kak i chem zhivut v sovetskom soiuze: pis’ma v Krasnuiu Armi-
iu, 1939-1940, 126-27, 172-75.
52. Balashov, Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-
1940 gg. Chast’ II, 131.

ROGER R. REESE
soldier’s division subsequently admonished its subordinate elements to raise the

quality of their political work among the men. Ivan Chetyrbok, a sergeant in the
war, recalled that the state’s rationale was accepted by most, but not all of the men.
In his platoon, “one Belorussian, who was standing at his DP [Defensive Posi-
tion], knocked down his machine gun and said: ‘A Finnish farmer has 30 hectares
of land, while I have 100 times less. What for am I fighting him?’ So, not everyone
in our division wanted to fight.”53
Other soldiers were more adroit and cautious, and kept their criticisms of the
regime to themselves until captured, like Private Nikifor Gubarevich, a conscript
who told his Finnish captors of the hard life on collective farms and the unfair
treatment meted out to collective farmers by the Soviet government. A veteran of
the September 1939 invasion of Poland, he had noted Polish farmers living better
than Russians. Another captive, a deputy politruk, wrote to the Finnish Minister
of Justice asking to stay in Finland on the grounds that the U.S.S.R. was “a land
of false ‘democracy and freedoms’ without bread”; he deplored the poor treatment
of the workers and peasants, and the destruction of religion under the dictatorship
of Stalin. Some diaries taken from dead Red Army soldiers and officers echoed
these sentiments.54
Morale was further challenged by news from the home front. Despite state
control over the media and the patriotic response by much of Soviet society,
indications surfaced that by January 1940 the war was beginning to be unpopular.
The Soviet population did not have reliable news about the course of the war
or conditions at the front, but the fact that the war had already lasted longer
than the regime had led them to believe it would caused some to speculate that
things were not going well. The many wounded and frostbitten soldiers flooding
hospitals in Leningrad and Moscow were evidence of the high human cost of
the campaign.55 The reality of the heavy losses had begun to cause some people
to doubt that the war was worth the price being paid. Particularly hard hit were
areas such as Vologda province, which lost 2,366 young men killed or missing and
certainly thousands more wounded and frostbitten out of 43,403 men mobilized
for the war.56 Such losses must have made people pause to consider the necessity
of the war. From the war’s onset, people began to fear that prices would go up in
an economy already suffering shortages, and this only a few years after the end of
53. Ivan S. Chetyrbok, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

54. Balashov, Prinimai nas, Suomi-Krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-
1940 gg. Chast’ II, 124-27, 128-29; Zenzinov, Vstrecha s Rossiei: kak i chem zhivut v sovetskom
soiuze: pis’ma v Krasnuiu Armiiu, 1939-1940, 164-67.
55. Semiryaga, The Winter War, 57.
56. Valerii Sudakov, ed., Kniga Pamiati Vologodskoi oblasti: Sovetsko-Finliandskaia Voina
1939-1940 gg. (Vologda, 1995), 9, 25-27.

food rationing. Such concerns had been reaching the soldiers in letters from their
families since the war began.57
In January 1940, when it became clear to Stalin and Voroshilov that the
forces of the Leningrad Military District would not be able to beat the Finns with
their own resources, the Ministry of Defense began transferring units from other
military districts. Rumors of the horrific bloodletting spread throughout the army
and triggered such negative responses as one soldier’s gloomy observation: “We’re
going to certain death. They’ll kill us all. If the newspapers said that for every Finn
you need ten Russkies, they’d be right. They are swatting us like flies.”58 A wave of
AWOL (Absences Without Leave), as well as excessive drinking and the singing
of antiwar songs took place in the Kiev Special Military District’s (KOVO) 13th
Rifle Corps after the start of a rumor, which turned out to be true, that some of
the divisions would soon be sent to Finland.59 The 97th Rifle Division experi-
enced an especially large number of desertions while en route to Finland. The
Military Soviet of Sixth Army, another element of the KOVO, reported several
self-inflicted wounds by soldiers hoping to avoid service in Finland. As the wave
of revulsion toward going to war frayed the threads of discipline, drunkenness
among soldiers and officers increased, as did venereal disease contracted from
local prostitutes.60
One of the more extreme cases of indiscipline occurred in the 62nd Rifle
Division, from which 292 men deserted in two days’ time while it was getting
ready to move to the front. Another 240 men of the unit were listed as AWOL,
including a dozen men who deserted from their train during a stop at a sta-
tion.61 One soldier told his buddies: “If they send me to the front I’ll sneak off
into the bushes. I won’t fight, but I will shoot people like our unit commander
Gordienko.”62 Such dissident sentiments, though troubling, were exceptional, and
most men maintained their self-discipline, stayed with their units, and obeyed
orders to go to war, albeit it seems, without enthusiasm.

Why did most Red Army men persevere, fight hard, and support the regime’s
goals? First, the Soviet regime, although the obvious aggressor in the Winter
War in the eyes of much of the world, as a closed system was able to justify the
conflict to the people of the Soviet Union as a just war in defense of the social-
iu, 1939-1940, 128-31; Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, 41-43.
58. F. 9, op, 31, d. 292, l. 318, RGVA, cited in Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army,
1939-1945, by Catherine Merridale (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 51.
59. F. 25880, op. 4, d. 4, ll. 16-20, RGVA.
60. F. 25880, op. 4, d. 4, ll. 196-97, RGVA.
61. F. 25880, op. 4, d. 4, ll. 268, 270, RGVA.
62. F. 9, op, 36, d. 4282, l. 148, RGVA, cited in Merridale, Ivan’s War, 71.

ROGER R. REESE
ist homeland against a hostile capitalist enemy. In the weeks prior to the attack
on Finland, the U.S.S.R.’s state-controlled media repeated the themes that the
U.S.S.R. merely sought to push the border back to protect Leningrad, and that
the Finns were being unreasonable and uncooperative. General Meretskov, in his
mobilization order to the soldiers of the Leningrad Military District, decreed that
the war was against the “capitalist exploiters” of the Finnish government who had
victimized the ordinary Finn. Raising the possibility of lifting the yoke of capital-
ism from the Finnish people, he concluded with the standard exhortations: “For
the security of the northwest border of the USSR and the brave city of Leningrad!
For our beloved homeland (rodina)! For the great Stalin! Forward, sons of the
Soviet people, soldiers of the Red Army, to completely destroy the enemy!”63 This
message evidently found resonance among Soviet citizens and soldiers.
Perhaps most importantly in propagandistic terms, the media convinced the
Soviet people that the Finns started the war, drawing first blood in an unprovoked
attack. This assertion stood opposite the war diary and personnel records of the
68th Rifle Regiment of the 70th Rifle Division, the unit Viacheslav Molotov
(Soviet foreign minister and head of the Council of People’s Commissars)
asserted was shelled on 26 November 1939. Those documents showed no shell-
ing or casualties on that date or any engagement with the Finnish Army at any
time before the Soviet Union declared war on Finland.64 Russian soldiers and
society at large having no access to the foreign press for alternative perspectives,
the regime’s “just war” claims cemented the fervor of most of the nation to the
conduct of the war. And the imprint was long and deep. Sixty years later, Viktor
Iskrov clearly recalled the rationale laid out in Meretskov’s order to the troops,
and then repeated in Pravda, and asserted that he and his fellow officers and
men had faith that those claims were valid. He remembered the politruki of his
regiment telling the soldiers of the negotiations with the Finns in October and
the subsequent appearance in the newspapers: “Our government proposed Finns
moving the border, as the border was just 32 kilometers from Leningrad. To
compensate, we were proposing [to give] Finns areas in the north, at the eastern
borders of Finland, the territory was four times larger than the one that we asked
for from the Finns.” He recalled that the negotiations lasted around six weeks or
so, but came to nothing: “Then, I think also on November 26, a few shots were
fired from the Finnish side in Mainila area. As a result, two men were killed, four
wounded.” The Soviet government protested, and attacked on 30 November. Isk-
rov remembered the Soviet position as “If you do not want to do it in a peaceful
way, we will move our borders by force. This is the way I understood the whole

1940 gg. Chast’ II, 2.
64. Pavel Aptekar, “Vystrelov ne bylo,” Rodina, no. 12 (1995): 53-55.

thing then.”65 So it was the Finns’ fault. They rejected the peaceful way, and in
Iskrov's mind and in the memories of many other veterans, the U.S.S.R. had no
choice but to wage a preventive “defensive” war.
Because the people perceived the conflict as a just war, the state had little
difficulty in mobilizing a crucial specific segment of society—urban youth—to
support it, and did not try to mobilize public support at large. The Communist
Party’s propaganda machine did not seek to ignite public activism or generate
a volunteer movement. Instead, the state sought to generate volunteerism in a
controlled, low-key manner. Several weeks after the war had begun, when it had
become clear that a greater effort than anticipated would be involved, the army
used local Komsomol organizations to seek young men, especially skiers, primar-
ily in Leningrad city and province, to volunteer to form ski battalions for the
duration of the war. After they met their quotas, recruiters turned away would-be
volunteers.66
When so approached, Georgi Prusakov, a Komsomol working in a factory,
was one of those who agreed to volunteer. He says of his recruitment to the 100th
Volunteer Ski Battalion, which comprised half workers and half college students:
“I was invited to the Institute's Komsomol Committee. The committee's secretary
was a girl called Tsilia Donde, and she told me that volunteer ski battalions were
formed for fighting the White Finns - that was the expression of that they used
in that time. She asked me if I would like to participate. I immediately agreed.”67
He ended up serving as a medic for a ski battalion. A very high percentage of
volunteers turned out to be party or Komsomol members. In the 7th and 8th
Separate Ski Battalions raised in Vologda, respectively 304 and 174 party and
Komsomol members joined.68
Nikolai Shishkin had a similar experience while a freshman at Sverdlovsk
Polytechnic: “Within two months after I started my studies and at the same time
of the start of the Finnish War, they announced a voluntary call for students for
war service. Perhaps I could not have gone to the army, but we were all patriotic.
Almost my entire class decided to volunteer for the defense of the Motherland.”69
Rather than form ski battalions like the students and workers from Leningrad,
the students from his class were sent with volunteers from neighboring univer-
sities to transit camps, where personnel officers parceled them out to serve in
regular army units.
65. Viktor Iskrov, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

66. Anatolii Muzhikov, interview located at www.iremember.ru.
68. Sudakov, Kniga Pamiati Vologodskoi oblasti: Sovetsko-Finliandskaia Voina 1939-1940 gg., 18.
69. Nikolai Shiskin, interview located at www.iremember.ru.

ROGER R. REESE
Besides patriotism, or a desire to defend the U.S.S.R., the deference to the

government felt by many of the younger generation served the purpose of the
regime. A veteran of the war, in a follow-on unit not subjected to political instruc-
tion about the need for the war beforehand, and apparently ignorant of prewar
press reports, wrote: “One of the peculiarities of this war was the fact that we
fought because we were ordered. This was different from the following [Great]
Patriotic War, when we hated the enemy that attacked our native land. Here they
simply told us: ‘Forward march!’ - without even an explanation of where we were
going. We simply did our soldier's duty during the Finnish war, and understood
the sense and the necessity of the fight later.”70
The army also used various positive inducements to gain obedience and
raise morale. Of the 50,000 awards bestowed for merit and courage during the
Winter War, 400 were the most prestigious title, Hero of the Soviet Union. The
army made a point to publicize the heroism of its soldiers to all the forces at the
front through unit and army newspapers and bulletins in hopes of motivating
widespread emulation. The army also awarded several units the prestigious Order
of the Red Banner.71 A more concrete and mundane incentive took the form of
a daily vodka ration, a gesture that took some soldiers by surprise, since drinking
had been officially discouraged in peacetime. “They started giving us 100 grams of
vodka a day. It warmed and cheered us during frosts, and it made us not care in
combat,” remembered one soldier.72 With so much vodka floating around, it was
not surprising that some officers and men managed to get more than their share
and occasionally overindulged.73
For those who were not moved to persevere by patriotism or duty, the army
resorted to draconian measures, most notably capital punishment to put a stop
to unauthorized retreats and desertion. Shortly after a relative handful of Finns
annihilated the 163rd Rifle Division and mauled and routed the 44th Motorized
Rifle Division along the Raate road, where they had been assigned to cut Finland
in two at its narrowest point, the Stavka sent Lev Mekhlis to investigate. Mekh-
lis, following a brief investigation, ordered the arrests of General A. Vinogradov,
the commander of the 44th Rifle Division; his chief of staff, O. H. Volkym; and

71. Baryshnikov, ed., Istoriia ordena Lenina Leningradskogo voennogo okruga, 145; Carl Van Dyke,
The Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40 (London and Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 1997), 120.
73. “Prodolzhaem prodvigat’sia v glob’ Bezuiutnoi Strany,” Istochnik, no. 3 (1993): 40, 43.

commissar, I. T. Pakhomenko.74 For the debacle with the 163rd Rifle Division,
Mekhlis arrested Colonel Sarov, commander of the 662nd Rifle Regiment of
the division; and his commissar, Podkhomutov; and Captain Chaikovskii, com-
mander of the 3rd NKVD Regiment; and his commissar, Cherevko.75 All were
subsequently executed in two separate proceedings following the reports of
military tribunals as subordinates looked on. The deaths of the commander and
staff of the 163rd Rifle Division at the hands of the Finns probably spared them
a similar fate. The message to the rest of the army’s leaders was unmistakable: die
fighting or before a firing squad, but do not retreat without authorization.
At the end of January 1940, as hundreds of deserters and stragglers roamed
the Soviet rear areas, the People’s Commissariat of Defense and the NKVD (secret
police) sought to impose control by forming twenty-seven blocking detachments
of roughly 100 men each to patrol the rear areas, mainly behind Seventh, Eighth,
and Thirteenth Armies, and to round up soldiers away from their units without
permission. Simultaneously, the Stavka sent out orders to shoot deserters and men
AWOL from their units. Eighth Army had shot eleven deserters in the first week
or so of January even before the creation of blocking detachments.76 Although the
Thirteenth Army, also in January, had begun to shoot deserters of its own accord,
General Zaporozhets said: “When the NKVD task squads appeared, they helped
us restore order in the rear. Until then the situation in the rear was deplorable.”77
It seems that the draconian measures may actually have started “from below”
and been adopted afterwards by higher headquarters. On 16 December, General
Ponedelin assumed command of the 139th Rifle Division in the aftermath of the
dismissal from command of the disgraced General Beliaev. Ponedelin’s first act
as commander was to create penal (strafnyi) companies of cowards and men who
panicked under fire.78 When the Eighth Army commander, General Vladimir
74. “Prikazanie Generalnogo shtaba komanduiushchemu 9-i armiei o merakh po vyvodu

44-i strelkovoi divizii iz okruzheniia,” no. 0965, 6 January 1940 22 ch 45 min (f. 37977, op. 1,
d. 233, l. 104, RGVA); “Doklad nachal’nika Politicheskogo upravleniia Krasnoi Armii chlenu
Glavnogo Voennogo Soveta o prichinakh porazheniia i poteriakh v 44-i strelkovoi divizii” (f.
33987, op. 3, d. 1386, l. 119, 120, RGVA); “Doklad Komanduiushchego 9-i armiei nachal’niku
General’nogo shtaba o prichinakh porazheniia 44-i strelkovoi divizii i merakh po ee vosstanov-
leniiu” (f. 33987, op. 3, d. 1385, l. 127-132, RGVA), Tainy i uroki zimnei voiny, 1939-1940 (St.
Petersburg: OOO Poligon, 2000), 259-60, 270-71, 271-77.
75. “Rasporzhenie nachal’nika osobogo otdela Glavnogo upravleniia gosbezopasnosti
NKVD nachal’niku osobogo otdela 47-go strelkovogo korpusa ob areste komandira i komissara
662-go strelkovogo polka,” 30 dekabria 1939 g. (f. 34980, op. 5, d. 211, l. 401, RGVA), Tainy i
uroki zimnei voiny, 1939-1940, 228.
76. Merridale, Ivan’s War, 80.
77. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 242; Van Dyke, The
Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40, 88.
78. F. 34980, op. 9, d. 82, l. 2, RGVA.

ROGER R. REESE
Kurdiumov, found out about it, he rebuked Ponedelin; however, when Kurdiumov
was removed a few weeks later and replaced by General Grigorii Shtern, repres-
sive measures in that same spirit began to be implemented at the army level. The
extent of the desertion or shirking problem is unknown, as is the number of men
detained by these detachments and their fates. In the end, in cold-blooded terms,
the “firm” measures contributed to the army’s effectiveness in that the measures,
however harsh and coercive, helped keep the forces fighting, and returned strag-
glers to the line.
Other punitive measures short of death were the relief of commanders and
the termination of careers. On the tenth day of the war, 9 December 1939, Gen-
eral Vsevolod Iakovlev, Seventh Army commander, was accused of missing an
opportunity to break through unprepared Finnish defenses and was reassigned
in disgrace to administrative duties in the Leningrad Military District. When
Meretskov succeeded him as army commander and things did not immediately
improve, Commissar of Defense Voroshilov suggested to Stalin that Meretskov
be court-martialed. He also recommended the removal of the entire staff of the
Seventh Army, as well as “a radical purge of corps, divisional and regimental
commanders. [We] need to replace these cowards and laggards (there are also
swine) with loyal and efficient people.”79 Luckily for Meretskov, Stalin ignored
Voroshilov’s advice and ordered the Stavka to draw up plans for a new offensive.
Two weeks later it was the turn of the commander of the Eighth Army, Kurdi-
umov, to be relieved of command and replaced by Shtern. Besides these two army
commanders, the Stavka and subordinate headquarters found it necessary to
relieve of their commands or dismiss from their responsibilities three army chiefs
of staff; three corps commanders and their chiefs of staff; five division command-
ers; several division chiefs of staff, division artillery chiefs, and their chiefs of staff;
and numerous regimental commanders.80 After the executions of Vinogradov and
his subordinates, and the removals of Iakovlev and Kurdiumov, the command
atmosphere from the Stavka on down to the front lines became very tense. It
was not unusual for senior officers to threaten their subordinates with dire conse-
quences if orders were not fulfilled.
In addition to military and domestic problems, diplomatic problems for

the U.S.S.R. loomed larger and larger the longer the conflict lasted. Anti-Soviet
sentiment became more and more vocal abroad, coupled with rising international
79. G. A. Kumanev, “Besslavnaia voina, ili pobeda, kotoroi ne gordilic [sic],” unpublished
paper given to a seminar at the Institute of the History of Russia, Moscow, 29 January 1992, p.
6, quoted in Van Dyke, The Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40, 77.
80. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940 gg. Kniga 2, 17, 24; Van Dyke, The
Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40, 197.

sympathy for the Finns. As the war dragged on, foreign aid for Finland increased
steadily, with military weaponry, supplies, and volunteers from around Europe
and the United States arriving weekly in 1940.81 Thus, the military difficulties
and perhaps more important, negative foreign and domestic factors may have
influenced Stalin to reduce his war aims and press for an early end to the war.
Stalin held on to his minimum acceptable goals, while wisely abandoning his
maximum goals, the pursuit of which would have kept the war dragging on too
long. As Stalin forced his generals to stick with it until they could deliver victory,
the generals in turn kept the troops closely engaged with the Finns while revis-
ing their strategy and assembling more forces. Even Stalin, for all his ruthless-
ness and cynicism, recognized that there were limits to the use of heavy-handed
methods. From mid-December on, the key modalities used by Soviet authorities
in bolstering military effectiveness were continued appeals to patriotism and duty
based on portrayals of the war as just and necessary, and brutal suppression of
noncompliance, desertion, and failure with dismissal, arrest, or execution—the
carrot-and-stick approach the regime would use again in the war against Nazi
Germany. Obviously, the success of this approach in establishing military effec-
tiveness in the case of Soviet Russia has to be appreciated in its unique context.
Draconian measures in the form of the widespread executions and the ability of
an authoritarian regime to censor and propagate its explanation of a war in an
informational near vacuum are not options readily open to democratic societies
with strong traditions of citizenship and a free press.
As noted above, the mainstay of the Red Army’s military effectiveness during
the Winter War was the fact that the leaders of the army, and the vast majority
of individual soldiers, never lost the desire to impose their will on the enemy.
Overall, the military’s staying power proved robust: under extremely adverse con-
ditions soldiers kept fighting and regiments remained cohesive. Most importantly,
the army did not fall apart or take flight en masse. At the top, the Stavka, with
the political leadership, was able to abandon its failed original plans and devise a
new, successful war-fighting strategy, set new war aims, reinforce and resupply the
forces, and succeed in the end. On 21 January 1940, as things were just beginning
to turn around, Stalin toasted the members of the Politburo: “To the fighters of
the Red Army, which was under-trained, badly clothed, and badly shod, which
we are now providing with [proper] clothing and boots, which is fighting for
its somewhat tarnished honor, fighting for its glory.”82 His words showed that,
despite the problems, Stalin at least wanted to convey the appearance of confi-
dence in the military.
81. V. M. Molotov, Soviet Foreign Policy: The Meaning of the War in Finland (New York:
Workers Library, 1940), 10-11.
82. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1949 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2003), 124.

ROGER R. REESE
At the lowest levels, small units and soldiers adapted to the cruel conditions
of combat in deep winter and, through initiative and experimentation, devised
appropriate and successful tactics to achieve their objectives, though often with
high losses as before. Perhaps because of effective propaganda, the soldiers’ dedi-
cation to the success of the mission never failed, and with the fatalistic recogni-
tion of the link between war and death, most soldiers, and especially the officers,
accepted the tragic losses as inevitable yet justified. The unchartable tangle of
motives—the idea that it was a just war, and a more general sense of duty to obey
orders—proved sufficient to keep the majority of soldiers committed to winning
the war, and kept discipline strong despite some early lapses. We do not yet know
the scale of the desertion or shirking problem at the front, but the shooting of
deserters and the creation of blocking detachments on the Karelian Isthmus may
well have been the deterrent and bolstering a lot of soldiers needed. Though there
were individual exceptions, such as the seventy-four Soviet soldiers taken prisoner
who refused repatriation after the war,83 the ideological commitment of the larger
military organization never faltered. Also, in part due to effective propaganda in
the state-controlled media, the domestic value system in support of the war and
the soldiers remained strong despite the doubts of some.84

In a rather deep paradox, neither Nazi nor Soviet leaders were able to grasp
how militarily effective the Red Army was - or was not - in the Winter War.
Immediately after the war the Communist Party hierarchy and army high com-
mand organized several major conferences to discuss problems of the war and
extract lessons from the struggle, which they deemed a failure. Exactly two weeks
after the war’s end, Voroshilov gave a report to the Party Central Committee
outlining the lessons of the war, which included the army’s ignorance of the actual
situation in Finland, the lack of preparation for the kind of war it turned out to be,
the unsuitability of a significant number of commanders, the poor uniforms of the
army, the need for a larger standing army, the excessive turnover in command, the
need for significant improvements in rail transportation, the need for the army
to be better supplied, and the need to study the Mannerheim Line.85 From 14
April to 17 April 1940, the Central Committee hosted a conference in Moscow
of forty-six officers from the Main Military Soviet (GVS) and selected regiment
commanders who had fought in the war.86 The thrust of the discussions was mili-
tary capability rather than military effectiveness, that is, tactical performance as

1940 gg. Chast’ I, 176.
iu, 1939-1940, 138-62.
85. Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 127.
86. Kulkov and Rzheshevskii, Zimniaia voina 1939-1940: Kniga 2.

opposed to the willingness and ability of small units and soldiers to fight. Increas-
ing the quality of leadership, logistical support, and formulation of strategy was
of course quite necessary if the Red Army was to be successful in a future war at
a lower cost in lives than experienced in Finland; however, the conference cast an
unduly pessimistic pall on the assessment of the army’s efficacy.
The army also could have acknowledged and built on its strengths. No one
commented on the successful tactical defense of the mottis, which helped stabi-
lize the Karelian front and tie down Finnish forces that otherwise would have
reinforced the Mannerheim Line. Had this, and a recognition of the loyalty of
the Soviet soldier been appreciated and incorporated into the training programs
of 1940 and 1941, perhaps the vast encirclements of summer 1941 would have
turned into massive mottis and slowed the German advance enough to enable an
effective defense of Moscow much farther west. Arguably, if the loyalty of the
Red Army soldier under adverse conditions had been more closely examined, the
disintegration of so many units in 1941 might have been recognized as the results
mainly of poor training and failures of organization and leadership, and as tempo-
rary phenomena rather than political unreliability, as Stalin interpreted it.
The Nazi interpretation of the lessons of the Winter War, along with those
of other major military powers at the time, proved to be as far off the mark as the
Soviets’. The evaluation of the Red Army by the German General Staff concluded
on 31 December 1939 read as follows:
In quantity a gigantic military instrument.—Commitment of the
“mass.”—Organization, equipment and means of leadership unsatis-
factory—principles of leadership good; leadership itself, however, too
young and inexperienced.—Communication system bad, transportation
bad:-troops not very uniform; no personalities—simple soldier good
natured, quite satisfied with very little. Fighting qualities of the troops
in a heavy fight, dubious. The Russian “mass” is no match for an army,
with modern equipment and superior leadership.87
The German envoy to Helsinki, Wipert von Blücher, also made a misevalu-
ation of the Red Army’s performance and sent it to Berlin in January 1940. His
views concurred with those of the German Army’s high command: Considering
that after six weeks of war the Red Army, outnumbering the Finns in men, weap-
ons, and equipment, had failed to reach any of its objectives and had sustained
massive losses, he concluded that the U.S.S.R. was not a first-class military power,
and that Germany no longer need view the Soviet Union as a serious military or
economic threat.88 Another dimension to the Germans’ failed appreciation of
87. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 9 vols. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1946), 6: 981-82.
88. Semiryaga, The Winter War, 63-64.

ROGER R. REESE
the Red Army’s effectiveness, pointed out by historian Albert Seaton, was the
skill and preparedness of the Finnish Army. German analysis was based on the
thought that the Red Army had been stymied by a rather low-quality Finnish
Army, when in fact the Finns were highly trained, motivated, and prepared, being
inferior only in numbers, heavy weapons, and air power.89
Because both of these assessments were made after only the first month or
month and one-half of the war, and the Germans neglected to make any new
analyses after the war, the German Army failed to take into account the regenera-
tive capacity of the Red Army to overcome its disastrous start, regroup, and ulti-
mately force the Finns to the peace table on Stalin’s terms. The early assessments
became the consensus that the Red Army was an inferior army. In early 1941,
several months before Operation Barbarossa, the Axis attack on the Soviet Union,
Adolf Hitler, attempting to reassure his cautious generals, told General Alfred
Jodl, chief of Wehrmacht (German armed forces) operations: "We have only to
kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."90
In planning for war against the Soviet Union, then, the Wehrmacht operated in
ignorance of the U.S.S.R.’s true capabilities and effectiveness, that is, its ability to
suffer crippling losses and tactical failure, and yet regroup and successfully take
the offensive, backed by a political leader and system that would not accept defeat.
At the Red Army’s aforementioned postwar conference, General Iuri Novoselskii,
commander of the 86th Rifle Division during the Winter War, said in referencing
the success of his unit’s mission to seize a specific objective in northern Finland:
“I emphasize this fact because much has been said here about discipline: whether
discipline was high or low, whether the men did well in an attack or not, how they
behaved, etc. The following circumstance is of paramount importance. In spite of
difficult conditions, our troops seized this area. They overcame the enemy.”91 This
was a lesson that most of the world’s military analysts - and most crucially, the
Germans - failed to draw from the events of the Winter War.
89. Seaton, The Russo-German War, 47.

90. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1976), 675.

852 ★

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Lessons of the Winter War: A Study in the Military Effectiveness

of the Red Army, 1939–1940

The Journal of Military History, Volume 72, Number 3, July 2008,

Published by Society for Military History

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Canterbury University at 02/19/11 6:10AM GMT

The Journal of Military History 72 ( July 2008): 825–852.

826 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

3. N. I. Baryshnikov, ed., Istoriia ordena Lenina Leningradskogo voennogo okruga (Moscow:

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 827

be very difficult to conduct military operations in this region.”4 He claims to

828 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

The winter war in Finland, 1939-1940 (Map: James R. Arnold)

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 829

7. F. 34980, op. 10, d. 7, ll.1-2, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (henceforth,

830 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

completed the counteroffensive to encircle the city - produced a daily casualty

10. Evgenii Balashov, Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 831

15. F. 34980, op. 7, d. 24, l. 19, RGVA.

832 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 833

834 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

23. Nikolai A. Ponomarenko, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 835

836 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

In contrast to the fatalistic resolve shown by Ugryumov’s battalion, the com-

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 837

838 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

39. Georgi Prusakov, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 839

840 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 841

soldier’s division subsequently admonished its subordinate elements to raise the

53. Ivan S. Chetyrbok, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

842 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 843

63. Balashov, Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-

844 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

65. Viktor Iskrov, interview located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 845

Besides patriotism, or a desire to defend the U.S.S.R., the deference to the

70. Mikhail Lukinov, excerpt located at www.mannerheim-line.com.

846 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

74. “Prikazanie Generalnogo shtaba komanduiushchemu 9-i armiei o merakh po vyvodu

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 847

In addition to military and domestic problems, diplomatic problems for

848 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

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83. Balashov, Prinimai nas, suomi-krasavitsa!: “Osvoboditel’nyi” pokhod v Finliandiiu 1939-

850 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 851

89. Seaton, The Russo-German War, 47.

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