St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

to continue fighting, whilst Soviet prisoners of war were dreading repatriation (Sander, 2013).

best example being the Second World War, where between 8.7 and 10.7 million soldiers were killed. The Finnish understood willpower and morale as a resource just as valuable as guns and ammunition. Whilst the Soviets ate black bread and drank bitter tea, insufficient nourishment for such temperature and conditions, the standard operating procedure for the Finnish was regular hot meals and consistent and diligent weapon maintenance keeping men healthy, resilient and prepared. The Soviets froze in cheap, low-quality uniforms while most of their opponents wore heavy wool underwear, jumpers, many pairs of socks, reindeer-fur-lined boots and lightweight snow capes (Trotter, 2013). The Soviets operated in cold, primitive trenches. The Finnish had warm dugouts lined with furs, blankets and straw, heated by stoves, with hidden log roofs. The schedule for ski-troopers was one two-hour patrol, two hours rest in a dugout, two hours of aggressive activity, followed by four hours of sleeping or eating. Every two or three days, if the status of the war allowed it, each man would get a turn in a frontline sauna. Trotter observes that these comforts ‘paid tremendous dividends in keeping up Finnish morale’ (Trotter, 2013). By maintaining these comforts, morale stayed high and soldiers were equipped and ready to fight when the time came. This was in comparison to the Soviets, who were effectively always fighting, be it the Finnish, cold, hunger or exhaustion. The USSR’s unpreparedness for the extreme cold contributed greatly to their inferior degree of morale. This is ironic considering the advantage they held in technology and human resources, and points to the consequences of their poor leadership and hubris. Living conditions were not the only contributing factor to the morale gap between the two militaries. It is important to understand how a soldier from each side viewed the war that they were fighting. Soviet soldiers were invading Finland. They were doing so because of the geopolitical advantage to be gained for the Soviet Union. That was their reason to fight and possibly to die in this war. The Finnish fought to protect their home, their people, their way of life. If the war were lost, as an individual Soviet soldier you would go home, and nothing would change for your society. If they lost and the Iron Curtain were to be drawn fully round Finland, the Finns would no longer have a sovereign nation to call their own – they would be thrust into an authoritarian regime infamous for its awful treatment of non-Russian ethnic minorities and its ‘Russification’ policies. Proof of the effect of this difference was that when the armistice was signed, most Finnish soldiers were shocked and were keen

Soviet military failures

In the 1930s, Stalin ordered a purge of the Red Army’s officer corps to ensure that all military operations were controlled by idealistic rather than military doctrine. In effect, this meant that field commanders were supervised by political commissars who checked that every order was compliant with communist ideology (Raftsjø, 2018). Raftsjø states that ‘Red Army officers were inclined to act according to what they thought Stalin wanted to hear, preventing creative leadership.’ This was in stark contrast to the Finnish, whose decentralised command structure and use of auftragstaktik encouraged individual thinking and creativity. The results are clear: some of the initial battles of the Winter War had a Finnish-Soviet casualty ratio of 1:122 (Tuunainen, 2013). Unfortunately for the Finnish, such extreme Soviet failures became less common with the appointment of General Semyon K Timoshenko as the new Soviet commander on 1st February 1940. Timoshenko would go on to retrain the Red Army, end the use of communist ideology as a basis for strategic decisions, sack the commissars and reinstate the former rank system. He also brought back many officers whose jobs had been lost in the purge. This reorganisation did come with a cost of 200,000 Soviet lives at the hands of the Finnish. Raftsjø refers to Timoshenko’s new offensive as the ‘beginning of the end for the Finnish resistance’. The Winter War would end on the 13th March, just 42 days after the offensive began (Raftsjø, 2018). The clear turning point of this war shows the importance of military doctrines and how significant command can be – as Raftsjø said, the Soviets coordinating themselves was the turnaround for the Winter War. Finland’s efforts in fending off a much larger force were impressive as was their ability to capitalise on every fault of their opponents. Once these faults began to disappear, Finland no longer had a chance of outright victory, and this should be unsurprising. Yet they still managed to avoid full occupation and to successfully retain territory. The Red Army general’s quote I used in the introduction is worth repetition: ‘We won just about enough ground to bury our dead’ (Quist, 2020).

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