Why was Finland the only part of the Russian Empire to successfully resist becoming part of the USSR?

Absolutely true but the main goal of the war which was full annexation failed which is why I feel no one side clearly won

The main part of the war was to allow the communist party to take part in government as votes for it suggested, and it wasn't allowed. Instead they just annexed the parts of the country that voted communist, an okay alternative I feel.

A Pyrrhic victory is still a victory. You seem to know your shit, but so often on this website people insist that Finland "won" the war, that I am obliged to press this issue, else I get acid reflux.

>wasn't the only part
>the only soviet general with more than one brain cell was busy kicking the Japanese out of Mongolia when the USSR tried annexing it

Veeky Forums pretends that the Japanese never tried to invade USSR, since the nazis didn't know nor write about it, thus its not true.

wrong, the goal was exactly what was taken by USSR, they achieved complete victory, that "pyrrhic victory" didnt stop them from fighting the biggest war the world have ever seen a year later

Not that I don't believe you but is there a document residing somewhere in the Central Archives somewhere where I could read up on what the USSR tried to take from Finland? What I recall reading was they used the "Close proximity of the Finnish" justification that it was a threat to Leningrad.

because Stalin was a good guy, he did not wanted UK to attack him in 1940 and in 1944 he wanted to kick Kraut asses first, Finland was economical puppet throught the entire Cold war, term called Finlandization stands for cucking yourself so your strong neighbrough wont be angry.

>we didn't annex your entire country, so we didn't REALLY win

Ah yes, what a clear draw

Stalin was fighting Japan at the same time he was fighting Finland, no? He may have been fighting in Ukraine at the same time too, depending on who you ask.
And he was definitely fighting tzarist loyalists who were cooking shit up and he overkilled them just to be sure, in what must be the worst purge in recorded history.

By this logic, 99% of all wars end in a draw.

Because Russia invaded Finland with it's budget lineup, and Finland was a functioning state capable of organising an armed defense.

>Soviet objective: annex Finland
>Finnish objective: stay independent
>Finland ends the war still independent at the cost of some territory
The peace terms favored the USSR, but I would hardly consider it an ultimate victory for them when the Finns were far closer to achieving their goal than the Soviets.

Finland also thought that the anti-communist alliance would back them (as they said they would), so they went all out. Sadly Germany stayed out, and with that every other anti-commie ally also passed.
I think there were volunteers and donations and such, but this basically meant that Sweden, Denmark and Norway drifted further from Germany, and wouldn't officially and totally join them in WW2.

I can't be overstated how much this war ruined the anti-Comintern alliance and how much it plagued Germany during the war.

Soviet objective: allow the Communist Party to be represented in government.
Finnish objective: send all communists to jail.
Result: the communist part of Finland joins the USSR (this was the developed part, for reference).

So in a monkey paw kind of way both sides got they wanted - USSR got the communist party represented where it was voted, and Finland got a commie free state.
However, I think the USSR was much happier with the end result, because it gained land and ports, and because of it humbled Germany.

>Result: the communist part of Finland joins the USSR (this was the developed part, for reference).

WTF? It was evacuated in full and repopulated with Russians.

That was after the war.
Initially, the Finnish Democratic Republic was created, and it had the Finnish Communist Party leading it, and about 10-15% of the Finnish population living in it.
Only after the annexation and loss of sovergnty the Finns felt betrayed and moved to the homeland.

>Instead they just annexed the parts of the country that voted communist
Except thats not true and even if those parts annexed were Communist voting which they werent, the population was all evacuated anyway so no communists ended under Soviet rule. Stop making shit up you tankie revisionist.

???? None of that is true. I guess you mean the terijoki puppet government established at the first tiny village soviets conquered and was populated by the few finnish commies that had fled to Russia and whom stalin hadn't killed yet. Government which never ruled over anybody at any point because all the civilians had been evacuated before the war even started.

>USSR taking the most industrialized and populated cities
They took one big city

Motti tactics and a tradition of skiing and hunting allowed them to hold off the russians in the winter war. Its a shame they western allies pussied out and refused to come to their aid, though.

Who else do you expect to get independent? The caucasus? They would've fallen to Ataturk. Central asia? Literally some random tribes, even today they have the soviet borders.

>be outnumbered 2:1 in terms of manpower, 141:1 in terms of tanks, 34:1 in terms of aircraft
>by wars end, infantry losses are 1:4.85, tank losses are 1:95, aircraft losses are 1:6.25
>all finnish losses in infantry weapons, artillery, tanks and armoured cars are made up for with captured russian equipment
This is why the finns are my waifus

Fun fact: the mills finns had in Petsamo are still operational with no modifications made in them at all since the 1930's

>USSR taking the most industrialized and populated cities
Viipuri was a great city culturally but not industrially nor it was the most populated. Big by the finnish standards but not huge

>The main part of the war was to allow the communist party to take part in government as votes for it suggested, and it wasn't allowed. Instead they just annexed the parts of the country that voted communist, an okay alternative I feel.

What the fuck are you talking about? Do we literally have Putinbots spreading Soviet style propaganda here?

>tfw you will never completely BTFO tankie scum in karelia with your bros
>tfw you will never serve under the greatest sniper of all time (who also happens to be a manlet)
>tfw you will never destroy tanks by jamming logs into the treads and burning the crew out with molotovs
why even fucking live

>tfw you will never get your defense line penetrated by Red army

Because Lenin gave Finland independence for Graham's number dimensional solitaire reasons that nobody knows anymore.

Karelia is pretty much all forest and a bit of farmland, the 'developed' part of Finland is the south west.
The winter war was a disaster.

Finland had one big city.

>the main goal of the war which was full annexation
No, the goal was moving the border further to the west. The USSR achieved that.

No, the goal was to have independent Finland governed by the Finnish Communist Party.
So basically the goal was to have the communism ban lifted in Finland, as the party was already getting votes.

>people actually believe that Russia only wanted part of Finland
Tell that to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The commies would have preferred a border with Sweden but they didn't risk continuing the war and the loss of prestige.

>but they didn't risk continuing the war and the loss of prestige
They were winning the war handily. It cost an arm and a leg, but at no point were they anywhere near losing, and it was obvious to everyone involved they will win.

What they were risking was foreign intervention. French and British support grew by the day and eventually Sweden might have cracked under the threat of having a border with the Soviets and let them pass through their country. Not to mention the US public was growing increasingly supportive of the Finns, and the Soviets couldn't risk trade sanctions or outright blockade with the Allies or the US.

>claim to be defenders of workers everywhere
>start a war of aggression because you're low-key trying to reconquer old imperial land
If the Western Allies are debating intervening against you, you fucked up.

No
Im pretty sure brits have already declared war on them
And it also further showed the weakness of the L*ague of nations
The soviets estimated they needed 1 month to sweep up the whole of Finland
And im pretty sure their plans was much more than just securing Leningrad

USSR propaganda painted the war as defensive, sort of. They made (favorable) offers to trade land in such a way that Leningrad would be further away from the Finnish border. Ultimately, the official goal of the war was to secure Leningrad, since it could currently literally be shelled from Finland, without even entering USSR.
And the first shot of the war was the (alleged) shelling of a Russian outpost by Finnish army somewhere in the wasteland there. Thats how the war was "defensive", it was a reaction to border guards being injured by artillery shots falling near.

Also, don't forget the civil war - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War
The Whites and the Reds were at war, and the Whites now rule Finland, while the Reds rule USSR obviously. This is a way to justify the continuation.

>They were winning the war handily.
They were bleeding themselves dry against a vastly inferior enemy and over a few miles of snowy clay. The only reason why the USSR made any gains was because the Finns were so outnumbered that they couldn't launch an effective counteroffensive.

>Tankie rooskishills denying reality this hard
>Literally DAMAGE CONTROL after 70+ years

B-but muh big city! Muh only objective was Leningrad!

The fuckin m*lotov-Ribbentropp pact included provisions for Finland to reside under the tankie sphere of influence so don't even pretend this wasn't the build up to annexation like we saw in the baltic states.

Karelia was no more communist than most other areas of Finland (although it was heavily ideologically bipolar, just like the rest of Finland due to the recent civil war)

And damn near 100% of the population evaciated anyway, with 10x the more bitter hatred against the russians. And what did you do with it? You rekt the infrastructure so bad that by now, if the Finns were to be given back the ceded territories (which we should), the main pain would be basically having to rebuild everything because of what a shitty state it's in.

Suomi on paras, tankie. Deal with it.

>The soviets estimated they needed 1 month to sweep up the whole of Finland
They estimated wrong, obviously. Them having a bad plan and losing many dudes doesn't change the fact that they were winning heavily and decisively.

>the reason the USSR was winning is X
I never spoke about reasons, I just said the USSR was winning. I dislike memesters who insist they were losing, this was never the case.
The USSR was winning heavily, decisively, for certain going to get whatever they ask for. They didn't ask for more because 1. They said to their own people they only want that, and 2. They didn't want the international community to intervene, as it hadn't thus far.

I thought the Finns accepted the Kremlin last overtures when the war seemed imminent,but by then they already closed down the diplomatic cables
Also im pretty sure that shelling was a false flag

>I thought the Finns accepted the Kremlin last overtures when the war seemed imminent
They made counter-offers and bargained a bit, but didn't accept the initial offer.

>Also im pretty sure that shelling was a false flag
It probably was, a few years ago Putin opened some Finnish-Russian commission to look at things.

For Finland it was a defensive war with the potential prospect of fullblown annexation. This did not happen because the time, energy and manpower would've been (even more) catastrophical for the Soviets.

Thus, by definition of what a defensive victory entails, Finland won.

If defensive victory is just survival, this means that Germany won both the World Wars.

Nazi support
Poland became a Communist Soviet Satellite. It was Soviet in all but paperwork

>I never spoke about reasons, I just said the USSR was winning.
But they weren't. Making gains does not mean winning. Operation Barbarossa made tremendous gains. Imperial Japan made significant gains. Italy made major gains in the Mediterranean. Until your enemies have capitulated you haven't won, and unless you're making progress towards their capitulation you aren't winning.

>aggressor in war
>defensive victory
Pick one.

First one? Arguably, but they still had to basically reform the country, thus one could argue it was a new one.

Second one? No. The Germany that started the second world war was not the Germany that came out of it, nor the one we know today. It is a heavily revised and altered state in every sense.

That being said, neither of those wars were defensive wars for Germany. WW1 was too complicated to be called defensive or agressive, though definitively leaning on thw agressive side, whereas WW2 was a direct war of German agression with the immideate aim of annexing parts of Poland. They did not achieve this as the German states created after the war were clearly separate from the Nazi state, nor did they possess the territorial gains that were sought after.

And it still does not disprove in any way that the Finns won a defensive victory.

They demanded military bases on Finnish soil - just like in the Baltics. They would have led to a military coup and annexation just like it did there.

One victory in 1920.
But in 1939 the Soviets attacked again and by 1944 the entire Polish population was under Soviet control.

>And the first shot of the war was the (alleged) shelling of a Russian outpost by Finnish army somewhere in the wasteland there. Thats how the war was "defensive", it was a reaction to border guards being injured by artillery shots falling near.
Mainila shots were fired by the USSR.

>It probably was, a few years ago Putin opened some Finnish-Russian commission to look at things.
"Probably".
>Materials in the private archives of Soviet party leader Andrei Zhdanov heavily hint that the entire incident was orchestrated in order to paint Finland as an aggressor and launch an offensive.[6] The Finnish side denied responsibility for the attacks and identified Soviet artillery as their source – indeed, the war diaries of nearby Finnish artillery batteries show that Mainila was out of range of all of them, as they had been withdrawn previously to prevent such incidents.[7]

Then that city was Åbo, not Viipuri

Or Helsingfors/Helsinki?

What about Tammerfors/Tampere?

Why does everyone write Vipuri?
Wasn't it called Wiborg?

Vyborg is swedish
Viipuri is finnish

Isn't Finland like Ukraine though, an tier country?
Its always been either Russia or Sweden, ever since nationalism got developed and nations and empires forming.

Vyborg is Russian
Viborg is Swedish
Viipuri is Finnish
Wxborg (x=i/y) is old Swedish

Nah Finns have clearly separate culture from Russians and Swedes. Ukraine is basically Russia in denial sort of the same way like all ex-Yugs are using the same language while pretending it's not.

That didnt happen until after WW2 and the paris peace treaty. If that was the goal all along why wasnt it demanded in 1940? instead all stalin demanded was territory. So youre wrong.

The most probable reasons were:

1. He believed that Finland was going to go commie anyway and would then return to the fold.

2. Accepting Finnish independence was a good way to appear magnanimous in comparison to his opponents, most of whom weren't willing to let the minority peoples of the former Russian Empire gain independence.

3. At the end of the day, there wasn't much he could actually do to stop the Finns from getting what they want at that very moment, what with the Civil War starting, Germans ready to meddle in his affairs and shit, so might as well make the most of it (see points 1 and 2).

tl;dr: He was playing the long game, didn't pan out entirely the way he thought and Stalin inherited that particular problem.

t. Ahmed von Vladmirov

>most industrialized and populated cities
So they took Helsinki, Tampere and Turku? You fucking sub-80 IQ moron, they took one larger town, and while it was the capital of Karelia, it wasn't as terrible a loss as you might think, except maybe emotionally

>the only relevant port
The Port of Helsinki? Again, what the fuck, you imbecile?

>and mines?
The ones that are still inside Finnish borders? Petsamo is not a lot of land compared to the rest of Finnish Lapland, which has mines galore.

This is soviet propaganda. They already set up a proxy government during the war. Finland would have been made into a Warsaw-pact communist shithole.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Democratic_Republic

>Do we literally have Putinbots
Yes.

>Finland will never get all of Russian Fennoscandia
MY BORDER AUTISM

The Nazi government was completely eradicated and the country was occupied and then reorganized. Not comparable at all.

Mongor Genes Forded 10 Mirrion times

Kek, suomi is life. Fingolian master race