“The Soviets didn’t want that land - as Finland was wasteland.”
This is fun guys. I facilitate Russian history classes mostly 20th century but working on classes on THE GREAT GAME, CRIMEAN WAR, & CHERNOBYL.
Finland is interesting. It was more like the tsars’ backyard than a Russian territory and had less restrictions depending on the tsar. They declared independence on 06DEC1917 and Lenin let them go. There were too many other immediate problems.
There was followed by a 3 month Finnish Civil War which killed around 39000 people mostly reds. The Bolsheviks did little to support the reds.
They stopped the Red Army cold in 1939 where the utter incompetence of the Soviet high command was exposed. They surrendered in March 1940 because they ran out of everything; guns, ammo, people. And the West just talked a lot but did little.
The Soviets realized they could control the government and thus did not need to occupy the entire country. Hence the term Finlandiazation.
Sorry for being verbose. I have a whole shelf on Finland and another whole shelf on the Russian Civil War. I find all this fascinating.
While most of that you have wrote is true I don’t like the term Finlandization. USSR didn’t control the government. It was an independent country with its own way of life unrelated to the Soviet. They were trusted to run their government by themselves.
The difference with Poland is that it never engaged in an aggressive war against Russia. Even Stalin realized why Finland allied with Germany.
Poland at the same time was an imperial power. It signed a pact with Hitler similar to Molotov-Ribentrop in 1934. It has attacked Czechoslovakia with the Nazis. It thought an aggressive was to carve itself an empire after the Bolshevik revolution. It was engaged in prometheism program to inflict division within the Russian Empire being one of the factors of Communist takeover.
The ugliest thing is it uses EU now to continue this dirty business nowadays. What is their beef with modern Russia is hard to imagine. Probably penis-envy again. There is a great number of great Polish people but these dim-wit warmongering nationalists spoiling it big time. Also they are dreaming to hit above their wait, regularly get their butts handed to them and then cry victim. That is simply disgusting.
no, you’re not verbose.
“Lenin let them go” - Lenin had no option - in fact the Bolsheviks signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty and that’s why they could keep their October revolution against the Mensheviks
Finland, after Russia grabbed it from Sweden, was a crown territory. But very little actual usage - besides keeping St. Petersburg safe.