During the four-month long Finnish Talvisota [Winter War, which the Soviets called the Belya Smyert, white death] the Soviet sent in a million men initially, with another half-million added in after initial losses. The Finns had fewer than 250,000 men with which to resist them, mostly ill-equipped and hastily-trained Civil Guardsment.
Four months later, at least a quarter-million of the invaders were either KIA or seriously enough wounded that they were no longer militarily useful: with missing limbs, badly burned, or, often, lungshot. Most of the Soviet casualties froze to death or bled out awaiting medical treatment that never came, having initially worn summer uniforms to what they had been told would be a short fight followed by occupation duty. Instead they got -30º temperatures of the coldest winter in 40 years, and the 20-hour long cold nights of the Arctic circle. Kruschev once stated that the Red Army hads taken a million casualties in Finland, and there's a fair chance that it was the Finnish success in repelling the Soviet visitors that convinced Hitler that if the Finns could do so well, the German Army could roll over the Red Army even easier...and so Hitler invaded Russia. But the Finns had taught the Soviets how to fight using the weather as a weapon, and the German effort failed. In 1959, the Soviets had put down uprisings of independence in East Germany and Hungary in '56, and again looked at Finland. Finland had no great army, and no massive budget, but they took their surplus and obsolete military weapons from their arsenals, including much of the foreign aid sent them during their Winter War and the equipment captured from the Soviets, and peddled it off to the American arms company Interarms, then called Interarmco. In nreturm the Finns got 250,000 WWII British 9mm Sten Guns, a quarter-million automatic weapons, enough for every Finnish soldier, reservist and civilian volunteer.
The Soviet Union's leadership decided that another visit to Finland would be just a little too expensive. And possibly, another MAJOR embarassment.
