Permanently Deleted
wrong side won the finnish civil war :sicko-wistful:
Before the war, around 90 out of the 200 seats in the Finnish parlament were held by parties that supported, to some degree, the idea of “Greater Finland”, conquering and ethnically cleansing parts of Russia. The fascist party had 14 seats. Finland was also deep in the German sphere of influence and would be a natural ally to the nazis in the upcoming war. Finland’s border was also very close to Leningrad.
The pre-emptive war was strategically sensible, and if it had ended in a quick Soviet victory as predicted, it would have probably led to fewer casualties in the war.
Here’s a bit of info in english
This and this are in finnish and mostly concern the Winter War.
If you want to read about the time between 1917 and 1945 to get overall feel for fascist as fuck Finland there’s this and this again in finnish.
I recommend https://www.deepl.com/Translator or Google translate might work too.
edit: also had this bookmarked, it’s in english.
Funnily enough only to the civil war times Brief history of Russophobia
According to Karemaa, the class war of 1918 changed the Finns’ attitude towards the Russians. With the war, the white side transformed pan-European stereotypes and occasional anti-Russian sentiment into deep Russophobia. The war was easy to present propagandistically as a struggle for independence, a mythical struggle of the West against the East. The fearsome Bolshevik Russian represented the evil that had been unleashed. Especially the Jäger who had returned to Finland from Germany had adopted Germanic racial attitudes and anti-Russianism. The fearsome Bolshevik Russian represented the evil that had been let loose. Many Finnish writers and poets, from Juhani Siljo to Larin Kyösti and V. A. Koskenniemi, Ilmari Kianto, wrote insulting texts about the Russian people during the war that raised the fighting spirit. The Russians were described in racist terms as “sluts of the land”, while the Red Guards were “half-wits” who fraternised with “dogs and scum”.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I feel like, despite the Finns doing fascism around the period, “temporary land loan” isn’t something anyone would trust from anyone else. That’s the kind of shit that invaders used as an excuse in Hamlet.
They were a far right country with Lebensraum like aspirations on the border of one of the USSR’s biggest population centers. Stalin did not feel like that was a good state of affairs
