Why Putin should have read up on the Finnish ski troops of the Winter War
At times of crisis, it’s tempting to look to the past for clues about what the future might bring. Tempting, but not necessarily advisable. History may sometimes find echoes in the present day, but it never repeats itself precisely, and trying to convince yourself otherwise can only ever lead to disappointment. Having said that, however, and as strange as it sounds, a book about the history of skiing may shed at least a little light on the conflict currently unfolding in Ukraine.
In 2008, Roland Huntford published Two Planks and a Pasion: The Dramatic History of Skiing, in which he set out to chart the development of the sport from its earliest beginnings as a means of getting from A to
B in the Bronze Age to the massparticipation recreational activity it has become today. One chapter is titled “Military Skiing”, and it deals with various conflicts in which skis played a role, starting with a battle fought near Oslo in 1200, in which the Norwegian king Sverre used a group of skiers to report on the size and position of a rebel force.
Obviously today’s Ukrainian armed forces aren’t using skis, but nevertheless one conflict described in this chapter bears an almost uncanny resemblance to what’s happening in Ukraine right now, and that’s the Winter War of 1939-40, in which Stalin, who felt the Finnish border was too close to St Petersburg (or Leningrad as it was then), threw some 600,000 soldiers of the Red Army against a Finnish force that numbered just 150,000.
The parallels are particularly striking when it comes to the pivotal battle for Suomussalmi – a strategically important village in central Finland which, if taken, would have allowed the Soviets to advance all the way to the Gulf of Bothnia, effectively cutting Finland in two.
Rather than attacking along a broad front, which might have made their numerical advantage tell, the commanders of a force of around 40,000 Soviet troops instead opted to stick to the roads and advanced in long columns. Approaching them swiftly and silently through the surrounding forests on skis, meanwhile, and wearing white camouflage often improvised out of bedsheets, around 7,000 Finns made a series of hit and run attacks. The Finnish commander Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo described their relatively straightforward tactics as follows: “It was a matter of using flank attacks to carve up the column in separate pieces and encircle and destroy each one in turn.”
These easily isolated Soviet units soon came to be known as “motti” – a Finnish word meaning a pile of logs waiting to be sawn up. The Soviets, meanwhile, mostly easy targets in their dark, standard-issue uniforms, described their swift, almost invisible attackers as “belaya smert” or “the white death”. At one point, Huntford writes, “the whole 163rd Rifle Division [of the Red Army] was helplessly strung out in a stranded column 40km long on the road to the border.” In the end, having defeated both the 163rd Rifle Division and also the 44th Rifle Division who were sent in to replace them, the Finns held the village, and were also left with much heavy equipment which had been abandoned by the retreating Soviets.
The contemporary resonances are not hard to find. For the 40km long Red Army column outside Suomussalmi, read the 40-mile long Russian Army convoy outside Kyiv; for the “motti” attacks of 1939-40, see the recent devastating Ukrainian attacks on Russian convoys, such as those outside Kharkiv and Kherson and in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv (some images of empty Russian vehicles in snow-covered forest tracks outside Kharkiv are eerily reminiscent of images from the Winter War); and for the heavy equipment abandoned by the fleeing Soviet troops, see the assorted Youtube clips of Ukrainian civilians taking Russian armoured personnel carriers for a spin and Ukrainian farmers using their tractors to tow away ditched Russian tanks.
As evidenced by his rambling speech of 23 February, in which he attempted to justify his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin clearly fancies himself as a bit of an amateur historian. However, if he had really done his homework, and paid attention to Russia’s defeats as well as her victories, he might have learned the lessons of the Winter War.
Incidentally, the skiing Finns managed to hang onto their independence in spite of the Soviet onslaught. Hostilities ceased in March 1940 with the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty. Finland ceded nine percent of its territory to the Soviet Union, which was more than the Soviets had demanded in the first place, but it had inflicted around 350,000 casualties while sustaining just 70,000, massively enhanced its international reputation, and also done serious damage to the reputation of the Red Army. Stalin was so chastened by the experience he demanded a complete overhaul of the armed forces. He may have been a mass murderer, but at least he knew how to learn from past mistakes.
The Finns managed to hang onto their independence in spite of the Soviet onslaught