Finland vs the USSR: the resistance Sanna Marin invokes and its shadows

Finland vs the USSR: the resistance Sanna Marin invokes and its shadows

Finland's former prime minister Sanna Marin said it without nuance: Finland fought against Russia in the Second World War. The statement, received in Helsinki as an obvious fact, clashes with the image that still circulates when that conflict is discussed. Because the full story is not that of a small country heroically alone against the Soviet giant, but that of a war with two very different phases and an uncomfortable alliance that the patriotic narrative prefers to gloss over.

The Winter War: when the USSR invaded Finland

On 30 November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland after Helsinki rejected territorial demands over Karelia, on the pretext of protecting Leningrad. Finnish resistance was real and tenacious against a far superior Red Army. That is the part of the story Marin invokes, and it explains much of the national pride.

The uncomfortable alliance with the Nancy

What the heroic narrative usually omits is that Finland, in order to recover what it had lost, then fought alongside Nancy Germany. And when the tide of the front turned, Helsinki switched sides and signed peace with Moscow. "Finland always sides with the winner," goes the ironic saying. A reading that irritates and that defenders of the resistance consider unfair.

The price still being paid

Some argue that the country still pays the consequences of that war, territorial and economic. And one detail that puzzles: in the country that prides itself on its resistance, military service is still compulsory only for men. The former prime minister boasts of a war that her own society has not yet fully come to terms with.