The lessons the forgotten ‘Winter war’ can teach us

As fears grow of an advance on Finland by Russian forces, Robert McCrum reviews a new book about a 1939-40 war in which Stalin's Red Army was thwarted by Finnish soldiers

- Robert McCrum

War and literature have shared an ageless and classic relationship ever since The Iliad. Helen (of Troy) is a mythical woman celebrated less for her jaw-dropping beauty than for her stunning charisma, the face (and majesty) that “launched a thousand ships”. Similarly, no fiendish war machine is more famous than the Trojan horse.

Military adventures, as much as literature, repeat an old tale. In Trotsky’s famous bon mot, war is the locomotive of history. Today, more than a hundred years after the Russian revolution, that ferocious engine, still driven by Moscow, continues to threaten, or devastate, some of the most strategic (and scenic) parts of Europe.

Eastern Ukraine has been reduced to a hellscape reminiscent of 1916 Flanders. Far to the frozen northwest, along 190 miles of Finland’s North Karelia border on the exposed Nato-Russia frontier, with its dense pine and silver birch forests, Finnish forces now rehearse guerrilla warfare against a potential Russian offensive that many expect to happen in the near future. For the vigilant Finns, the odds are just as atrocious as they were the last time enemy troops materialised out of a snowstorm. Finland can barely muster 900,000 fighting men from a population of 5.6 million.

Their preparations are a conscious re-enactment of a brutal David-and-Goliath campaign from 1939-40, the forgotten “Winter war” in which Stalin’s Soviet army advanced on Finland, expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, a quick victory. Three months later, it was over, but not as Stalin had hoped. It's here that literature becomes braided with conflict once again.