more than four hundred of the Soviet assault troops were killed. Material losses were similarly lopsided in the war. Altogether, the Soviet Air Force lost about one thousand aircraft; Finland around one hundred.
The world’s attention was focused on the Soviet-Finnish War, because at that time despite British and French declarations of war against Germany in September 1939 over Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was no other fighting taking place in Europe. Finland was much admired in the democratic West for its courageous stand against a much larger foe, but to Finland’s disappointment, that admiration did not translate into significant outside assistance. By contrast, Soviet aggression was widely condemned, and the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. More importantly, So1434
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viet military weakness was exposed, which served to embolden Hitler and confirm his belief that Germany could easily defeat the USSR.
Defeated Finland became increasingly worried when in the summer of 1940 the USSR occupied Estonia, which lay just forty miles across the Baltic Sea. Finland found a champion for its defense and a means to regain the lost territories when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Bar-barossa on June 22, 1941. The USSR provided a convenient pretext for the start of the “Continuation War” (as the resumed hostilities are known in Finland), when it bombed several Finnish cities, including Helsinki, on June 25. While the Red Army retreated before the Nazi blitz to within three miles of Leningrad and twenty of Moscow, Finland invaded southward along both sides of Lake Ladoga down to the 1939 boundary. During the nearly nine hundred day siege of Leningrad, Finnish forces sealed off access to the city from the north. Close to one million Leningraders perished in the ordeal, primarily from hunger and cold in the winter of 1941-1942. Finland, which relied heavily on German imports during the war, rebuffed a Soviet attempt through neutral Sweden in December 1941 to secure a separate peace and relief for Leningrad. At the same time, the Finnish government refused German requests to attempt to cross the Svir River in force to link up with the Wehrmacht along the southeastern side of Ladoga. The lake remained Leningrad’s only surface link with the rest of the USSR during the siege.
Finland’s position in southern Karelia became increasingly vulnerable as its ally Germany began to lose the war in the USSR in 1943. In late February 1944, a month after the Red Army smashed the German blockade south of Leningrad, the Soviet Air Force flew hundreds of sorties against Helsinki and published an ultimatum for peace, which included, among other things, internment of German troops in northern Finland and demobilization of the Finnish Army. After Finland refused the harsh terms, the Red Army launched a massive offensive north of Leningrad on June 9. In early August Mannerheim managed to shore up Finnish defenses near the 1940 border at the same time that the Finnish parliament appointed him the country’s president. However, continued German defeats and Soviet reoccupation of Estonia convinced President Mannerheim to agree to an armistice on September 19. The agreement restored the 1940 boundary, forced German troops out of Finland, leased to the USSR territory for a military base a few miles
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from Helsinki (which was later returned), and saddled Finland with heavy reparations. Although the Soviet Union basically controlled Finnish foreign policy until the Soviet collapse in 1991, of all of Nazi Germany’s wartime European allies, only Finland avoided Soviet occupation after the war and preserved its own elected government and market economy. See also: FINLAND; FINNS AND KARELIANS; NAZI-SOVIET PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II
Mannerheim, Carl. (1954). Memoirs. New York: Dutton. Trotter, William R. (1991). A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
After declining relations throughout the 1930s and then a flurry of negotiations in the summer of 1939, Germany (represented by Karl Schnurre) and the Soviet Union (represented by Yevgeny Babarin) signed a major economic agreement in Berlin in the early morning hours of August 20. The treaty called for 200 million Reichsmark in new orders and 240 million Reichsmark in new and current exports from both sides over the next two years.
This agreement served two purposes. First, it brought two complementary economies closer together. To support its war economy, Germany needed raw materials-oil, manganese, grains, and wood. The Soviet Union needed manufactured products-machines, tools, optical equipment, and weapons. Although the USSR had slightly more room to maneuver and a somewhat superior bargaining position, neither country had many options for receiving such materials elsewhere. Subsequent economic agreements in 1940 and 1941, therefore, focused on the same types of items.
Second, the economic negotiations provided a venue for these otherwise hostile powers to discuss political and military issues. Hitler and Stalin signaled each other throughout 1939 by means of these economic talks. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed a mere four days after the economic agreement.
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Because raw materials took less time to produce, Soviet shipments initially outpaced German exports and provided an important prop to the German war economy in late 1940 and 1941. Before the Germans could fully live up to their end of the bargain, Hitler invaded. See also: FOREIGN TRADE; GERMANY, RELATIONS WITH; NAZI- SOVIET PACT OF 1939; WORLD WAR II
Ericson, Edward E. (1999). Feeding the German Eagle: Soviet Economic Aid to Nazi Germany, 1933-1941. West-port, CT: Praeger.
For many years, the term novy sovetsky chelovek in Soviet Marxism-Leninism was usually translated into English as “the new Soviet man.” A translation that would be more faithful to the meaning of the original Russian would be “the new Soviet person,” because the word chelovek is completely neutral with regard to gender.
The hope of remaking the values of each member of society was implicit in Karl Marx’s expectations for the progression of society from capitalism through proletarian revolution to communism. Marx reasoned that fundamental economic and social restructuring would generate radical attitudi-nal change, but Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin insisted that the political regime had to play an active role in the transformation of people’s values, even in a socialist society. It remained for the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted at the party’s Twenty-Second Congress in 1961 in accordance with the demands of Nikita Khrushchev, to spell out the “moral code of the builder of communism,” which subsequently was elaborated at length by a wide variety of publications. The builder of communism was expected to be educated, hard working, collectivistic, patriotic, and unfailingly loyal to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During the transition to a fully communist society, as predicted by Khrushchev, such vestiges of past culture as religion, corruption, and drunkenness would be eradicated. The thinking associated with the Party Program of 1961 represented the last burst of revolutionary optimism in the Soviet Union.
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Over time, it became increasingly difficult to ascribe “deviations from socialist morality” to the influence of pre-1917 or pre-1936 social structures. Indeed, testimony from a variety of sources suggested that reliance on connections, exchanges of favors, and bribery (which had by no means disappeared in the Stalin years) were steadily growing in importance during the post-Stalin decades. In the mid-1970s Hedrick Smith’s book The Russians described the members of the largest nationality in the USSR as impulsive, generous, mystical, emotional, and essentially irrational, behind the facade of a monochromatic ideology imposed by an authoritarian political regime. Though the Brezhnev leadership still insisted that the socialist way of life (sotsialistichesky obraz zhizni) in the Soviet Union was morally superior to that in the West with its unbridled individualism and moral decay, the sense of optimism concerning the future was slipping away. Ideologists complained ever more about amoral behavior by
