While the French and the British were preoccupied with their war against Germany,

and with the blessing of Germany in the secret protocols to their non-aggression agreement,

the Soviet Union began to assert itself within its recently designated sphere of influence.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The 20th century. Episode 317, The Winter War.

We're going to talk about Finland today.

We last looked at Finland back in episode 181, which was part of our 1919 world tour.

I concluded that episode by saying that relations between Finland and Russia would remain tense for the next two decades.

Now here we are, two decades later, and things are tense.

Told you so.

Bolshevik Russia under Lenin had allowed Finland to secede from its relationship with Russia, though the Bolsheviks felt confident that the

revolution would sweep Finland as well and turn it into an allied communist nation.

Finland had its own version of the civil war that splintered Russia,

except that in Finland, the whites, led by Karl Gustav Monterheim,

the ethnic Swede, Finnish, Imperial Russian General,

routed the Reds and brutally.

Finland and Russia signed a peace agreement in 1920.

Finland became a democratic republic, right-leaning in its politics, and it was still pretty

much the same 20 years later in 1939.

Throughout the 1920s, the new Soviet Union was preoccupied with its internal problems.

But by the 1930s, with Stalin emerging as the effective dictator of the USSR, and with the Soviet economy and military both rapidly modernizing,

Finland was finding itself in an increasingly difficult position.

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