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That's not entirely fair. Kuusinen was known in Finland, he had after all been a legitimate and somewhat prominent leftist journalist, a Social Democratic politician, a member of parliament and even his party's chairman before the Civil War. The thing is, though, that by 1939 he was heavily...

You're welcome. Vuorisjärvi's book is a pretty good account of the Petsamo nickel issue, academic and well-sourced. I have a copy (well, honestly speaking it is on long-term loan from a colleague), so if you want to know specific things, feel free to PM me about it.

This issue has been discussed rather exhaustively here on the forum in the last few years. You would do well to use the search function to find earlier discussions about the Soviet goals in Finland, as after a while it gets tiring to have to constantly restate all the things that point towards...

I believe I provided you with some pretty exact numbers in an earlier thread: The information quoted above comes from the book Petsamon nikkeli kansainvälisessä politiikassa 1939-1944 ("Petsamo nickel in international politics in 1939-1944") by Esko Vuorisjärvi, published in 1990. The...

Peasant farming and mechanization with, say, small tractors are not in themselves incompatible. Small family farms don't necessarily need to be operated by man and horse power alone to maintain their character in the way the Nazi romantic ideals called for. Like I wrote above, there was an...

From earlier comments and discussions on the forum, it seems that the New Union Treaty is often seens as something of a silver bullet to solve the USSR's problems in the early 1990s. Personally, I suspect that in practice, even if the treaty was signed and implemented, it might have only served...

I wouldn't say that Germany was particularly poor. It was one of the most affluent nations in Europe, after all. In the interwar, no country in Western Europe had really come that far in mechanizing its agriculture. In terms of employing machinery in farming, the US was in a league of its own by...

That would be practically the same thing, from a Finnish and Baltic POV. It would definitely encourage the *Soviet state to "take back" these areas if the Bolsheviks know that the western Entente powers would not oppose such a move in any concrete way.

A thought: if the Bolsheviks kept Russia in the war on the side of the Entente, do you think if the British and the French would later support a Bolshevik bid to reconquer Finland and assert their rule in the Baltics, too? On one hand, Red Russia would be their ally. On the other, it is also an...

As per my earlier comment about the peace treaty with Finland, where the banned weapons are in the exact same order as in the Austrian State Treaty, I believe this definitely is a case of "cut and paste", with only some changes and additions due to developments between 1945 and 1955.

Waltz-Trapp submarine cooperation? Something something Whitehead torpedoes? ...Or perhaps a musical partnership? :p

I guess it was not really necessary, specifically, to ban submarines from Austria. But then this list of prohibitions seems to be a default script imposed on Germany and many of its allies after WWII. Finland gained many of the same prohibitions as well, as a matter of course it seems, not...

Inspired by the flags above: The flag of the Finnish Popular Republic (Suomen kansanvaltainen tasavalta), a Soviet-allied, short-lived (1918-1923) state created after an alternate Finnish civil war: The greater coat of arms of the Popular Republic, with its motto "The People's Work, the...

I understand using the main elements from the Finnish Communist Party's logo in the coat of arms. But why include the sabre, specifically? In context, using a flag like this would appear to mean that this Finland claims a high level of continuity (and legitimacy) from the 1919 Republic of...

A case of German soldiers helping a country in a significant way can be seen in the fighting between the Finnish military and the Red Army on the Karelian Isthmus in the summer of 1944. In the event, the Soviets concentrated enough troops, armour, artillery and airplanes, etc, against Finland in...

Abandoning Finland does not in itself necessarily give Germany significantly more troops for Normandy. There is only a limited number of troops the Germans could in the short term withdraw from Finland itself, I'd say five divisions or so (most coming from Finnish Lapland), and then it is not a...

Even if the Russians in Karelia would really want to become a part of Finland, like I said above I find it very hard to see there being enough political support in Finland for annexing Karelia, or even a significant part of it. In the 1990s, Finland was in deep economic trouble as it was, and...

The OTL Soviet operation against Finland was a sizable one. The so-called Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive involved altogether 35 divisions, 4 fortified regions, 4 tank brigades and 17 tank and assault gun regiments. They were supported by over 220 artillery and rocket launcher batteries, and...

Karelia was by the 1990s heavily ethnically Russian, though. Only 10% of the Karelian ASSR's population was actually Karelian in 1989. 73,6% was Russian, and altogether nearly 90% was non-Finnic. I would be very surprised if in this majority-Russian area a popular movement commanding more than...

While this is true, it is also true that the Nazis did plan to practically eradicate the Estonians as a population group, by Germanizing a part of it and destroying the rest in some fashion (likely through slave labour, etc). For Nazi victory scenarios that include an independent Greater...