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I think that it is important to ask which of these administrative areas had a) the actual viability to function as an independent state and, even more crucially, b) a real homegrown movement that supported a project for independence, with enough support that it could feasibly jumpstart an effort...

I agree with this post pretty much word for word. The OTL Soviet Union managed to kill a lot more people in the 20s and 30s than any other nation in Europe. The level of death caused by the Soviet state and leadership was extraordinary in period terms, and, at the time, no non-Nazi right wing...

There was peat production for fuel use in Finland before WWII, but it was rather small scale. They did jumpstart a government-run effort to raise production during the war IOTL, but did not get very far in the project by 1945 because only limited resources could be thrown at it in wartime. The...

In the event, I would be a bit worried about the logistics of getting all those tanks into Finland in conditions where Germany and the USSR treat the Baltic Sea as a battleground, and then keeping them supplied with fuel, ammunition and spare parts, etc, through the Finnish ports, and the...

From the top of my head, I'd say that creating a producer gas based system was easier, especially in terms of the logistics for the fuel (which would be locally available pretty much everywhere). Methanol would have created additional work (setting up production, transporting wood to factories...

This matter has been discussed in other WWII threads earlier. In the 20s and 30s, Finland used a lot of domestic firewood even on ordinary days, over 20 million cubic meters per year - that comes to almost 6 cubic meters per person per year. During WWII, the number rose to over 25 million cubic...

How on Earth could the Soviets do "much worse" in the Winter War? Are both Stalin and the general commanding the invasion deliberately sabotaging the Red Army's efforts, instead of just doing it unwittingly like IOTL? Maybe they decided that Finland was such an easy mark that the Red Army should...

My point is that for a certain important role in settling virgin land, the "Forest Finns" simply were the best tool the Swedish had. Yes, the Swedish and Norwegians could do it, too, but in some ways the Finnish Savonians were just better. Despite their comparatively small numbers, it thus makes...

I have two general expectations in a scenario where Finland has granted the Soviets (some of) its demands in late 1939. 1) If the USSR attacks in 1940, the Finns will fight. Or at least some of them will. The question is how badly will they get hampered by the different ways the government...

The reason people often posit Finns, and especially Savonians, as the go-to settlers a Swedish power would use in North America is that these people had a particular skill set required for settling virgin land of the kind one could expect in coastal North America. As practitioners of slash and...

The butterflies would make European and world history very different from the OTL, in ways that are not easy to predict. The changes for Russian and general Eastern European history alone would be huge.

There's an argument to be made that dealing with the Baltic states had been so easy that the USSR went into the discussions with the Finns in sort of a half-cocked fashion: offer the Finns comparatively light terms to make a quick deal. Reading the accounts of the Moscow negotiations, I tend to...

The terms offered by the USSR included strategically important parts of Finland being occupied by Soviet troops, namely the southern part of the Finnish main defensive line on the Karelian Isthmus (the so-called Mannerheim Line), the Hanko Peninsula (or parts of it) at the mouth of the Gulf of...

Akin to how the Baltic states remained independent and neutral? ;)

I think the basic question here is why would Sweden want to adopt so many and deepening policies that tie its economy to Nazi Germany? While such measures would in part help the Swedish economy in peace time, during war they would seriously endanger the Swedish ability to stay neutral. And...

The Finnish Civil War, along with its aftermath, was a national tragedy and a formative experience for the young republic as well as for both the political right and the political left. Up to 180 000 Finns took part in the war on both sides, and like the text you quoted says, over 80 000 of the...

I generally agreed with that post, but this bit is unsupportable hyperbole. The Finnish Reds only ever made up just a small part of the Finnish working class, and then most Red warriors and prisoners survived the war and the postwar prison camps. If the Finnish Whites had indeed "massacred" the...

Could you elaborate on this? The Finnish Air Force had a maritime role IOTL, with reconnaissance and anti-submarine duties being mainly bestowed to No. 6 Squadron of Flying Regiment 5. I think the question in that regard is that how much resources would it be useful to invest to such work? The...

The Finnish Air Force's role was mostly defensive. Giving it more and better aircraft would help Finland and increase the Soviet aircraft losses, but strategically speaking there would not be major benefits to be expected. The Finnish air doctrine didn't include strategic bombing, the bombing...

It is not easy to find sources about exactly how many mines the Soviets laid in 1941, but it its at least clear that when they still controlled Estonia and the Hanko base on the Finnish coast, they laid a barrage of c. 3000 mines at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland where the plan was to create...