Why did the Soviet Union make peace with Finland in 1940?

After a series of brutal failures in the winter of 39-40, the Red Army regrouped for a new offensive in early 1940, which badly damaged Finnish forces and pushed them to the brink of collapse. However, in March 1940 the Soviet Union agreed to a peace treaty which, while harsh, allowed Finland to keep it's independence and maintain a strong military. My question is, why did the Soviet Union decide to make peace when it seemed to be on the verge of total victory? I have my own theories, but I was wondering if anyone had a more concrete explanation?
 
Because they just weren't at the verge of victory? If any Finnish sniper can kill hundreds of Soviet soldiers, you better leave them alone.
 

karikon

Banned
One of the resson was that Stalin was a little bit paranoid about the capitalistic powers uniting against the soviets
 
Because they just weren't at the verge of victory? If any Finnish sniper can kill hundreds of Soviet soldiers, you better leave them alone.

By 1940 they had pushed Finnish forces back from the Mannerheim Line and taken the city of Vyborg. Every account of the war I've read describes those as major accomplishments and indicative that the Finns were unable to put up further resistance.
 
Perhaps it was the preparation of an Anglo-French-Free Polish expeditionary force to go to Finland's aid that made Stalin back off. Although said force would probably never have got to Finland the risk of ending up at war with the western powers may have seemed real enough. In addition world opinion was clearly on Finland's side and aid was arriving from the West, including the US. If it had been a straightforward march in, installation of puppet government and Finnish SSR then it would have been okay but plucky little Finland standing up to the SU and resisting so well was bad P.R. He probably just wanted it over and done with.
 
By 1940 they had pushed Finnish forces back from the Mannerheim Line and taken the city of Vyborg. Every account of the war I've read describes those as major accomplishments and indicative that the Finns were unable to put up further resistance.

Actually they hadn't taken Viipuri yet but would have done it rather shortly. The Finnish supply situation was extremely dire at that point and it's very likely that Finnish forces would have collapsed rather soon.

The main reason why Soviets made the peace was that they just wanted to wash their hands from the whole affair. The war had become way too embarrassing for them and hurt their foreign relations. There were also fears about a possible Franco-British intervention which really wasn't something what Soviets wanted. (I should add though that I'm extremely skeptical that the intervention could have been done in any realistic way.)

It's good to remember too that the Soviets didn't actually know the situation in the Finnish army as well as Finns did. They might have thought that they must fight all the way to Helsinki before Finns surrender.

Some people have also suggested humorously that Soviets had come to a conclusion that Finns would be too difficult people to rule under the Soviet system. :D
 
The real miracle of the Winter War was the fact that Finland didin't crack at the very end. Finns had already spent most of their military resources in the static defence of their main line, the position that the foreign journalists rather ambitiously nicknamed Mannerheim Line - this "Maginot" had less concrete than the Finlandia House in Helsinki and was basically just a trenchline reinforced with some AT obstacles here and there, accompanied by ~hundred concrete emplacements at the whole Isthmus.

After Timoshenko had massed hundreds of tanks and thousands of fresh troops to Summa area and meticulous Soviet reconnaissance had identified the Finnish positions in the intented breakthrough zone, the war in the Isthmus truly turned into a battle of attrition.

Finns were able to disengage and slip away their frontline troops to their new line of defense further north - but it was a line on maps, hastily dug in by the same troops that had already been worn out in the battles at the main line. Unsurprisingly this line was soon breached as well, and the Finns withdrew to the last area where they hoped to stop the Red Army before it would be able to spread out from the narrow bottleneck of Isthmus and enter to the better roads and wider operational areas of Southeastern Finland.

Finnish HQ was really stressed by the time the truce negotiations in Moscow begun. Mannerheim insisted that the current positions should be held at any cost to deter futher Soviet demands, while Airo and Heinrichs, the commander of the troops in the Karelian Isthmus, stated that with the current rate of thousand casualties per week the frontline could perhaps be maintained for a week - after that everything would shatter and fall apart.

There were no operational reserves left, and even field replacements were hard to come by by February, as conscripts were sent to the front with minimal training. Chronic shortages of artillery ammunition had plagued Finns since the beginning of the war, but by now Mannerheim's orders to fire 50% of remaining artillery munitions to fool the Soviets into thinking that Finns were beginning to receive more aid from the Entente resulted to situations where batteries firing against the Soviet bridgehead at Häränpäänniemi fired a salvo of 2 shells.

But the Soviet military intelligence didin't know any of this. What they knew was that the British and French media was eagerly lobbying for military intervention, the Soviet Union had already been expelled from the League of Nations, and that the Entente powers were pressuring Swedes and Norwegians to grant military access to Allied expeditionary forces.

Most of all they knew that the operational season in northern Fennoscandia was turning towards the springtime. Back in the Karelian Isthmus the same spring thaw that would stop all large-scale operations in the Eastern Front in the coming years was locally known as rospuutto - but to the Soviet planners it was the same familiar rasputitsa that threatened to wreck their already stressed supply system in the Isthmus. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tanks and artillery pieces crammed to the narrow ~50km wide area between the western shores of River Vuoksi and the Gulf of Finland, the Red Army was in the danger of outrunning their clogged supply routes, thus preventing a quick new breakthrough that would have turned the war from field battles into asymmetrical and bitter guerrilla struggle.

So, Finns were desperate enough to accept the draconian terms dictated by Stalin, while the Great Generalissimus in turn wanted to take a timeout from a conflict that had been intented to be a short showcase of the new power of the reformed RKKA. Finns had made the Soviet Union look weak, and Stalin hated that. He was also cautious enough to cut his losses for now in order to see how the showdown between Hitler and the Allies would turn out in the Western Front in summer 1940.

In the end leaders on both sides felt cheated and bitter of the outcome of the conflict, and knew that this was indeed only an interim peace.
 
Maybe Stalin didn't like his dramas turning into comedy shows. The world was supposed to tremble not laugh.
 
After a series of brutal failures in the winter of 39-40, the Red Army regrouped for a new offensive in early 1940, which badly damaged Finnish forces and pushed them to the brink of collapse. However, in March 1940 the Soviet Union agreed to a peace treaty which, while harsh, allowed Finland to keep it's independence and maintain a strong military. My question is, why did the Soviet Union decide to make peace when it seemed to be on the verge of total victory? I have my own theories, but I was wondering if anyone had a more concrete explanation?
1. Well, Stalin take only that territories, that he wanted before - so, it could be the attempt to save the face - something like "we didin't wanrt to capture Finland! we just want our border no to be so close to Leningrad."
2. Maybe, he also didn't want to face guerillia warfare and the necessity to bear expences, connecting with occupation - f.e., he would have to give some parts of Karelia to Finland, to make his puppet Funnush government more popular.
 
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Both the Soviet government and the Western Allies had in November-December 1939 seriously underestimated the ability of Finland to defend itself. By February 1940, after the "miracle" of the Winter War the view had shifted in both East and West to the opposing end of the spectrum: now both were seriously overestimating the Finnish defence.

Like Karelian has described above, the Finns were able to maintain cohesive defence into the very last days of the war, and more to the point to keep up an illusion of a strong, organized army that could keep up the fight until the Western help arrived.

It seems the Soviet leadership was in late February - early March very afraid on even somewhat convinced that the Finns would start receiving serious Western help within weeks and that the British and the French and possibly Sweden and Norway would be joining the war themselves. There exist, for example, NKVD reports from these weeks (signed by Beria) that directly say that three Allied divisions are standing by in Britain to be sent to Finland and that the Swedish would be ready to allow them passage.*

The situation was of course in reality somewhat different, but Stalin and the other Soviet leaders were viewing the situation through their own Soviet spectacles - ones that saw encirclement and Grand Capitalist Alliances everywhere.

The USSR surely could have crushed Finland in the spring of 1940. But the reality and illusion of both a continued stiff Finnish resistance and an imminent large-scale escalation of the war, both heavily influenced by the fog of war, had created a situation that was both too different from the original plan** and potentially too dangerous to the very existence of the Soviet state. In this situation Stalin did what he did best as a skilled gambler, cut his losses and managed to turn an impending disaster into something that could be played up as a limited victory in Soviet propaganda.

A blow was struck against Soviet prestige and Stalin and his cronies surely were hurting because of it. But looking out to the world at large from the windows of the Kremlin in March 1940, this was definitely not the worst way the war could have ended.


* Reprinted in Tuntematon talvisota. Neuvostoliiton salaisen poliisin kansiot. ("The Unknown Winter War. The Files of the Soviet Secret Police.") by Vihavainen and Saharov et al., 2009.
** Swift, nearly bloodless conquest of Helsinki after the ignominious collapse of a weak bourgeois government and its poorly armed White militia, installation of a puppet regime in a glowing propaganda coup to bring Finland into the Soviet sphere of influence and the elimination of the possibility of Finnish soil being used as a launching pad for an attack against the USSR in the future.
 
What if Germany had allowed support to come through them instead of confiscating everything.

They were already willing to seriously piss off Mussolini in order to avoid pissing off Stalin. And for a good reason - The Third Reich would have been unable to conduct the offensive in the West during the summer without Soviet raw materials and trade keeping their army, war industry and economy up and running. Why antagonize their main source of supplies because of some former Russian province where the locals speak some Fenno-Ugric gibberish?

Although I can't find the exact source, the book was an article compilation known as "Suomi Sodassa: Talvi- ja jatkosodan tärkeät päivät quoted Himmler as saying in winter 1939:

"Of course it annoys me to think that Asiatic-Mongolic Soviet soldiers will soon ravage blond Finnish women, but right now we must conduct ice-cold foreign policy."
 
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I'm going to go with the "PR" and "realpolitik" explanations too.
Stalin may have been a lot of bad things, but the one thing he was not was stupid.



Although I can't find the exact source, the book was an article compilation known as "Suomi Sodassa: Talvi- ja jatkosodan tärkeät päivät quoted Himmler as saying in winter 1939:

"Of course it annoys me to think that Asiatic-Mongolic Soviet soldiers will soon ravage blond Finnish women, but right now we must conduct ice-cold foreign policy."

Never mind, its too easy.
 
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