Estimates of how long the enemy could have been held in these kinds of retreat-and-stand operations varied from a few days[2] to a couple of months,[3] most averaging around a few weeks.
In his radio speech of 29 November 1939, Molotov argued that the Soviet Union had been trying for two months to negotiate guarantees for the security for Leningrad.
Molotov blamed western countries for instigating the war and argued that they had used Finland as a proxy to fight against the Soviet Union.
In 1948, Stalin wrote in Falsifiers of History that "there could hardly be any doubt that the leading circles of Finland were in league with the Hitlerites and that they wanted to turn Finland into a springboard for Hitler Germany's attack on the U.S.S.R."[7] Regarding the beginning of the war, Stalin wrote, "In the war which the Finnish reactionaries started against the Soviet Union, Britain and France rendered the Finnish militarists every kind of assistance.
Both the Red Army and the League of Nations were humiliated and furthermore, the Allied Supreme War Council had been revealed to be chaotic and powerless.
After the Peace of Moscow, the Germans did not hesitate to move to improve ties, and within two weeks, Finno-German relations were at the top of the agenda.
[15] On 31 July 1940, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler gave the order to plan an assault on the Soviet Union, meaning that Germany had to reassess its position regarding Finland.
Until then, Germany had rejected Finnish appeals to purchase arms, but with the prospect of an invasion of Russia, this policy was reversed, and in August the secret sale of weapons to Finland was permitted.
[19] Finland primarily aimed to reverse its territorial losses from the Moscow Peace Treaty and, depending on the success of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, to possibly expand its borders, especially into East Karelia.
One Red Army General, looking at a map of the territory just conquered, is said to have remarked: "We have won just about enough ground to bury our dead."
[26] In 1990, professor Mikhail Semiryaga used the Red Army Casualty Notifications to publish a book in which he gave exact figures: 53,522 dead, 16,208 missing, 163,772 wounded and 12,064 frostbitten.
In 1999, Finnish historian Ohto Manninen estimated Red Army casualties to have been 84,994 dead or prisoners, 186,584 wounded or disabled, 51,892 sick and 9,614 frostbitten.
[28] In 1999, Yuri Kilin, professor at Petrozavodsk State University, calculated 63,990 dead, and 207,538 wounded and frostbitten, making total casualties 271,528.
[33] The foremost motive of the war, as initially presented by Soviet historiography, was to assist the Finnish working-class people against the tyranny of the White Finns.
This was rooted in the Finnish Civil War, in which thousands of Red Guards were killed, and the many communist leaders were expatriated from Finland to the Soviet Union.
During the winter of 1940 the planned intervention by the United Kingdom and France was used by Soviet propaganda to show that the Western imperialists were willing to use Finland as springboard against the "socialist motherland".
These multinational contributions demonstrated that Finland was preparing an assault against the Soviet Union with "any military alliance possible".
The rendition of Winter War studies had its breakthrough when the Soviet historian Mikhail Semiryaga wrote an article for the weekly magazine Ogoniok in 1989.
[42] In 2003, Pavel Petrov and Viktor Stepakov wrote a 542-page long book called Sovetsko-finlandsjaya voina 1939–1940, in which they negate the myth of a major Nazi-German influence on Finnish foreign policy, and demonstrate that the United Kingdom had a larger role.
[43] However, more conservative literature has also been published, such as Rozdeniye i krah by Nikolai Baryshnikov and Vladimir Baryshikov in 2000, in which the authors revive traditional Soviet views.
[44] During the period of Finlandization, the Finnish president Urho Kekkonen gave a speech in April 1973 in which he stated that Winter War was unnecessary.
Similar opinions were presented by the Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander and Finnish novelist Väinö Linna.
The comments of President Kekkonen were objected to by the majority of Finns, however, as most had supported the Winter War and criticizing it was not looked upon favourably.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had agreed to Soviet demands and a year later were occupied and annexed - it has been brought to question whether Finland could have been the exception.
According to the document approved in 1939 by Zhdanov, Molotov, and Kuusinen, the Finnish political system was meant to be altered after the Soviet occupation by establishing a "people's republic" and capturing "enemies of the state".