People actually do arranged marriages. Wow.

They chose each other all right, an undiagnosed autist in denial raised with backwards Ukrainian village values (dad) and a narcissist (I suspect slightly retarded, in a medical sense, too) raised by pretty irresponsible parents who’d tell her how smart she is instead of teaching her something (mom).

And they wouldn’t be such a bad combination, if my dad hadn’t moved from a technical to a management position at some point, which affected his mental state negatively, and if my mom weren’t anywhere near opportunities to worsen her narcissism (stupid conspirologic books helping her feel herself very smart, books on psychology, such stuff).

Baltics and Finland just chose differently, Finns to fight and Baltics to give in.

Different situations, Finland had lots of sympathies from both future western Allies and the fascist nations, and a better military.

About Czechoslovakia - I meant the Nazi approach to negotiations, like calling bombardment of a city in the middle of a diplomatic meeting. Compared to that USSR was almost civilized. Nazis were much like ISIS (similar ideology to Salafism too).

So if you gain anything depends on whether you believe USSR had further ambitions in Finland or not.

It definitely had, but Stalin with his “socialism in one particular country” already lowered the bar on that a bit. Still till his death USSR would be preparing for global thermonuclear war for world dominance and such.

OK, I think we agree on this. My initial post was about the stereotype which ignores the first and the third of the wars between USSR and Finland, leaving only the second, which was, yes, an aggression against Finland.

Building a few more bunkers is easier than moving a city, especially in the 30s.

But to help your argument, there were plenty of propaganda pieces and Finnish communist organizations supported by the USSR before the war. So probably there were intentions of biting off more than expressed.

And to help mine (sort of, it’s an appellation to authority), I think I’ve read many notable figures, even Mannerheim himself, considered the proposed deal reasonable.

Comparing this to Czechoslovakia, USSR still took exactly what it initially demanded, and I don’t remember Nazis offering anyone anything in exchange. And comparing this to Baltics - there it was a different scheme, where IIRC their governments (small cozy authoritarian ones, which is very funny) asked USSR for protection (because Nazis were scarier), Soviet troops entered those countries and suddenly there were Soviet state institutions in place and plebiscites.

That’s true, except people from Baltic countries, all of the Eastern Block, and notably Finns love the narrative of bad bad barbaric Russia that always oppressed them, and bad bad totalitarian USSR that was “worse than Nazis”.

Just recently certain Linus Torvalds expressed a interesting sentiment about being a Finn and knowing something about “Russian aggression”, well, Soviet-Finnish conflicts didn’t start with the Winter war, and the Winter war was preceded by a few suggestions ending in an ultimatum. By those suggestions Finland would receive far greater amounts of territory (in the areas it claimed before at that) than the stripe of land and a few small islands in artillery range of Leningrad it would be giving away. That’s rather soft if you consider the character of the preceding Soviet-Finnish war. And Finland’s participation in the blockade of Leningrad while allied with, well, Nazis makes the “worse than Nazis” argument more easily understandable and still wrong.

The Soviet Union just after the war supported the so-called “Socialist Imperial Party” in Western Germany, until it was banned there. That party, as you might have guessed, was basically rebranded Nazis.