Olivier Norek, Les guerriers d’hiver. Paris: Michel Lafon, 2024. 448 pages.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and drawing on his country’s own historical experience, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, supported by leaders of neighbouring Nordic and Baltic countries, insisted that any resolution must uphold Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. Ukraine’s full recognition as a sovereign European state, backed by security guarantees and NATO integration, must be the end goal of any diplomatic efforts.
As Finnish leaders have reminded the democratic world, the lesson to be learned goes back to 1939. Despite maintaining its sovereignty after World War II, Finland was forced to cede territory and accept foreign policy restrictions as a result of what began with an attack by Stalin’s USSR in what became known as the Winter War. The lesson for Ukraine was clear: there should be no such compromises regarding its future alliances. It emerges clearly from a new book by Olivier Norek, a former captain of the French judicial police, better known for his detective novels.
Norek dramatically captures the events that followed November 30, 1939, when the world’s largest army was sent marching into its tiny neighbour, sending columns of tanks in a battle against amateur soldiers armed with old rifles. For Finland, it was a question of waging war or surrendering to the Soviets, and giving up its hard-fought independence. Joseph Stalin had promised his troops an easy victory against an enemy that could be crushed in two weeks, but they ran into a wall. Nature was as much their adversary as the valiant Finns, in this war fought in the depths of winter:
Soldiers who had been promised a quick and easy conflict … lost their lives in a land they had no use for, in a country that the Kremlin had raised to the rank of enemy by dint of propaganda … It was not an entire nation that had declared war, but one man had decided to do so. (My translation).
The forests, the cold, the darkness and the fierceness and dedication of the Finnish soldiers (the majority of them peasants and foresters), brought together in cohesive units mainly made up of men from the same village, held back a huge, ill-prepared Red Army. In a few months, 26,000 lay dead on the Finnish side, 126,000 among the Soviets.
In recounting this bloody “Guerre d’hiver,” Olivier Norek, in beautiful French, captures the dehumanizing effect of war – the enemy is just a target – and, at the same time, the powerful human solidarity in defending one’s land. If there is a main character, other than the Finnish winter, it is Simo Häyhä (1905–2002), a rifleman who became a true legend. Perhaps the best sniper of all time, he was nicknamed “the White Death” by the Russians. During the three and a half months of the Winter War, Häyhä alone is said to have killed between 500 and 700 Soviet troops.
Stalin assured the world that it would be just a matter of days before his army would be in Helsinki and the revered Finnish general, C.G.E. Mannerheim, in chains. We learn how Stalin’s generals were afraid to tell him the truth, which would mean facing liquidation. The truth was that Soviet troops were totally ill-equipped in uniforms, weapons, strategy and leadership to take on highly motivated snipers under very harsh winter conditions.
The war ended when the Treaty of Moscow was signed on March 12, 1940. The high cost of the Soviet victory caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who, not long afterward, broke his deal with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.
It’s impossible not to think about the conflict in Ukraine today in reading Norek’s powerful recounting of the bloody Winter War. Putin, like Stalin, totally misjudged his adversaries’ readiness to defend their country against invading soldiers who had no idea why they were fighting and dying there in the first place.
Finland had been left mainly to its own devices by its allies to face the Soviets. This, fortunately, was not the case when Russia invaded Ukraine. Or at least it was not the case before Trump.
