Lord Baal, I'm not talking about moral justifications of starting war here. So whether soviets had brought for themselves the fear of Finnish attack by starting Winter War has nothing to do with this. The only question I'm talking about is if soviets had reason to suspect that Finland would be threat to them. I happen to also believe that Finland had every reason to be suspicious about SU. They aren't mutually exclusive possibilities.
You on the other hand seem to treat Finland and SU very differently. You say that Finland had reason to be concerned if SU had been threat to other countries. Why then SU has no reason to be concerned if thousands of Finns have conducted war on their soil against them?
Considering what happened to the independent states of Belarus, Mongolia, and several Central Asian khanates in that civil war, they had every right to be concerned. Remember that a weak Russia is a Russia that can't reclaim its old territory, while a strong Russia is one that might, especially in the hands of Communists calling for a world revolution.
I was sick while writing the first message on this subject, and used little sloppy language, because I was too tired to formulate it better.
Here's what I was talking about.
Russia might have been a threat for Finnish independence, but to what degree? It was Lenin himself who granted Finland independence, Russia was the first country in the world to acknowledge independent Finland.
I'd say it's fair to say that those volunteer Finns operating in Russian Karelia weren't there to secure Finland against Russia, but rather exploiting it's weakness.
While Finland would have never started a war by itself against Soviet Union, the latter was attacked in 1941 by Germany, and they had quite good success too. If some Finns (and not insignificant amount of them) had taken the opportunity during Russian civil war, why wouldn't they do the same when Soviets gets beaten by Germany?
If you say that soviets called for world revolution, there was strong fascist movement in Finland in 30s, and groups that called for destroying communism. I suppose you think these can't be compared, but you have to remember that Soviets didn't necessarily think that communism was evil ideology, so for them the fascist tendencies in Finland was at least as worrysome as communism in Russia was to Finns.
I read the whole thing. You'll not I mentioned some of that in the body of my previous post.
Apparently we noticed different things there. The keypoint I was trying to make was that Finland had allowed German troops to be transported through Finland. Given how near Finnish border was from Leningrad this was serious threat. They didn't allow ground attacks from Finnish soil, but should soviets just have waited until they do allow it?
Also Germany used Finnish aerial space (or whatever it is called) to attack SU, and they also used Finnish airports, although they made only one minor attack from them.
And as you mentioned yourself, Finland did break treaty of demilitarization of Åland.
Nah, it was just big enough to provide a pretext.
On what grounds do you exactly evaluate how big it was? The wiki-article you mentioned before:
seems to be pretty fair description of dreams about Greater Finland. The maps, you know, contain only areas that have substantial Finnic population, and Siberia isn't even visible there.
The Finnish Parliament were (admittedly, this is unverified by independent sources) meeting to declare their neutrality on the same day the Russians started attacking them. This understandably changed their minds.
Finland had claimed neutrality all along, it doesn't really mean that much at all. You can claim neutrality while going for a war. If I remember correctly Germany and SU had treaty of nonagression, how good did it prove out to be?
As far as I know, the parliament wasn't going to make any specific desicion about being neutral. The prime minister Rangell was going to propse to the parliament continuing the claim for neutrality, so he says, but after the bombings changed the speech to say that Finland is now in war. Instead of trying to solve the conflict peacefully, he was rather rushing into war.
Also Hilter had in speech said that Finns are allies of Germany. Even if Finns didn't think that it was true, Russians had no reason to believe it wasn't.
