Cosmoline
Member
Survival was victory. They weren't looking to take over the USSR, just to keep Finland intact and avoid getting shipped off to Magadan. They won in that sense, and given the horrors they faced I'm not sure there is any other true victory. There is a Finland today and a Finnish people, with or without Karelia. If they hadn't been such great fighters Stalin might well have shipped the lot of them to Siberia.
Finland's status during the war gets confusing and it is a confusing. They were fighting a different war than the rest of us in many respects. Though they were co-belligerents with the Germans during the Continuation War, they were never Nazified in a political sense and when the tide turned they attacked the Germans. Survival was their goal, and that trumped all other political considerations. Their Reds and Civil Guardsmen were even fighting side by side, which is pretty astonishing considering that two decades earlier they'd been trying hard to murder each other.
