Part One: A Tale of Two Snipers: Simo Häyhä, Lyudmila Pavlichenko & the Eastern Front

of the Great War? The World War It's sometimes called.

invade and conquer his country. The other person we're going to talk about was two inches shorter, still, a five foot one Ukrainian gun manufacturer lady who also had a Moson Neagaunt, who also didn't want anyone to invade and conquer her country. Both of them, by strange accidents of history, were working counter to Hitler's plans. Although the Ukrainian woman was absolutely the more anti fascist of the two. The finn Simohuha is sometimes credited as the most successful sniper

in history. The Ukrainian Ludmila Pavlchenko is universally considered the most successful woman sniper in history. It's actually completely possible. The numbers and all this stuff is really blurry. It's only possible she has more confirmed sniper kills with a rifle than Simo because his count also includes his prolific submachine gunning. You ever heard of these folks.

not on the Scandinavian peninsula. It is I mean neither Iceland or Denmark. But those are Scandinavian countries because they're culturally Scandinavian. All of these like whenever I talk about like what counts as what and like lines on a map, it's all bullshit. And this whole story is about how all that stuff's bullshit, but also how it matters. So the rest of Scandinavia, they're all Germanic pagans like fore and Odin and Lokian shit. Well, I mean not now,

but historically some of them still are. Finland is considered Nordic, but it is not considered Scandinavian. It has always had its own thing going on, like really had its own thing going on. There are only a few other places like Estonia and Hungary that are linguistically related to Finland to any appreciable degree. And it's an odd man out from Europe, just part of why it's so fucking cool, frankly, although it is also part of why it has suffered

at the hands of other countries so many times. Finnish paganism is a combination of polytheistic, like it has lots of gods, but it's also animistic in that there are spirits and everything in the world. Animals are considered sacred, and each type of animal has its own like animal mother, a sort of guardian spirit for all of that animal

that is distinct from the gods themselves. As best I can tell, and I'm not actually an expert on Finnished paganism, as best as I can tell, it's actually because there's like multiple religions that are all kind of like trying to share the same and like some of them are more animistic, and some of them are more polytheistic. That's my like, that's my best inference based on what I've read. But I haven't had as many conversations with Finns about their paganism.

So like when you die, you're dead, and there's like some gods that look over it, and like, you know, there's all the stories about people like going there and getting stuck there and retrieving wisdom and all that shit. But like, good bad, it doesn't matter. When you die, you are fucking dead. I love it.

I guess you could maybe think it was finish. That was the way to describe the difference. Uralic language is come from a language called proto Uralic, which was spoken in the Ural Mountains, which is a mountain range that runs through chunk of Russia. Basically because actually everyone moves around all the time and nationalism is garbage, Finnish wasn't a written language for a long ass time. In the sixteenth century, folks were like, well, what if we want

to write the Bible? And they were like, oh shit, I guess we need a written language, right, So it started being written, but only in religious context. They didn't really the modern written Finish was not developed until the nineteenth century. Everyone was writing Swedish. It wasn't that people weren't I mean, I'm sure a lot of people weren't literate, but it was all ruled by Sweden at this point.

So the modern written Finish was developed in the nineteenth century as part of this urge to create a Finnish nationalism to escape centuries of Swedish and Russian colonization. I know, I just talked shit on nationalism, but it means different things in different contexts. It's a different thing when you're talking about colonized people versus anyway whatever. People probably heard me rant about that before. If not, yep, okay, great, And.

said that, people would turn around and walk away. And then eventually I learned I was saying, and I don't speak Finnish people. But then I learned that if I just said I don't speak Finnish in English, they would talk to me, whereas if I didn't want to talk to them, I would say I don't speak Finnish and Finnish and then they would turn around and leave, especially if I said I don't talk Finnish people anyway. Right, So is a fucking cool language. I am not good

at speaking it, as we have discovered. I know how to say beer and thank you and cuss. There are no gendered pronouns in Finnish. The same word is used for men and women. Lots of languages do this, actually, probably the majority of languages in the world do this,

but almost no Western languages. The only exceptions that I've ever been able to find of Western languages that have no gendered pronouns are Finnish and Hungarian and Bosque and except Have you ever heard about the secret gendered pronoun in Finnish?

my useless piece of shit husband pronoun? And then, especially if they're drunk, they'll admit it that there is this secret gender pronoun. I can't remember what it is. And I tried googling this and I did not come up with success. And I wrote my finish friend, and I think my finished friend is sick of me asking this kind of question and didn't get back to me before the time of recording.

I learned this when I was sixteen years old and have not checked since but this, you know, this idea of like I don't have the energy, and you can say it in a way that like, if you say it in English, I don't have the energy, people are like, ah, you lazy bum get up. At least in the nineties, I think that culture is caught on to the fact that sometimes people literally don't have the energy to do things anyway. Fins historically were wild and scary to the Scandinavians.

Fins were seen as wizards by the Norse. If a fin shows up in a story, you know that something spooky is about to happen. But this is also a conflation of the Fins with the Sami people, which is an indigenous group in the northern in like Lopland. Right that the Scandinavians weren't really good at making these distinctions, and neither is anyone else, because the samiyear and oppressed

people who get complated with the Finns. Finnish also only became one culture really recently, and it's still in many ways not necessarily one culture. The indigenous Sami of the north exist, and then even in southern Finland there are

multiple regions with their own ethnicities and languages. Even if most of them are Finnic, right, like you have the Karelians, the Ingredians, and the Ingreans were almost completely genocided by Stalin and we're going to talk about that, and that is going to be a really major factor in understanding what we're going to talk about, which is clearly Finland and World War Two. We've clearly painted at that. But you know what isn't Finland in World War two? Any ideas?

up with a modern map. You've got folks speaking Miankili in northeastern Swedish in Sweden, which is a Finnish dialect sort of another Finnic language, and then in Karealia, which is now mostly part of Russia, and then Ingria is entirely in Russia, so lines on maps don't define culture very successfully, right, But in the nineteenth century, Finland is trying to become Finland, and so a poet whose name I forgot to write down goes around and collects the Kalabala,

which is the Finnish great epic of all their myths and shit, and it kind of turns it into a single narrative. So in some weird ways, it's like, oh the like all the traditional mythology is actually only from the nineteenth century, but it draws on oral tradition before that. These days, Finland is probably known for being happy, except that it has a really high suicide rate, although lower

than the US is. And it's known for being a great, great social democracy, except that the social democracy is falling apart and fascists are gaining more and more power. It's also known for producing very great black metal, no notes this is true, and for being the place that gives the world, gives the world the sauna, and for having one hundred and eighty thousand lakes a lot of fun.

There's a fact there's a public sauna in Helsinki that you can go to and like, for example, they don't have hang ups like about like public nudity like we would in the US, where people just all body types and everyone's together in one space. Yeah, and nobody really looks at each other and it's not but if it was here it would be weird. So that's an example of our culture does form things.

about agriculture shit. And then in the thirteenth century, the Christians were like, well, we don't want cool, pluralistic religious systems, so we're going to kill you all until you join our blood drinking cult. So they had the Northern Crusades, the lesser known Crusades, and they conquered Finland for Sweden, and basically Finland became European at this point, and it

also became Catholic. Then the Protestant Reformation hit the North hard, and Finland went Lutheran because the Swedish king went Lutheran during the nineteen forties when most of our story takes place, Like ninety six percent of Finns are Lutheran, which I do not know a ton about. But it's not anti science or anti abortion, so okay.

it goes to more modern and closer to a current time. Okay, when you get to the floor, When you get to the floor, it's like it says the Christian era, and then when you go to the floor above it, it's interesting, it's a word phrase that would never be used here. They refer to it in the museum as the post Christian era. I thought that was something.

of an empire, and that tends to go rough. About a third of the population died two years in two years during a famine from sixteen ninety five to sixteen

ninety seven. It was a really cold summer followed by a really hot winter that just fucked everything up, plus snowing and floods and the combo move of the little ice age happening, and then a whole bunch of volcanoes had gone off all around the world, and it was bad and people were like eating each other and shit, not the majority of people, but that was the thing that happened and it was really bad.

than one hundred years. During this time, you start getting finished nationalism though, like let's be free idea, and a big part of the like leftist and labor thing for decades was fighting against Russification. So the very idea of making a Finland was a worker's idea and a socialist idea, especially social democracy that was like always the most common wave of like I'll talk sometimes about how overall socialism

in the nineteenth century had like three sides. There was anarchism, there was authoritarian communism, there's social democracy, and the dominant strain in Finland I think the entire time has been social democracy. So in their own internal elections before Finland becomes free, they become the first European power to give women the right to vote. Literally, women have had the right to vote in Finland since before there was a Finland.

And nineteen seventeen is a year that comes up a lot for some weird reason, was a good year for leaving Russia. Finland was torn between the Social Democrats and right wing parties as Communists took control of Russia. The right wing of Finland recently. Previously, the right wing of Finland was the like we love Russia part right, but then when the Communie to control of the Soviet Union,

they were like, we're not so sure about Russia anymore. Actually, we want to be free too, So they like show up in the Social Democrats like, wait, you want to be free too, We actually, like finally fucking agree that we want to be Finland, and they were like, yeah, we totally want to be Finland totally. This is an employ to join the German Empire. I swear we're not just looking for a different boot to lick. And they were like, sweet, I don't know why you brought that

up about the German Empire. It seems completely unrelated, but sure, let's be free. So Finland declared it's independence. And this was before the Bolsheviks were like we want all power forever, fuck everyone, right, or kind of before they had conquered all power. So Lenin was like, chill, you can go

your own way. It's cool. It helped I think this is my inference a really large chunk of the Soviet forces in the northwestern Russia where the sailors who skewed heavily anarchist, and anarchists tend to be a little bit less, making everyone be Bolsheviks kind of one of their things. So you have a newly through free Finland and they're like, okay, are we a socialist workers republic in a social democratic form or are we a puppet state of the German monarchy?

And they had a war about it. The Reds were mostly social Democrats and only a minority of them wanted to join the Bolshevik thing going on next door. They wanted no dictatorship of the proletariat. They only wanted democracy. They kind of they specifically were like, basically, we want like a France or USA without private property, like with where where workers own the means of production instead of like one dude owns everything.

like just the general let's put it this way. Some places are just way more bohemian feeling and they still feel that way. Yeah, and it's leftovers that resonate from like that long ago. It's really interesting.

capitalists who won militarily were heavily supported by Germany. Basically, Germany conquered Finland at the behest of the upper classes of Finland. Then the whites were like, hey, Germany, do you want to help us get rid of this red problem? And they're like, yeah, as long as our prince gets to be whatever anyway. So the Reds were volunteered, the Whites were conscripts. The Reds included thousands of women fighting in the army the Soviets. The Soviets off to the side,

were split. I actually had just assumed that they basically were the main Red Army in supporting the Red Army. They mostly kind of stayed out of it. Some supported the Reds, some worked against the Reds and effectively sided with the Whites. The Soviet soldier station in Finland who sided with the Reds were buying large these anarchists two hundred and fifty anarchists sailors in the Battle of RUSSOVESI was, I don't know, the main largest force of Soviet forces

I found fighting in the Civil War. I'm sure there's others. And this is while the anarchists were still sometimes part of the Red Army. That changes, and we'll talk about it in the next week's episodes. I don't know if anyone on the show has picked up that I'm not really excited about Bolshevism, that they tend to kill everyone that they disagree with. But if you're ever in the middle of a revolution and you're like man, I wish it.

I hope someone betrayed, Like I hope someone uses this as an opportunity to just like kill everyone who disagrees with them. Well, then you should befriend the Bolsheviks, the group that won the Civil War. You would think it would be the Finns because they were both sides of the fight. But it was not the Finns who won the Civil War. It was the Germans. The conquering Whites rounded up the Reds and their families and just fucking

murdered them or just left them to starve. More than ten thousand Red prisoners were left to starve to death in prison camps, and the White Field commanders got shot the shoot on the spot declaration, which was fairly literal, and it told them to execute anyone they wanted. Yeah.

I had this moment where I didn't really know about this right when I was when I you know, went to Finland and until like some of the more recent times, I went to this anarchist festival called Most of Pispola, and Pistola is a working class suburb of Tampaday, and at one night I was like walking home from the party at two in the morning and like the sun's still on the horizon because it's fucking Finland and it's

cool as shit. And there's this big hill that runs to the middle of town and I walk up to the top of it by myself, and there's just this big monument and it's just a monument to the murdered Reds, and I just had this, like, I don't know, introspective moment thinking about that war and thinking about how, as likely as not, I would have been fucking one of those dead people.

on the society in it. Yeah, and I don't I don't know, like you mentioned earlier, like how things are sometimes devolving there in terms of authoritarianism, and it's it doesn't really go away. It just it just gets quiet for a little while and then it comes.

elected a German prince as the King of Finland. Fortunately, Germany then immediately lost World War One and the German

Empire collapsed. Finland became a republic and kind of in the weird way, like the moderates won the war, like the side that wasn't one of the sides won the war because the Whites and the Reds kind of both lost bootlocking the Germans and the atrocities that the Whites had committed lost the Whites a lot of popular support, and the Reds had lost all their popular support because

they were dead or in exile. And so you get the moderates, the center and the center left, who more less have traded Finland off between each other ever since. So Finland messy place, beautiful place, lots of lakes between the wars, World War one and World War Two. In case anyone forgot what the two wars were, they're numerically named. It's easier to remember which one came first, which one

came second. Wouldn't it be awful if they were a countdown instead, like we'd started off with like World War nine or something.

were running the government in coalition. The far right is on the decline, as is authoritarianism on both sides of the spectrum. The far right parties aren't officially banned, even though they just try to stage a coup in like nineteen thirty two or something like that. But the Communist Party, the Bolshevik Control Party, is officially banned, and so the

Center is holding stuff. But the other thing that happened that I think is really important to understand for this story, so Finnish culture and language extends beyond the borders of

what managed to carve itself out of Finland. You've got some Finns in northeast Sweden, and more importantly, you've got all these Fins over in Russia, and not just like Finns who showed up there, but like Finns who've been there for ever or at least hundreds of years, right, the Angrian Finns who are mostly Lutheran, and I couldn't tell you their average politics. And also in Russia you do have all of these Reds who were fleeing the White terr and most of these Reds that start off

actually fairly moderate. There are social Democrats who want to use democratic state focused means to a chief workers control, but they'd just been fucking massacred by the landowners, and so for a lot of them Bolshevik had a sudden and new appeal.

Stalin was like, we've got to destroy Finnish culture, language traditions. And while we're at at people the Ingri and Finns who lived in the area that's now Saint Petersburg, since they've lived there since before there was a Saint Petersburg, they're like, I want to say, seventeenth century migrants to that area, and then Saint Petersburg came like the next

century or some shit. In nineteen twenty six, there's one hundred and fifteen thousand of these Angryan Fins living in this area where they have lived for hundreds of years. They have their own Finnic language, in their own culture. Nine years later, there's only seven thousand of them left. So this is a pretty successful genocide. This genocide was centrally managed and considered with the specific goal of assassinating

the male population and destroying them utterly. Those who weren't killed were usually deported since Stalin was like, well, we need this buffer zone. Russia's obsessed with these buffer zones, and they were like, we need this buffer zone between US and Finland where there's no Fins because they might be loyal to Finland, right, and so he sent folks to Siberia Kazakistan. If he didn't just fucking kill them, Settlers from elsewhere in Russia took their homes and farms

and shit. All the Lutheran churches and the Finnish language schools, radio, and newspapers were all shut down. Today, the population of Angrian Finns is about twenty five thousand. There are only seventy living speakers of the Angrian language. Left and the communist exiles. I think that they had started off helping all of this happen, right, to like prove that they're good and loyal. They got purged after they helped purge the other Fins.

Stalinism or communism or Nazism or whatever. Always results in the same shit.

to come later. Spoiler alert. Joseph fucking Stalin. We have talked about the Molotov ribbon Trump packed before on this podcast. You can cross it off your BINGO cards now because we're talking about it now. It is the Stalin and Hitler are allies for a while packed. It was signed on August twenty third, nineteen thirty nine, between Ribin Trump, who was a Nazi, and Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister. To the public eye, this was a non aggression pact,

but secretly it was more than that. It was an agreement of how the two powers were going to carve up Eastern Europe, like who gets what when they start conquering shit. This secret element wasn't revealed until after the war. Hitler's big weakness. As far as I understand, I'm not a huge World War two understander in the way that there are many people who that is their life's blood. Hiller didn't have oil and Russia had oil. Sort did a remania. I think it was his ally, but he

wanted more fucking oil, right. Russia had sent so much material assistance to Hitler's war machine, just running trains across the whole their massive country to make sure Hitler at everything he needed to start World War two. A week later, Hitler invaded Poland. Two weeks after that, Russia was like, sick, me too, and they also invaded Poland and the Polish defenses, who initially thought the Bolsheviks were gonna come and help them. We're like, hooray, the Soviets are here. We're like, wait,

why are you shooting at us? We're not the Nazis. And then the Soviet Union invaded Poland and conquered it alongside their allies Hitler and held joint military parades and shit. This does not undermine the bravery of the people in the Red Army, who later are the people who bled the most to destroy Nazism. But it is a thing that's worth fucking understanding about their leader. So Stalin stopped

putting anti fascism into the party jargon. The new enemy was Western Powers, as like France and England, and in their secret pact they decided something that's gonna have a lot of importance to today's story. They said, Russia, you can have Finland as well as Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. But those aren't as involved in the story. And even before the secret part of it, it was known just that

the Stalin was siding with the fucking Nazis. Pushed a lot of the Finnish communists over to the social democrat side of things. Already there's not a ton of Bolsheviks or like communists like Communist party communists in Finland. But seeing all this happened, like the Finns are like, oh,

actually maybe this like powermonger is not our friend. So on October fifth, only a couple weeks after they'd invaded Poland, the USSR was like, hey, Finland, can we like, can we have party you just we want to set up some military bases all your neighbors. Let us do it, just give us control of huge trunks of Finland. And even the Finnish communists were like, oh, this is Russia

doing an imperialism. This is the part that I like, I wasn't certain about this whole, like the communists actually were against Russia thing, because I like, it's not usually the way things go. But I read this like thirty fucking page academic paper about communism in Finland during this era, because that's whatever. I can't complain. I do it for work. It is the best job anyone has ever had in the history of this world. Thank you, Sophie. So the

communists are like, this is Russia doing an imperialism. There was a few tankies, there's a few holdouts who are like, actually, the Finnish government, including the Social Democrats are the same as the fascists, since they won't just turn Finland over to Stalin, who is allied with the fascists. But don't pay attention to that part. Finland said no to the Russians and so and then they started mobilizing for war because they were like, oh, fuck, this is going to

go really bad. We just told Stalin no, that's like not a he's like more like a yes man guy, you know.

they let them all go except like one guy. I don't know, there's like probably one guy who was like, fuck you, I love Stalin. You know, I don't know. Even a bunch of Communist officers who had received training in the USSR were like, no, we are fucking defending Finland. Fuck the USSR. They just purged all my friends. And I really didn't expect this part. I really thought that the Reds of Finland were like in a roll and help the Soviets in the coming war. They didn't. They

were really principal. Russia was like, all right, give us some Finland. And then it was like what the fuck. No, And.

Paris Commune. And I referred to the Paris Commune like really quickly and haphazardly, where I was like, and the government was out of town, so people were like, we're gonna have a party, but then they weren't sure it was a be a communist party or socialist party, and then they kind of got into some arguments about it, and then the Germans invaded, and someone was like, really mad that that was the way I summed up the

Paaris Commune. Someone listening is really mad about how I just summed up the start of the Winter War, And I don't it's cool.

so we should have to denazify you. And in this case, in the Winter War, this was based on how seven years earlier some far right people tried to stage a coup and they lost, and then they stopped being particularly politically relevant. God, that's even the same fuck number, almost the same number of years as the Madden Euromaidan, whatever the protests in Ukraine. I'm not as good at modern history current events. Is that what you call modern history

current events? I'm not as good at current events. Also, the people who are going to take up arms to defend Finland include people from every part of the political spectrum, the far right, the far left, the center right, the center left and the center all about to pick up guns and fight alongside of each other, which is like fucking Ukraine also Russia. Things is going to be easy, and then they meet an intensely fierce defense and their first attack is going to be utterly defeated.

fucking fun of this. But like, and also I think the thing that you can get other than just listening to another podcast bestimo or something, right, but I think you have to like get a sense of all this stuff in order to like figure out who these people were and why they were fighting, and like what it meant to different people to be fighting at different times

in different ways. So Russia is gearing up for war after Finland says no to their demands, and then one of the problems that they run into as they have to be like, wait, hold on, stop purging all the Fins. We need enough Finns who are loyal to us to shore up some political legitimacy for when we try to take over Finland. So then they like stop purging the rest of the Fins, and then there's this whole thing

with a false flag attack that isn't as interesting to me. Basically, Russia shells itself and it's like the Fins did it, and then attacks. November thirtieth, nineteen thirty nine, the USSR attacks Finland and their plan is to set up a puppet government, and they do right. Whenever they're conquering places, they're like, aha, this is now though I didn't even write down the name of it, because this puppet government

is so irrelevant. It didn't last. But the Red Fins didn't rush to join the puppet puppet government, and the Soviets scarcely had enough Fins left to manage this puppet government. Instead, the communists and the socialists, the workers and intellectuals alike, they rush to the front lines to defend Finland from

the Soviet Union. At least one Spanish Civil War veteran who was finished came back and told everyone what he had seen in the war and seen what a piece of shit Stalin was firsthand, and how he'd betrayed the revolution. So the puppet government had no fucking support or very little support. There were a couple of the communists who went off to it or whatever. The US star doesn't care. They're not actually trying to set up a red government

in Finland. They're trying to fucking conquer. And so I can't get into the mind of Stalin on this one. At the start of one of the harshest winters in years, he invades Finland. It fucking winter. The Finns, there's not a lot of things. They're known for, skiing, snow hunting, and fucking pure and raw emotionless heartiness and maybe saunas. That's what Finland's known for, which.

the beer. A couple hours go by, and he's like, how you been, And the other brother looks and says, christ did we come here to talk or did we come here to fish?

that's not a problem. And that's how that's how it vibes there.

go back and listen to it. Gear has been covering cop City for I don't know two years now, and they've done a really good job of making you feel like you're there and giving a clear visual understanding of what's going on. So check it out.