ঘরের মধ্যে ঘর | Gharer Madhye Ghar পিডিএফ ডাউনলোড করুন

magoyes87876a

I have read a great deal of material about the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish War in Russian on the Internet, but not a single-volume popular English-language history book about this war. This is such a book. It talks in detail about how the prewar negotiations broke down; why the Soviets did not understand that their conditions were unacceptable to the Finns; the action on each front during the first period of the war, which the Finns, amazingly, won, despite having a much smaller army and few arms compared to the Soviets; how the Soviets learned from their mistakes, and won the war during the second period. One chapter discusses Otto Kuusinen's puppet government of "People's Finland", which promised an eight-hour day to the Finnish workers, something they had already enjoyed for twenty five years, and the breakup of landed estates to the Finnish peasants, even though there were only a few hundred landholdings over 300 acres in all of Finland; I think this is an example of a person being blinded by his ideology. Another talks about the outside world's reaction to the war, including Britain's and France's plans for intervening in it. If they had, and the Red Army ended up fighting the British and French armies, this would effectively mean the Soviet Union entering World War II on the side of the Axis; the consequences of this for the world would be too terrible to contemplate; fortunately, the Soviet-Finnish war ended before this could take place. The author learned Finnish, spent a year in Finland, and read a great deal of primary source materials while there; he does not use any Soviet sources except Khrushchev's memoirs. Trotter is very sympathetic to the Finns; his tone sometimes reminded me of Tom Clancy's books about the US Army. In the last chapter he says that "modern Finnish historians" estimate the Soviet casualties as 230 to 270 thousand dead and another 200 to 300 thousand wounded; General Krivosheev's book about Russia's military losses in twentieth-century wars gives much smaller numbers: 71 thousand killed in action, 16 thousand dead of wounds, 39 thousand missing in action, 189 thousand wounded. The last chapter also discusses Finland's participation in World War II. Finland's part in the Siege of Leningrad is not mentioned, and neither is the fact of the Finns almost reaching the Murmansk railroad, through which lend-lease went from the Western Allies to the Soviet Union. The Finnish occupation of East Karelia is mentioned, and the fact that its population did not welcome the Finns as liberators is blamed upon the "massive resettlement programs carried out by Stalin in the 1930s" and not upon them being foreign occupiers who set up concentration camps.

2022-10-26 05:34