A forgotten little war

The LawDog reminds us of the now-almost-quaint war between the then-Soviet Union and Finland, back in 1939:

On 26 November 1939, the Soviet Red Army, probably on direct orders from the Politburo, shelled one of their own villages on the Karelian Isthmus and immediately began pointing fingers at Finland. Four days of intense Soviet propaganda later, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, in a tactic that had served him so well previously in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, sent his troopies over the Finnish border. Unfortunately, most of what Uncle Josef managed to do was severely irritate a large part of the population of Finland in general, and a certain five-foot, three-inch skinny little farmer in particular.
Over the next three-ish months the 250,000 grunts of the Finnish military faced off against 1,000,000 (that's one million) Soviet soldiers.
There are numerous scholarly works explaining the results— the Soviet officer corp was still recovering from one of Uncle Josef's little purges; Finnish tactics were simple and flexible; the Soviet armies being used were drawn from the south of the Soviet Union and weren't really accustomed to brawling in -40 degree weather; and the Finns quite happily cheated (a favourite target of Finnish attacks and artillery barrages was the Soviet field kitchens. Nothing wrecks morale quite like never, ever seeing a hot meal during more than ninety days of fighting in Arctic weather.)
Whatever the reason, the Finnish military hauled off and place-kicked the Soviet Red Army right in the wedding tackle and kept on punting until they were dragged, kicking and screaming, to the peace table on 12 March 1940, 105 days after the Soviets started the whole thing, to sign a brutal and dishonourable cessation of hostilities.
Soviet casualties were almost 400,000 men dead, wounded, and missing; with another 5,600 POWs. They managed to inflict less than 70,000 dead and wounded on the Finns, with only about a thousand Finnish POWs.
And that skinny farmer? Well, he picked up his iron-sighted Finnish copy of the Mosin-Nagant M28, sewed himself an oversuit of white bedsheets, and (with the occasional judicious application of a KP-31 submachine gun) proceeded to personally turf between 500 and 700 Soviet solders until 6 March 1940, when a Red counter-sniper got lucky and put Simo Häyhä out of the fight for the rest of the all-too-brief war. That averages out to about five enemy personnel a day for 100 continuous days. With iron sights.
While Finland ultimately lost the Winter War nearly seventy years ago, the cost of that defeat was best summed up by a Soviet general later: "We gained just enough land to bury our dead."

Rico says those who do not remember history might be condemned to repeat it, but nobody's been stupid enough to fuck with the Finns since 1940...