The year is 1939. Hitler and Stalin, the mustachioed villains of this story, get together and have themselves a meeting. They both HATE each other and want to wipe each other off the face of the earth. Yeah, shit's gettin' real. But they put that aside, hook up, and decide "Aiight, we really wanna fuck each other up, but not quite now." So they sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which basically agrees they're not going to fight for a little while longer, oh, and also we're going to curbstomp Poland.

So the bad guys work together and wipe out Poland really quickly. Then Hitler goes off and does whatever. But most history classes don't look at what Stalin does after that. See, Stalin knows it's a matter of time for the Fuhrer wants to come Fuhck him up, so he wants to grab a couple of buffer states along the Baltic to slow Hitler's invasino down.

Shit goes hilariously wrong. In what came to be known as the Winter War, Stalin's homies have this half-assed scheme to invade Finland. They start off by bombing one of their own villages and claiming the Finns did it-literally every nation in the world sees through this BS, but just like Putin, Stalin didn't really give two shits what other people thought. So he demands a bunch of land from Finland, and the Finns (they're the heroes of this story by the way) flip him the bird and wait.

Now, Finland has absolutely no hope of beating Russia. If you're not sure why, go look at a map. So the Finns' leading general, Mannerheim, basically decides they're going to set up this long defensive line with what few resources they have and try and wear the Ruskies down as best they can. They dig trenches, put like the two artillery guns they have in position, and dig in deep.

Everyone (see, no other developed nations wants to cross Stalin, because they know they're going to need the Reds to fight Hitler later on. Interestingly, Christopher Lee, a.k.a. Motherfucking Saruman, tries to join and go help the Finns fight the Russians. They mighta won if he could've done that avalanche thing he did in Fellowship, idk) expects Finland to get steamrollered in a matter of hours, but somehow, they manage to humiliate the Russians pretty badly. The Russians easily have ten times the casualties that the Finns do, and are the laughingstock of the entire world.

This happens for several reasons. First, The Purges. Not The Purge, which is honestly something I'd expect Stalin to do, but the Purges. Stalin was paranoid as shit and feared any remotely high-ranking military officer would turn on him. So, naturally, he killed all of them. Right before he went to war. Everyone who had to move up to fill the ranks was hopelessly inept at their new jobs and scrambling to manage things. This is contrast to the Finnish leadership, which was more fluid and more localized: whereas they could react quickly and effectively, the Russians were forced to follow a chain of command because they all feared reprisal from someone further up. This resulted in the Russians having to wait a considerable amount of time to get the go-ahead for stuff, by which time the Finns had scurried back off. Not to mention, Stalin feared that any of the Russians who lived close to Finland might sympathize with their cause-so he only sent soldiers from southern Russia. As a result, they were totally unprepared for the fiercest, coldest winter in Finnish history: yeah, that's right, the russians couldn't handle the cold. At one point, it was so friggin cold that a Russian soldier got his throat slit by a Finnish soldier, and they found him the next morning standing stock still, his body frozen from the inside out...

Second, the Finns were poor. I know this does not sound like an advantage, but this is literally the closest thing history has to Rocky, okay? See, the Finns didn't have fancy things like lots of airplanes or tanks or paved roads, so they got really creative. The Russians, for all their mechanized toys, had a really hard time using them in the snow and dirt roads of Finland. This is also where the Molotov cocktails received their name-it was an insult to the Russian general Molotov, and the Finns threw those poor man's hand grenades to devastating effect. The Finns also had very short supply lines to manage, and as a result, their soldiers were usually better fed. There's one instance where the Russians managed to slip past the Mannerheim line (this is like Rocky getting knocked down) but then they smelled some of the stew that the Finnish support guys were cooking for dinner. Their hunger outweighed their fear of their families being shanked by Stalin and they tried to steal the food, got caught, and presumably laughed at a lot after the war.

Third was leadership. Yeah, Mannerheim isn't at Napoleon's level or anything, but the guy had balls that drag across the ground when he walked. First off he's around 70ish, I think, when all this takes place, and he is reluctantly forced to throw in with the Axis powers in order to contend with Russia. So Hitler, in a show of good faith (yeah, read that right) goes to see Mannerheim for his 70th (I think, it was an old birthday, somewhere up there) birthday party. How sweet. He also requests a moment in private with Mannerheim, so they go and sit in a pimped out limo. Immediately upon sitting inside of it, Mannerheim pulls out a cigar and lights up-if you don't get how big a diss this is, it's because Hitler was famed for hating smoking, didn't tolerate nearby him. One of the deadliest, most powerful men on the earth is sitting in his car, and this boss stares him in the eyes and starts puffing on his cigar. Balls. Those are balls. This is also the only time in history that they managed to record Hitler talking outside of speeches, just speaking casually: the Finns, being sneaky sneaks, had laced the car with microphones, and while they were caught pretty quickly, it was still ballsy.

Finally, the deadliest man ever of all time. Simo Hayha. This little 5'2 dude picked up a rifle and was all "Guess I gotta go fuck stuff up". He went on to earn more confirmed kills than any other soldier in history, earning the moniker "The White Death". The Russians sent dogs, napalm strikes, countersnipers...Hayha survived all of them. Every sniper team they sent after him never came back. I dunno if he killed the dogs, I like to think they were awed by his badassness and they became friends or something. Also, he accomplishes all this-705 kills-in a span of THREE MONTHS. It's not even like he had a couple of years to do this in, nope, he got his name in the history books in...well, shit, I can't think of something funny that takes three months, I dunno, insert funny similarity here. He was, however, stopped. An exploding bullet (ka-boom) hit him right in the face, and the White Death entered a coma for eleven days. After which, he woke up and lived until 2002. His face was, uh, a little scarred up, but damn if he wasn't still the most badass person ever. When asked how he managed to be so skilled, he simply replied "Practice...and clear skies." Hayha was unbelievable-he stuffed snow in his mouth so they couldn't see mist rising from him, fought without a scope on his gun to avoid the glare giving him away, and also had this funny thing where he straight up killed everyone. Hayha lived out the rest of his days as a simple farmer, hunting and probably having trouble sitting down with the massive balls of his getting in the way.

So, finally, the Finns lose, because the Russians have Russian-level reinforcements (Paradox players: Russia's set on full Quantity, Finland's on full Quality) and they're forced to concede defeat. However, they gave us the Molotov cocktails, Simo Hayha, and an unbelievable amount of Russian casualties.