Abstract
The Winter War became a phenomenon that strongly influenced modern Finnish identity and strengthened Finnish self-esteem. It showed the importance of defending a small country against a qualitatively better equipped and quantity beyond the attacker.
It ended, and for that time the constellation had to end, a Finnish defeat, but only four months after the start of the Soviet attack. However, the Finnish miracle was not a matter of course, and the later myth around the heroic Finnish defense covered a series of paradoxes of war that became the test of the young Finnish state.