Shelling of Mainila

[MarxEngelsLeninStalinMao]

Could someone tell me what actually happened? Since I live in Finland, I only hear the official Finnish version of events, and I can't seem to find anything online that wouldn't be either completely pro-Finnish or pro-Soviet.

[Hrafn]

I personally think it's factually correct and pretty uncontroversial to call it a classic false flag operation. Compare it to the Mukden Incident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident) a few years before that allowed a Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and the Gleiwitz incident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident) only a few months before the shelling - a Nazi attempt to motivate the invasion of Poland.

Another comparison can be made to the incident in Puumala in then-Swedish Finland, not that far from Mainila, used to trigger the 1788–90 Russo-Swedish War.


In 1788, a head tailor of the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms that later were used in an exchange of gunfire at Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on June 27, 1788. The staged attack, which caused outrage in Stockholm, was to convince the Riksdag of the Estates and to provide Gustav with an excuse to declare a "defensive" war on Russia. This was important since Gustav III did not have the constitutional right to start an offensive war without the agreement of the estates, who had already made clear that their acceptance would not be forthcoming.