History: White Death, an account of the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, is Robert Edwards's first venture into military history. His previous writings have been confined to books on motor cars and motor racing and contributions to the Daily Telegraph.
A former financial analyst and trader, Edwards takes a major change in direction towards the complex relationship between Finland and its giant neighbour.
Despite the war that cost the USSR tens of thousands of lives and in which Finland lost swathes of its territory, the two countries maintained a reasonable co- existence until the Soviet Union ceased to exist in the final hours of 1991.
Edwards's account of the war is viewed from a right-wing perspective. He lays his cards on the table when referring to another of the 20th century's conflicts, the Spanish Civil War, by giving retrospective approval to the view, expressed by a Tory MP in 1938, that the war in Spain was "a conflict between Christian Civilisation and the Beast".
The conflation of Russia and the Soviet Union, so common over the three- quarters of a century of communist rule, is unfortunately carried forward by many writers into the present day, and Edwards is one of them. Russia formed a part of the geopolitical entity that invaded Finland in the winter of 1939, but not its entirety. At the time of the invasion the USSR included many other republics (which are now independent states) and the blame for this shameful episode cannot be laid entirely at the door of Russia or the Russians.
The attack was ordered by Stalin, a Georgian who spoke heavily accented Russian and when speaking without notes used the familiar ruse of slurring the case endings of Russian words in order not to be heard making grammatical errors. Perhaps the most important general in the Red Army's Finnish campaign, Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, was a Ukrainian, and the Soviet Union's foreign minister during the events leading up to the conflict, Maxim Litvinov (Max Wallach), was born to a Jewish family in Poland.
Of the Soviet Union's leaders since the revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin was of mixed ethnic origins, Stalin was Georgian, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev would be Ukrainian citizens in today's geopolitical circumstances, while only Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev could be described as thoroughly Russian.
This conflation, sometimes deliberate and sometimes due simply to sloppy thinking, has had the effect of transferring Cold War hostility against the Soviet Union to the non-Soviet Russian Federation that exists today.
At the time of Stalin's invasion the Soviet Union and Finland had developed along different lines following bitter civil wars in each country. To the east the Red Army - commanded, incidentally, by the Latvian general, Jukums Vacietis (Joakhim Vatsetis) - had defeated its White opponents. In Finland, the Whites were victorious over the Reds and were led by Baron Carl Gustaf Emile Mannerheim, an anachronistic character with his own Russian background, having been a devoted military servant of the tsar.
Edwards is at his best when depicting the personalities involved in the conflict. Mannerheim is shown as a survivor from the Europe that existed before the Great War of 1914-1918, a moustachioed and bemedalled nobleman who was bereft of egalitarian sentiment. He wrote in his diary of his distaste for the Bolshevik revolution: "It disgusted me to see generals carrying their own kit." Having witnessed what was, to his eyes, such an abominable sight, he took the train from the Finland Station in St Petersburg to his native Finland.
Mannerheim may have been "a stranger from a sunken world", a son of Finland who only got round to learning Finnish when in his 50s, but he remained an efficient and skilled soldier who was the decisive character in ensuring the country's independence.
The near-victory of the efficient and courageous Finnish forces, aided by a virtually impenetrable lake-strewn terrain, is well described. So too is the inefficiency of the Red Army, surprisingly unused to winter fighting conditions. Stalin's paranoia had a lot to do with this. Fearful that soldiers from the north of the USSR might have sympathy with the Finns, he sent troops from the south of the Soviet Union into action in weather they had rarely experienced.
Among them was Ismael Akhmedov, a non-Russian intelligence officer whose accounts of the war give a vivid illustration of conditions inside the Red Army.
Seamus Martin is an author and journalist who worked as The Irish Times's correspondent in the USSR and later in the Russian Federation
White Death: Russia's War on Finland 1939-40 By Robert Edwards Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 319pp. £20
