Soviet Union Expelled: League of Nations Fails Again

The League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union on December 14, 1939, in response to the Soviet invasion of Finland, which had begun on November 30. It was only the second time a member state had been expelled from the organization, and it was the last significant act the League took before fading into irrelevance. The Soviet Union had invaded Finland without a declaration of war, after the Finns refused Stalin's demands for territorial concessions, including a naval base on Finnish soil and a border adjustment that would have moved the frontier farther from Leningrad. Stalin expected the campaign to take two weeks. It took three and a half months. The Finnish defense, known as the Winter War, was one of the most remarkable military performances of the twentieth century. The Finns, outnumbered three to one, fought in forests and snow, using terrain, mobility, and winter conditions to inflict devastating casualties on a Soviet force that was poorly led, poorly supplied, and unprepared for Arctic warfare. Finnish ski troops attacked Soviet columns bogged down on forest roads. Finnish snipers became legendary. The term "Molotov cocktail" was coined by Finnish soldiers, naming the improvised incendiary weapon after the Soviet foreign minister who had claimed the bombing of Helsinki was a humanitarian food drop. The League's vote to expel the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly in favor, but the decision exposed the organization's fundamental weakness: it could condemn aggression but could not stop it. No military force was dispatched to assist Finland. No economic sanctions were enforced against the Soviet Union. The League could only issue a moral judgment. Finland ultimately ceded the territories Stalin had demanded in the Moscow Peace Treaty of March 1940, after sustaining roughly 25,000 dead against Soviet losses estimated at 125,000 to 170,000. The Soviet military's poor performance in Finland reportedly encouraged Hitler's belief that the Red Army would collapse quickly under a German invasion, a catastrophic miscalculation that he acted on eighteen months later.