
Stalin’s Danish Mystery - Thevet
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/stalin’s-danish-mystery
======
willvarfar
Fascinating! If Bornholm had remained a Soviet garrison, it would have
completely reshaped the cold war in the Baltic.

~~~
Koshkin
How?

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socialdemocrat
If Denmark was a mystery then certainly Norway should have been mentioned as
well in this article. Northern Norway was liberated by the Soviets and to my
knowledge no allied forces ever set their foot in Norway at the end of the
war.

Thus in principle the Russians could have claimed all of Norway.

They did not which I think is one of the reasons we in Norway retained a
pretty good relationship with the Soviet Union through the Cold War sometimes
to anger and bitter resentment by our American NATO allies which seemed to
prefer to refer to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”.

~~~
johnchristopher
Interesting. Off-topic but: How was that norvegian TV show about a Russian led
occupation received by Norvegians considering the good relationship ?

~~~
lb1lf
I cannot vouch for others, but I didn't think much of it; while no-one are
seriously expecting a Russian occupation of Norway, we're rather aware that we
are a NATO member, the Russians very much not - and that there is bound to be
some strain in the relationship, despite it (in particular in the border zone
up north) being good on a day-to-day basis.

For instance, citizens of both countries living in a defined zone either side
of the border can visit under a visa waiver-esque program.

IIRC the debate following the TV series was more about how some figured the
plot - that the EU wanted access to our natural resources and were willing to
use force (by proxy) to get it - seemed plausible if international relations
deteriorated sufficiently.

Our own little Suez crisis, that.

~~~
vl
While plot in the current political climate is obviously a stretch, it’s an
allusion to the annexation of Crimea. Overall, given constrains, it’s well
executed.

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eps
Click-baity title, but an interesting article nonetheless.

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9nGQluzmnq3M
> _Bornholm was quietly evacuated leaving no Soviet presence in Scandinavia._

Arguably incorrect, since the Soviets maintained a naval base in Porkkala,
Finland, just west of Helsinki, until 1956. (Arguably because Finland is
culturally but not strictly geographically Scandinavian.)

~~~
Trafz
Finland isn't a part of Scandinavia. The culture doesn't matter. A lot of
countries share a "Western Culture". Doesn't mean that what happens in 1
country, happens in all of them.

~~~
Svip
A lot of people confuse 'Scandinavian' with 'Nordic'. Scandinavia is a
geographical description, Nordic is more cultural, which includes Scandinavia,
Finland and Iceland.

~~~
bmn__
Poor Estonia suffers neglect. :)

‣ [https://satwcomic.com/new-nordic](https://satwcomic.com/new-nordic)

‣ [https://satwcomic.com/greatest-authority](https://satwcomic.com/greatest-
authority)

‣ [https://satwcomic.com/imposter](https://satwcomic.com/imposter)

‣ [https://satwcomic.com/party-crasher](https://satwcomic.com/party-crasher)

~~~
tenant
And what about the Faroe Islands? The people of the Orkney and Shetland
Islands of Scotland are fond of claiming Scandanavian heritage too.

~~~
BurningFrog
I would argue an independent Scotland could become the 6th Nordic nation.

Of course, I enjoy being contrarian more than I probably should.

I'm Swedish, if that matters.

~~~
tenant
Well it's certainly northerly anyway.

~~~
BurningFrog
It also has a similar culture, weather and history.

Not sure if any Scots agree, but it seems right to me at least.

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JackFr
> The war with Japan, to which the Soviet Union was committed by Treaty, and
> in which it played an immense role, continued until the end of August.

Really? I think the Soviet campaign in the Far East began 3 months after VE
day, after the US had dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, and lasted less than 4
weeks. Its real strategic importance was that it forced the Japanese to
realize the Soviet Union would not broker a negotiated peace with the other
Allies. The Soviets had no beef with Japan, to them it was a land grab,

~~~
vkou
The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started before the bombings.

Japan's forces on the mainland were swept away by experienced, battle-tested,
and overwhelmingly large armies redeployed from the Eastern front.

Japan's plan for the defense of the home islands consisted of pulling everyone
they could out of Manchuria, but relying on its resources and industry to
support the war effort. This obviously required the Soviet Union to uphold
it's end of their non-aggression pact. Which it didn't.

With Manchuria under Soviet occupation, and the Japanese armies routed, this
plan completely fell apart. The invasion convinced Japan that capitulation was
the only solution more than the bombs did.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started before the bombings.

No. (And also no to JackFr.) The Soviet campaign in Manchuria started on
August 8, after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki.

The Japanese plan to use Manchuria for defense of the home islands would never
have worked. The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport
of troops and material impossible.

~~~
vkou
> No.

My mistake. I must have gotten confused because of its inter-bombing timing.
The argument that it played a bigger role in their capitulation than the
second bomb is still a reasonable one, though.

> The US could have put enough naval forces there to make transport of troops
> and material impossible.

Japanese war planning was quite optimistic. But once Manchuria fell, it was
clear to everyone that there was no hope.

------
dimitar
Most likely Stalin hoped that Denmark would become neutral in any future
division of Europe (Finnish and Austrian Neutrality is highly useful for the
USSR).

I think this is consistent with the withdrawal of Red Army troops from places
like Austria.

------
yaakov34
There are much more significant instances of Soviet retrenchment and retreat
during this period. Probably the most notable is the withdrawal from Austria.
The USSR held a significant amount of territory in Austria at the end of the
war, with the US holding the rest, and quickly agreed splitting the country
into 4 allied sectors of control, and doing the same in Vienna. Shortly
afterwards, the USSR withdrew from Austria completely. Why? Well, Stalin was
not one to share his strategic thinking with the public, so we can only guess.
Probably he did not want to deal with a "West Vienna" along the lines of "West
Berlin". But who knows.

As for Bornholm, I really don't see why people think it would have some great
significance. The Soviets already had many bases in the Baltic which were
contiguous with their territory. What would an island add? The Soviets did not
have a good record of supplying their forces by sea. During WW2, i.e.
immediately before the time in question, they suffered a number of disasters
when their forces were cut off from supplies by land and had to be supplied,
and then evacuated, by ships. There was the disastrous evacuation of Tallinn
at the beginning of the war, the battle (and evacuation) of Odessa, the loss
of Crimea, and the Leningrad front with immense civilian and military losses.
Bornholm would have looked like a death trap to the Soviet commanders of the
time, rather than some great asset. No wonder they agreed to return Porkkala
to Finland 40 years early, and never placed naval assets of any significance
there.

~~~
pvg
_Shortly afterwards, the USSR withdrew from Austria completely._

The Soviets did not withdraw from Austria until 1955, two years after Stalin's
death. The neutrality of Austria was a condition.

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rob74
Not related to Bornholm at all, but it struck me how the "Map of the North Sea
and Baltic Sea, 1914" emphasizes railways (the thick black-and-white lines)
over roads (the much thinner dashed lines). Of course, those were the heydays
of the railroad, and road travel was still largely by horse-drawn carriage...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And rail was several orders of magnitude more efficient at moving goods. The
'roads' were tracks made by repeated wagon traversal. Bumpy, muddy, rocky,
eroded.

~~~
gerikson
The area around Bornholm (Skåne, Denmark, Germany/Prussia) has some of the
best agricultural lands in Europe. The roads were just fine.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hm. I come from a rural setting in Iowa, and the roads even today are not much
good.

Here's a painting of Danish roads around that period. Looks like a buggy track
thru the countryside:
[https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=gUPDkI...](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=gUPDkI10&id=9F09B8ABA74B01BE30BFA1BA7A84DE50155C3AB2&thid=OIP.gUPDkI10PTfqvrmAlnHeBQHaFG&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.christies.com%2fimg%2fLotImages%2f2016%2fCSK%2f2016_CSK_12582_0475_000\(carl_wennemoes_winter_road\).jpg&exph=2207&expw=3200&q=danish+roads+1914&simid=608036887598926641&selectedIndex=18&qpvt=danish+roads+1914&ajaxhist=0)

~~~
gerikson
The area is now, and was then, densely populated.

Here's an article (in Swedish) about the roads in Skåne.

Covers a long period.

[https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2017-03-25/alla-landsvagar-bar-
ti...](https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2017-03-25/alla-landsvagar-bar-till-det-
forflutna)

Malmö was even then Sweden's third largest city. Copenhagen was a global city
and Denmark the center of European pork production. Prussia's huge estates
were the foundation for the aristocracies' wealth.

To get goods to market, or to a rail hub, good roads helped a lot.

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walterkrankheit
Is it just me or did he lose the Hamlet thread? It doesn't seem so much a
mystery as a purely strategic post-war moment that no really knows about.

~~~
pvg
She (Caroline Kennedy-Pipe ) - and the Hamlet thing is mostly colour but it
did send me down a clickhole of tracking down 'Stalin hated Hamlet'. That the
"story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin
of Kremlin politics" sounded a bit off to me - after all, Stalin famously
commissioned Eisenstein's _Ivan the Terrible_.

It seems around 1940 or so Stalin did stop a Hamlet production (based on a
Pasternak translation) at the Moscow Art Theatre. Recollections vary somewhat
but the most plausible explanation is that Stalin felt Hamlet (the character)
was weak. Completing the circle, the Russian wikipedia page on _Ivan The
Terrible_ has a quote from a Central Committee critique of a different movie
in which, as an aside, part two of Eisenstein's film is criticized as
ahistorical and as portraying Ivan as too weak "like Hamlet". The second part
was not screened until some years after Stalin and Eisenstein's deaths. Hamlet
itself was not staged in the last 12 years of Stalin's life.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I'm imagining the Stalin from Death of Stalin sitting around complaining that
Hamlet takes nearly two hours and doesn't hardly kill anybody! And then dies
himself!

~~~
pvg
Hah, it's hinted at in the movie but Stalin was actually something of a
performing arts (and theatre in particular) superfan - that's why the Hamlet
bit caught my eye.

------
jtlienwis
My fist thought was what could Denmark trade at that time for the return of
Bornholm? My first thought was the atomic secrets that the Neils Bohr group
had.

------
mci
> The country was ultimately liberated by the Americans in Greenland [...]

Hmm. "On 8 April 1941, the United States occupied Greenland to defend it
against a possible invasion by Germany."[1] So, first, there never were any
German occupiers to liberate Greenland from, and second, the US occupation of
Greenland started 4 years before 1945.

> Furthermore, there were emplacements for massive guns with 42 kilometre
> range, which could close the strait south of the island to the coast of what
> is now Poland (then Germany).

First, the strait is 90 kilometres wide.[2] Second, the last German stronghold
on the southern coast of the strait, the port of Kolberg (Kołobrzeg) fell to
the Polish People's Army on March 18.[3] Calling the coast "then Germany" in
May is pretty weird.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Treaty_of_Kiel_to_Wo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Treaty_of_Kiel_to_World_War_II)

[2] [http://visitkolobrzeg.com/bornholm#](http://visitkolobrzeg.com/bornholm#)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolberg_(1945)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kolberg_\(1945\))

~~~
zeveb
> Calling the coast "then Germany" in May is pretty weird.

Founded in 1255 by Germans, Kolberg was part of Prussian Pomerania from the
1648 Peace of Westphalia until the _August_ 1945 Potsdam Agreements which
implicitly recognised the Soviet capture of eastern Poland and gave Poland
eastern Germany in return; this was not finalised until the _1990_ Treaty on
the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. It's perfectly reasonable to
refer to Prussian territory in early 1945 as Germany.

(I am not complaining about the transfer to Poland — after the inhumanity of
the German occupation of Poland itself it was only just. It _does_ seem a bit
unjust that eastern Poland is still part of Russia though!)

~~~
mci
Let me rephrase: assigning any military importance to the de jure status of a
land is pretty weird.

~~~
mannykannot
Such issues featured prominently in the Yalta conference, where the starting
point for the discussions and negotiations was the de jure status quo ante.
And if Bornholm ws not de jure Danish territory, there would be no issue here
(or, at least, a different one - if it had been German, I imagine it might
have become part of the DDR.)

------
einpoklum
I thought this was about Stalin's craving for Danish:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_pastry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_pastry)

~~~
thih9
Reminds me of this article about unusual cravings from the 1940s; no mention
of Stalin though.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Coke](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Coke)

------
zeveb
> our American NATO allies which seemed to prefer to refer to the Soviet Union
> as the “evil empire”.

It wasn't an entirely inappropriate term, given the Holodomor, the Katyn
massacre, the massacre of the Cossacks, the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Wall, the gulag
system, the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan &c. The U.S. was imperfect too, of
course, but most of the badness was non-policy like the My Lai massacre, or
evil or wrong policies (e.g. segregation) which pale in comparison, and anyway
whatboutism isn't really wise: one should call out misbehaviour anywhere it
rears its head.

It's fair to say that even in its kinder, gentler post-Lenin and post-Stalin
form the Soviet Union was a malign force in the world. 'Evil empire' was a
fair shorthand.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It
just leads to even more and even worse, as it did below. This is why the site
guidelines ask people not to post like this.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534609).

~~~
zeveb
I don't think that's very actionable direction, because _every_ post, no matte
how dryly factual, can trigger someone who reads it. No doubt there is someone
reading right now who would react violently to a post about an experiment with
statically-typed programming languages, and someone else who is still really
unhealthily incensed about the War of Jenkins's Ear. All one can do is apply a
reasonable-man standard: would a reasonable man think that a post is starting
or perpetuating an ideological flamewar? I don't believe a reasonable man
would think that about my post, which I believe falls well within the
guidelines.

