(Mirror.)

Unfortunately, the author seems clueless about how diplomacy works (misleading a less careful reader to the implicit conclusion ‘Russians are self‐hating sadists’), and he makes some strange claims, as

Soviet legacy of seeing POWs as traitors of the Motherland.

That said, this is only twenty‐one pages long, and some of the information is too important to overlook:

The battle’s death toll was over 400 Soviet and 17 Finnish soldiers, on top of which 29 Finns were wounded and a few dozen Soviet prisoners taken. The next day, a local Finnish work company started burying the Soviet dead in four large mass graves on the battle field. This work was directed by the older brother of our informant, Mr. Alpo Siivola. His brother had later called it “an appropriate birthday present for Comrade Stalin.” The Soviet soldiers who had perished during their escape through the wilderness were buried the next summer when the melting snow revealed their bodies, but the locations of those gravesites are unknown.