Arguments for cringe: Possibly killed up to 500 Soviet soldiers during The Winter War with the USSR, and is often masturbated to by chuds as a result.
Arguments for based: Him doing this was arguably justified self-defense, as the Soviet Union did initiate the conflict and draw first blood by invading Finland due to them not handing over some land they wanted.
I am struggling to see how that narrative doesn't make the Soviets the aggressors.
The Soviets tried negotiating for quite some time and the Finns were completely intransigent no matter how generous the terms. Unlike the Finns the Soviets faced the possibility of a ruinous invasion on two fronts by both Germany and Japan simultaneously with no allies to fight alongside them. All they wanted were some uninhabited little islands in the Gulf of Finland or a lease on a nearby naval base but the Finns refused at every turn. So they went to war to secure their interests.
Again, the Finns did not take Soviets concerns seriously and doubted they would go to war over this, and the British egged them on in this regard (it cannot be understated just how awful British foreign policy was during this period). This despite that Stalin led the negotiations personally, something he rarely did.
It definitely backfired on that it drew the Finns into intractable hostility, thus siding with the Nazis and making Soviet concerns re:Leningrad a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Winter War was also very important for the Red Army getting its act back together after the 37-38 terror.
This is often how aggressors are described.
Like, I'm not trying to say the Soviets are bad (obviously) but if we're denying that the Soviets were the aggressors here, that seems like we're just ignoring reality. We can acknowledge that they were the aggressors and explain why, which I think you did a very good job of.
To be clear, I'm being nitpicky about this sentence:
Thing is "aggression" is a loaded term. The Finnish government was fervently anti-communist, just as much as the regimes of the Baltic States, which had fallen into Nazi orbit on the eve of WWII (leading to their occupation and annexation by the USSR after Molotov-Ribbentrop). There was a very high chance they'd have acted as a staging ground for Nazi troops anyway.
EDIT: I'm also loathe to call a war "aggressive" when it could have very easily avoided by one side not being stubborn shitheads. This isn't like, say Iraq, where Sadam complied with every demand but the US invaded anyway; or Operation Barbarossa, where the Nazis broke a written non-aggression Treaty because their intent was aggressive from the start.
:rat-salute: