I've always been fascinated by the Finnish winter War, and the fantastic defense put up by the Finns.

Would Stalin have stopped at the exchange of territory that he wanted [to move the border 25 kilometres back from Leningrad, and lease of the Hanko Peninsula to the USSR for 30 years in exchange the Soviets offered to cede to Finland about 8,800 square kilometers of Karelia along the Finnish border, or about twice the amount of land to be ceded by Finland.] Or would he have invaded any way, especially as it left Finland without it's main defences in Karelia?

In other words, would it have been better for Finland in the long run to have agreed to the exchange of territory or was there definitely no alternative to fighting?

The Finnish defense certainly impressed the Soviets as some later commented.......

Timoshenko said, "The Russians have learned much in this hard war in which the Finns fought with Heroism." Admiral Kuznetsov concluded, "We had received a severe lesson. We had to profit by it." Khrushchev summed it up, "All of us—and Stalin first and foremost—sensed in our victory a defeat by the Finns. It was a dangerous defeat because it encouraged our enemies' conviction that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay . . . We had to draw some lessons for the immediate future from what had happened."