The disastrous performance during the Winter War gave an impetus to a reform movement within the Red Army but it did not create it. The Red Army had already discovered that its performance in the Polish campaign was lacking and Zhukov achieved his victories at Khalkin-Gol with considerable casualties. The aggressiveness and capability demonstrated by the Wehrmacht also lent a great deal of urgency towards reform. The Soviets passed new military service laws in 1940 to greatly expand the length of service for its conscripts and reservists. While defeat in the Winter War certainly played a role in formulating this policy, however, Finland was only one part of the geopolitical situation in which a generalized war in Europe had broken out.

A notable result of the Winter War was a refocusing of the Red Army upon training and operations. A Red Army postmortem on the officer corps concluded that although individual commanders had achieved results, the purges had undermined the interwar training program. This growing recognition of the need for a professional military to a deemphasis upon the military role of the political commissars, which prior to the 1940 reforms had dual command of units. The success of Finnish automatic weapons (Finland was one of the world leaders in submachine gun technology) led to a program of reequipping Red Army infantry with large numbers of rugged submachine guns. Timoshenko's reforms programs placed a new emphasis upon creating command cadres. The number of military training institutions rose from 49 in 1937 to 114 in 1940 (again, accelerating a preexisting trend). But both the expansion of the army and the territorial growth into Eastern Europe undermined much of the training efforts.

Of course, the Soviets ignored a number of lessons from the Winter War. For example, Soviet tankers' reports on the problems with the mobility of the KV-1 and KV-2 were largely ignored by the upper echelons. The failures of Soviet tanks led Stalin to disestablish the tank corps, only to reestablish it in light of later German successes in France. This administrative chaos meant that there was little time for the Red Army tank forces to reform and many were understrength in June 1941. But perhaps more importantly, the Winter War inculcated a command habit of throwing manpower at military problems. The Soviets managed to achieve victory over Finland in January 1940 by concentrating its forces in the south, leaving its encircled forces in the north to their own devices.

Therefore, the Winter War highlighted many of the deficiencies of the Red Army, but many of the reforms were undercut by the nature of the USSR's geostrategic position in 1941. The Red Army incorporated some lessons from its initial defeats, but was structurally unable to implement all of the lessons. Many of the lessons of the Winter War would need to be relearned during Barbarossa.

Sources

Glantz, David M. Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War. University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Mercatante, Steven D. Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of the Second World War in Europe. Santa Barbara, Calif: Praeger, 2012.

Reese, Roger R. The Soviet Military Experience: a history of the Soviet army, 1917-1991. Routledge, 2002.