"There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors."

- Stalin, commenting on Order No. 270

Where exactly is the glory here, popped a thought into Ivan's head on a fine December day. What day, exactly, he wasn't sure. He'd lost count of the days at the worksite he'd been sent to, and once he'd returned to camp with the others, he'd been too exhausted and cold to keep track of something as trivial as days. He was sure one of the prisoners in his barrack had been stealing his food, too.

Today was a good day. He'd managed to actually get up, and his sorry lunch had remained in his possession, too. He didn't want to think about how long it'd take, how many days of being worked half to death and having the missing foodstuffs in his portions replaced with nothing, how many days of the biting cold, for him to end up like some of the other prisoners he'd seen on his way out of the barracks. Like living skeletons, some of them, with no strength to do anything but lie down and drift deliriously between sleep and their few waking moments.

If they managed to wake at all, that is.

The icy wind that blew between the barracks and the lonely tall pine trees made him shiver. Ivan was aware that this was a rather new development. While he'd never liked the cold, he'd been able to withstand it just fine. These days, though? He hadn't missed the way his worn-out clothes hung off his frame, and he hadn't been delirious enough to have only imagined poking new holes in his belt. In this never ending cold, he was eternally thankful for the kind soul who'd looked the other way and let him keep his dirty, tattered scarf.

He wasn't sure he'd have the strength to keep living without it.

Ivan made his way to the edge of the camp area. The barbed wire fence running along the whole perimeter vibrated from the force of the gale with a metallic hum. The Finnish soldier on guard on the other side of the fence glared at him in warning, and his hand drifted closer to the rifle hanging off his shoulder. Ivan thought it best to turn around and meander back deeper into the camp. He did. Glancing behind himself, he found the Finn staring at him with narrowed eyes and his hand steadily placed on his lifted rifle. Ivan subtly quickened his pace.

He pulled up the scarf over his runny nose. What would he even have done? A sudden spike of irritation, even anger, went through him. How would he scale a barbed wire fence when they were barely giving him enough food or rest to stand up on his own two feet?

A door was closed with more force than necessary, and the loud noise made Ivan glance up. A man from his barrack, a Ukrainian soldier, if he remembered right, stood next to a door, looking surprised with his arm outstretched. The wind must've slammed the door, then. Some Finnish soldier, maybe the one that'd been glaring at his back, barked an angry order that was carried away by the wind. Not that it mattered if Ivan heard it properly or not. There were too many vowels for it to be anything but Finnish, which he did not speak. Nor did he intend to learn.

Irritation simmering, Ivan looked around the rest of the wide, empty yard. There were some lone fellow prisoners going about their business where he could see, though only a few seemed to actually have a destination. The rest wandered around much like he was doing. Some were huddled in small groups, hiding from the biting wind in the cover of the barracks and other camp buildings. All of them, dirty clothes, gaunt faces, shoulders sagging from exhaustion. Some were shivering from the cold hard enough that even he could see it.

Would his sisters recognize him, if they were to see him like this, he wondered as he took cover beside a lone pine tree. Would they even want to acknowledge he was their brother? When he'd gone and gotten captured, become a traitor of the motherland, a prisoner of war. He didn't like to think of himself as stupid. He'd heard stories from his parents, and later from Katyusha, of what war was like. He'd been drafted, he hadn't volunteered to go to war, but yet, he'd expected...

It was stupid, he knew now, to think that anything about war was glorious. There'd been so much talk about how it was an honour to defend the motherland, how it was glorious to give your life for it. Glorious to kill those who would threaten it. Glorious to fight alongside your comrades. Glorious to never retreat. Glorious to fight. Glorious to kill. Glorious to die. Glorious. Glorious, glorious, glorious.

Where was the glory? Here he was, a glorious soldier of the glorious Red Army, in his glorious ragged uniform and his glorious hole-filled socks inside his glorious leaking boots, gloriously freezing and starving to glorious death alongside his glorious fellow prisoners. Glory to the motherland he'd never see again.

He kicked a lump of snow in irritation. A balled up paper was revealed, and the text on it, written in familiar cyrillic, compelled him to bend down to pick it up before it was snatched up by the wind. Straightening back up, he smoothed out the paper with clumsy fingers, numb from the cold.

Ah. It was a page from one of those newspapers specifically made for prisoners of war, filled with fascist propaganda, no doubt. The ink had bled somewhat, so not all of the page would've been legible even if Ivan had had any desire to read it in the first place. He had none. But he did look at the one part of the page that'd stayed mostly legible: the date. The twenty-something-eth of December, 1941.

It would be his birthday soon, he realized. If he'd been less exhausted, it might've been with a jolt. Now he just stood there still, numb, but back straight. His birthday might even be today, for all he knew. He'd miss the anniversaries of the deaths of his parents for the first time since being stuck in St. Petersbur- in Leningrad. Nadezhda's, too. Their youngest sister's.

Would Katyusha and Natasha mourn him, too, on the 30th this year? Did they think he was dead? Or did they know he was alive, a prisoner and a traitor? Would they think he'd be better off dead if they did? The anger that'd been simmering inside him bled out as quickly as it'd appeared, leaving his shoulders hunched and his mind numb from the exhaustion and the cold. With how things were going, it wasn't all that unlikely that they'd get their hypothetical wish.

Ivan loosened his grip on the piece of paper and let the wind tear it from his stiff fingers. A gust of wind blew fine snow into his face. It might've started snowing, or maybe it was just lifted off the ground. He wasn't paying attention, really. He absentmindedly adjusted his scarf, tucked his hands into his pockets, and started to wander somewhere into the general direction of the barracks.

He'd better get inside before he froze off his glorious toes.

During the Continuation War (1941-1944) the Finnish troops took approximately 67,000 Soviet soldiers as prisoners of war, most of whom were captured towards the very beginning of the war. Of these 67,000, even up to 23,000 people perished. Most deaths happened in the winter of 1941-42 and in early 1942. The biggest cause of death was starvation and the diseases brought with it.

Finland had been ill-prepared for the huge flood of prisoners of war, and the crop hadn't been very good in 1941. The prisoners, who were not only forbidden from leaving the camps in search of food unlike the regular citizens, were also very low on the list of priorities when it came to ensuring there was enough decent-quality food for everyone. The portions were made with poor knowledge in the new hot field of nutritional science - the amount of calories needed for a human to survive was estimated as way too low - and the work the prisoners did was much too harsh for the diet. In some cases, if certain foodstuffs included in the prisoners' daily portions had run out, no replacements were provided, so they were just left out.

In addition, once it had become clear that the situation on the camps had gone very bad very fast, nobody wanted to take responsibility. After this disastrous winter and spring the organization behind running the camps was changed, and the treatment of prisoners of war became much more humane.

I could've gone on about the history behind this for longer, but that's probably enough for now. This part of Finnish history isn't very well-known, even in Finland, but I thought it's certainly an interesting one. If uh. Quite depressing.

Anyway, hey! It took me less than four months to write something for the drabble game! Even though this isn't a drabble, either, but well. No matter! At least something got me to write?

A big thanks to my friend peachplume for beta-ing this and helping with brainstorming and lots of other stuff! And also thanks for the Hetalia Writers Discord both for the drabble game prompt and for helping me out with some language stuff, even though I wrote this straight in English this time. Finnish translation coming at some point, if you'd prefer that? To like, all three Finnish Hetalia fans here reading this. :')

This does take place in the same universe as Six Sunflowers, my previous fic, which can be found through my profile. Maybe... look forward to more stuff in this verse in the future...?