Years after the Finnish Winter War against the Soviet Union in WW II, Väinö Linna wrote a different book of the war, 'Tuntematon sotilas' (The Unknown Soldier), that was published in 1955: no longer heroic patriotic stories, but a realistic view that aggravated many.
In the book a Soviet machine gun fires at a Finnish ambulance and sets it afire. When the screaming men are pulled out of the burning van, the gun kills them all.

In 1955 a film was made of the book, and later on the film was shown on national TV on every independence day. The story goes that after one such show a Soviet diplomat would have protested against the film bluntly stating that "The Soviet soldiers never shot at ambulances", after which the film would have been re-cut not to show the ambush.In reality the director of the film had censored the part himself already in advance: in the film the ambulance is not shot by a ground based Soviet machine gun, but by a Soviet airplane: From air the ambulance would have looked like any ordinary van on a forest road.
This all happened in the times of Finlandization (Finlandisierung): With a large military power as a neighbor, truth has little value.

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