During the Winter War of 1939 the Soviet Union dropped hundreds of incendiary bombs over Finland. The bombs—a cluster of loaded devices inside a giant container—were lethal, but the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, claimed they were not bombs at all, but food for starving Finns. The bombs became known, tongue in cheek, as Molotov’s bread baskets. The Finns, in response, said they wanted a drink to go along with the food, so they then invented the Molotov cocktail to wash the Russian bread down.
