Some news outlets have reported that Joseph Stalin attempted to introduce the moose as a replacement for horses in Soviet cavalry regiments based in the northern parts of the country during the 1930s. The story is thought to have been popularised by a 2010 April Fools' Day article published in the Russian language edition of "Popular Mechanics". The article claimed that 1,500 moose cavalrymen were trained for service in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940. Machine guns were supposedly mounted to the antlers of the moose. Among the more outlandish claims was that the start of the war was postponed to avoid clashing with the moose mating season and that the animals could distinguish between the Russian and Finnish languages at a distance of over a kilometre. The article included several photographs supposedly showing members of the moose cavalry unit. These were in fact posed by members of "Popular Mechanics"' publishing house dressed in reproduction Red Army uniforms with the moose superimposed in post-processing. A graphics artist, Vitas Chernyauskas, mocked-up the front cover of an instruction manual for the unit, based on contemporary Soviet documents and this was also included in the article. The hoax article was widely reproduced in Russian media over the following years, often without the April Fools' Day disclaimer carried in the original article. Posters on military history forums often claimed to have seen, or even read, copies of the fictional instruction manual. The coverage in newspapers, satirical sites and social media meant that the story gained a measure of credence as a historical fact. Moose were later successfully domesticated in Soviet Russia but as livestock, for their milk and antlers. In 2017, a war museum in Lakhdenpokhya, Karelia, Russia showcased the doctored photographs from the "Popular Mechanics" article in an exhibition as a recent discovery of historic documents. The exhibition claimed that the "war moose" had been trained by the Soviet army for four years. The story, sourced from the museum exhibition, was covered by the Finnish national public broadcaster Yle in a television broadcast and as an online news article in June 2017. Yle was informed of the errors in the story by a member of the public but only issued a correction one month later. As a consequence they were investigated by the Finnish media regulator the Council for Mass Media in Finland for failures in fact-checking and responding to the error report. The erroneous story is still available on the Yle website, including the doctored images from "Popular Mechanics", but with a disclaimer and link to the Council for Mass Media's findings.