On this day in 1918, the Finnish People’s Delegation declared a socialist workers’ republic (known “Red Finland”), at the start of the Finnish Civil War. The burgeoning working class movement was crushed by imperialist German forces.
Prior to 1917, Finland had been ruled as a Grand Duchy, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Tsarist state in the wake of February Revolution and a long-term increase in nationalist sentiment, Finland declared independence on December 4th, 1917, formally recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks on December 31st.
Due to industrialized Finland having a strong revolutionary labor movement, conservative and proletarian forces were immediately thrown into conflict.
Red Guard paramilitary units representing the labor movement found themselves in a cycle of escalation with loyalist “White” Guards, culminating in a mass uprising of Reds in Helsinki on January 27th, 1918, marking the start of revolution. The following day, the Finnish People’s Delegation was formed by members of the Social Democratic Party. Bourgeois forces fled to Vaasa, where they set up their own “White Senate”.
The war saw the Whites, under the leadership of General Mannerheim, receive support from the German Empire, which was more well-established than the Reds’ primary ally, the newly-created Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following an imperialist intervention by Germany on the side of the Whites in March 1918, the war ended in defeat for the Reds in May. Over 12,000 people perished from starvation and hunger while imprisoned in White-operated POW camps, and reparations were not paid to former victims of the White Terror until 1973.
Lessons of the Finnish Revolution of 1917–1918
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Interesting to think about how contingent history can be. If the Finnish Reds had won the civil war, then possibly there wouldn’t have been a Siege of Leningrad. And it would have changed the calculus of the northern/Baltic theater of WW2. Maybe Finland would have been among those countries which joined the USSR as a Soviet republic.
I was in Tampere a while ago and visited the neighborhood of Pispala, where Reds held out for over a week during the White advance. Geographically, Pispala is a high point in the area on top of a hill that oversees a lake. There’s a monument there now in memory of the Reds. When the situation looked bleak, some Reds were able to escape in the middle of the night by skiing across the frozen lake to safety.
I am 100% convinced that if Trotsky et al could have spared ten thousand red army soldiers and a couple of maxim guns finland wouldn’t suck.
I’m told the Finnish government was going to agree to the land swap the Soviets wanted before wwii but some fascist white general left over from the civil war walked in to the room and said “lol nope fuck you commies we’re doing a winter war so the nazis can definitely murder one million civilians at Stalingrad eat shit.”