Bedtime Facts (22/365)

The Finnish Civil War started exactly 100 years ago today

The Finnish Senate had declared independence on December 6 1917.The country had been dependent on grain imported from Russia and Russia was in chaos after the Bolsheviks had successfully taken power in a coup in November 1917. The Bolsheviks had pulled Russia out of the very unpopular Great War. Many Finns had had work building fortresses on the southern coast to protect it from a German invasion. The fortress building came to a sudden halt. This added to the economic distress large numbers of the poor country was already suffering from as a result of the bad domestic harvest of the summer of 1917.

The poor majority of the population was not equally represented in local government. In national elections, every adult had one vote, but in local elections the weight of one's vote was based on taxes paid. That favored the wealthy very significantly as most government functions were at the local level. In municipal councils, only the wealthy were represented. In most of the country, most of the population were tenant farmers or factory workers. In the province of Ostrobothnia, most of the population were small farmers who owned their land.

It did not help that in March when the Russian Emperor was dethroned and the Russian Provisional Government took power the members of the hated police were all fired. A popular militia was founded. The Senate ordered the popular militia to be disbanded in May. There was no external or internal security. Workers had organized and had set up of guards of picketers. The bourgeoisie organised their own guards. There were two rudimentary organised armed groups capable of enforcement in the country as the Russian Gendarmerie (the police) were defunct and as the government had no armed forces.

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The leaders of the left and the right tried to resolve the situation together in the autumn of 1917 but the situation spiraled out control as the crisis gradually worsened. On 15th of January 1918, the Senate appointed the White Guards as the official armed forces. The Senate appointed General Carl Gustav Mannerheim as the commander of the White Guards. The Finnish People's Delegation was made up by the political leadership of the Reds. It included a faction of the Social Democratic Party that was represented in the Senate. The large-scale mobilization of the Reds begun and the first major battle was fought on 27th of January 1918. The Reds received material support from Soviet Russia and the Whites were supported by Germany both in material and the Baltic Sea Division that landed in Hanko on the south coast, took control of Helsinki and Lahti later in the war.

In February 1918, the Reds who controlled the southern part of the country where the most industrial centers and large cities were and where land ownership had been the most concentrated, started a general offensive that failed. The White counteroffensive led to the bloody and drawn out Battle of Tampere after which the fate of the rebellion was sealed. Helsinki was captured by the German Baltic Sea Division that also cut off the escape route of the Reds fleeing from Tampere in Lahti. Large concentration camps were set up in Lahti after the surrender of the Reds.

Both parties were committed acts of political terror. Conditions in the concentration camps after the civil war started getting bad, the country was in the throes of a serious labor shortage and the economy was in tatters. In the coming years, the vast majority of the Reds received amnesty and many of the political reforms of championed by the left were implemented. In July 2018, tenant farmers were given the opportunity to purchase their land. Universal suffrage was extended to local elections. These rights were affirmed in the 1919 constitution. In the coming decades, consensus building was seen as vitally important and many reforms to improve the lives of the poorest strata of society were implemented.