The Finnish Civil War begins

Late in the evening of 27 January 1918 the Finnish Red Guard received the order to mobilise. From 11 p.m. its units gathered in the working-class districts of Helsinki, and a red lantern, the agreed signal of revolution, was lit on the tower of the Workers’ House. Some Finnish studies state that the lantern had already been lit a day earlier, when the decision to rise was taken. During the night the Red Guards crossed from Siltasaari over the Long Bridge into the centre and occupied the telephone exchange, the railway station and the telegraph office. By the morning of 28 January the capital was in their hands. A few hours earlier, at three in the morning, at the other end of the country, units of the civic guards loyal to the Senate of Pehr Evind Svinhufvud began, on the orders of General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, to disarm the Russian garrisons in Ostrobothnia. Finnish historians take that night as the beginning of the Finnish Civil War: for the Reds at 11 p.m. on 27 January, for the Whites at three in the morning on 28 January.

Two armed camps

Finland had declared independence on 6 December 1917, and at the beginning of January it was recognised by Soviet Russia and the first European states. The young state, however, had neither an army nor a police force, while its garrisons and ports still held up to 40,000 Russian soldiers and sailors of the 42nd Corps and the Baltic Fleet, mostly mutinous and waiting to go home. Since the summer of 1917 both sides of the Finnish political conflict had been arming on their own account. The labour movement formed workers’ order guards, which in January 1918 numbered several hundred units and were increasingly called the Red Guard. The bourgeois and agrarian parties formed civic guards (Suojeluskunta), called the White Guard by their opponents, armed partly with weapons smuggled from Germany. The country was starving, because war and revolution had cut off supplies of Russian grain. After the general strike of November, in which 34 people were killed, mistrust between the camps turned into hostility.

In January events gathered pace. On 12 January the Eduskunta, by the votes of the bourgeois parties, 97 to 85, authorised the Senate to create a “strong authority to maintain order”. The left saw this as heralding a crackdown on the labour movement. On 15 January the Senate entrusted the direction of military affairs to Mannerheim, a general of the Russian army who had returned home after the revolution. Mannerheim went to Vaasa on the west coast and set up his headquarters there, among the prosperous, anti-socialist peasantry of Ostrobothnia. At the same time Lenin promised the Finnish Reds a large consignment of arms. The first clashes broke out even before the war: on 9 January near Sipoo, and on 19–23 January in Vyborg and on the Karelian Isthmus, where there was fighting for arms depots and for the railway line to Petrograd.

On 25 January the Senate proclaimed the civic guards the government’s army. That same day Mannerheim, who had earlier wanted to remove the Russians peacefully, ordered the disarming of the garrisons in Ostrobothnia. A day later the Executive Committee of the Finnish workers decided to start the revolution, and the workers’ guards were merged into a single Red Guard. Its units on the railway line from Vyborg to Tampere set off to meet a train carrying arms from Petrograd. On 27 January the Whites tried to intercept the consignment near Kämärä station on the Karelian Isthmus. Between twenty and thirty Finns on both sides were killed.

Night in Helsinki

The leaders of the bourgeois parties expected a coup. As early as the evening of 26 January Svinhufvud sent four senators to Vaasa, who were to form a legitimate government there if necessary. When the Reds took Helsinki, most bourgeois politicians and members of the civic guards left the city or went into hiding. Svinhufvud himself hid in the capital for several weeks, and at the beginning of March escaped by icebreaker to Tallinn, from where he reached Vaasa via Germany and Sweden. On 28 January the People’s Delegation of Finland was formed in Helsinki, a revolutionary government headed by the Social Democrat Kullervo Manner, the same man who on 6 December had signed the left’s draft declaration of independence in the Eduskunta. In the proclamation “Workers, citizens of Finland!” the Delegation announced that the working people were taking power. Its members spoke of socialist democracy, not of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the Bolshevik model. The Russian units in Helsinki generally remained neutral, but the Reds received arms from them: about 2,000 rifles from the fortress of Suomenlinna.

Disarming the Russians in Ostrobothnia

In Ostrobothnia the Whites struck simultaneously in more than a dozen localities. In Vaasa itself Colonel Martin Wetzer divided about 1,600 members of the local civic guards into five columns, which surrounded the Russian barracks during the night. The garrison numbered between 1,500 and 2,000 men, but only about two hundred were fit to fight. Most Russian officers sympathised with the Whites, and according to Finnish accounts some of them were enjoying themselves at a hotel when the attack came. Resistance came mainly from mutinous sailors. At 2.30 p.m. representatives of the garrison signed the capitulation at the town hall. Two Whites and between fifteen and twenty Russians were killed. The same day the Whites disarmed the 423rd Infantry Regiment at Seinäjoki and the garrisons at Lapua and other towns of the region. According to Finnish studies about 60 Russian soldiers were killed in Ostrobothnia in all. The weapons captured from the Russians were used to arm the White army, and the prisoners were held in a camp in Vaasa. The senators from Helsinki arrived in the town, and from 29 January Vaasa was the capital of “White” Finland.

White historiography later called these events the beginning of a “War of Liberation” against Russia. In reality it was from the first day above all a war of Finns against Finns. Russian soldiers rarely fought, although Soviet Russia supplied the Reds with arms and some Russian units and volunteers fought on their side. The front cut across the country from the Gulf of Bothnia to Lake Ladoga. The Reds held the south with almost all the large towns, including Helsinki, Turku, Tampere and Vyborg, and the Whites the agricultural north and centre of the country.

What followed

The Reds’ February offensive stalled for lack of trained commanders. The Whites received reinforcements: in February the Jägers trained in Germany returned, and Swedish volunteers also arrived. In March Mannerheim went over to the offensive and on 6 April, after the bloodiest battle of the war, took Tampere. The Senate, however, asked for help from Germany, which after the breakdown of the talks at Brest had decided to intervene. On 3 April the German Baltic Division of General Rüdiger von der Goltz landed at Hanko, and on 12–13 April it took Helsinki. At the end of April the Whites took Vyborg, and on 15 May 1918 the war ended.

It lasted three and a half months, but it was among the bloodiest civil wars of those years. About 36,000 people died, more than one per cent of the country’s population. Most of them died away from the battlefield. About 1,500 people fell victim to the Red terror, and about 9,000–10,000 to the White terror, especially after the victory. More than 12,000 Red prisoners died of hunger and disease in the camps. For a few months independent Finland found itself in the German sphere of influence, and the division into “Whites” and “Reds” weighed on its political life for a whole generation.