Abstract
The Finnish Civil War, 1918 is a collection of essays by Finnish authors, focusing on the aforementioned conflict and its legacy in popular culture and collective history. They cover the conflict itself and its aftermath from multiple points of view. The book is divided into 12 chapters, in addition to an excellent introduction by the editors that not only introduces the other authors but demonstrates through a literature review how the research into the Finnish Civil War has evolved in the last nine decades.
Pertti Haapala explains the origins of the civil war. He departs from the earlier consensus, which emphasized the importance of economic reasons, and puts forth a compelling argument that the under-developed political system in the Grand Duchy – as Finland was known before independence – was the leading reason for the war, especially when coupled with the instability of Russia itself as a result of the Great War. Thus, he concludes, without a world war there would not have been revolutions and chaos in the Russian Empire, and without such turmoil, Finnish society could not have erupted into a bloody civil war.
Juha Siltala highlights the reluctance of both the Conservative and Socialist leadership to take control of the deteriorating situation, preferring merely to blame the other side and letting events unfold as they did. This led to increased violence, as the more radical elements, especially on the Red side, could operate freely and push events towards their goals, which were not necessarily the same as those of less radical groups. He illustrates well the collapse of communication between Whites and Reds, as both sides depicted the other with as harsh and violent language as possible. This then led to widespread fear of the Other, making violence – under the cover of self-defence – practically a guaranteed outcome.
Marko Tikka follows a more traditional military history path, explaining the main campaigns of the war and how the armies of the two sides were built from scratch at the outset of the conflict. For a new reader unfamiliar with the Finnish Civil War, it is a valuable chapter and a good introduction to the war on an operational level. Tikka also touches upon the wartime executions and massacres, performed by both Reds and Whites, though the reprisals by the latter far outnumbered the murders committed by the former. His summary includes a well-researched breakdown of casualties by nationality.
Aapo Roselius explores a lesser known result of the war: the adventurous military policy of the young nation that led to the Tribal Wars or irredentist campaigns in East Karelia between 1919 and 1922. While not officially run by the government, these campaigns were unofficially sanctioned and ended up creating tensions between Finland and the Soviet Union – a factor that probably played a part in Stalin’s strategic planning in the late 1930s. Roselius, however, does not speculate on that aspect, choosing to focus more on the immediate outcome of the campaigns, defeat for the Finns and the near abandonment of the Greater Finland ideology, though the latter had a brief resurgence during the Second World War.
Tuomas Tepora discusses the ideas of sacrifice that permeated the public discourse and thinking on both sides of the civil war, though there were important differences in how Reds saw sacrifice compared with the Whites. For the Whites, sacrifice was necessary for the nation to be ‘reborn through blood’, whereas the Reds viewed it as an unfortunate side-effect when creating a better society.
Tiina Lintunen examines how women experienced the civil war. While the Whites allowed women to participate in the war effort through traditional means – as nurses, cooks, and seamstresses – the Red side allowed limited mobilization of female combat units. Lintunen also points out how temporary any breaking of gender roles was, as traditional roles were quickly reasserted after the war.
Marianne Junila observes how schoolgirls at Tampere – one of the key battle sites of the war – experienced the war. She relies heavily on essays that the girls wrote at school very soon after the war, and showcases an interesting mixture of excitement and horror that the children experienced during the siege of their home town and the following battle, and how their experiences were not fully compatible with the official national narrative of the war that the Whites produced afterwards.
Anders Ahlbäck writes about the surprisingly quick transformation of Finnish ideals of masculinity after a century of peace to very militarized notions in the years immediately leading to the civil war and then for decades afterwards. Only a few Finnish men served in the imperial army of Russia, and thus the militarized ideal of manhood had to be created from scratch in 1918. This target was achieved, partially due to the national service implemented and partially due to the near complete domination of the White viewpoint in any discourse of events leading to and during the War of Liberation.
Aapo Roselius touches upon the same topic, as he discusses national memory of the war in the following two decades. Even as the political climate started to heal, as social democrats were accepted back into political life and an embryonic welfare state started to form, the remembrance of the war was highly militarized and completely dominated by the White version of a victorious War of Liberation.
Tauno Saarela then offers a polar opposite viewpoint: how the Finnish labour movement remembered the war. The left was divided between the social democrats, who emphasized the grave mistake of 1918, and the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Communist Party, which focused more on protest and on challenging the victors’ views. Remembrance focused on grave sites and on the publishing of albums presenting the names and pictures of the dead.
Tuomas Tepora’s penultimate chapter maps the process that pushed the bloodletting of the civil war to the background, in favour of the national unity of the Second World War. The interwar pathos of Greater Finland was replaced with the post-war ideal of inclusive patriotism.
Tiina Kinnunen ends the book with a chapter on how new approaches have appeared in remembrance and research of the civil war after the end of the Cold War. That the war is still explored through both academic research and fiction is a fact, though viewpoints have diverged from the old, monolithic White one. The strong divide between Reds and Whites survives today, but alongside it a new approach, which places agency outside the binary division, has emerged.
The book is obviously most useful to a reader who has some knowledge of Finland and its civil war already. For someone who knows absolutely nothing about the topic, the plethora of foreign names may be daunting, though most of the chapters are welcoming enough. The old sin of Finnish historiography, of separating Finland as something unique from the rest of Europe, is not present.
Technically, the book is well edited and printed. It includes multiple photographs but only a few maps. A reader not well versed in Finnish geography will find it useful to have an atlas open also. Some phrases and words make it clear that the authors are not writing in their native language, but such minor details do not detract from the overall value of the book.