“The axe without an edge”: social

democracy and the Finnish Revolution of

1918
Issue: 159

Posted on 2nd July 2018

John Newsinger

The failure of the October Revolution to spread throughout Europe, and beyond, in the
years after 1917 is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Indeed, many of the
catastrophes that subsequently beset humanity including both Stalinism and Nazism are
consequences of that failure. Understanding the reasons for the failure of the working
class in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere to take power during the years
of revolutionary turmoil that accompanied the end of the First World War and continued
through to 1923 in Europe is still of considerable importance. The starting point for any
such discussion has to be the first defeat that the international working class was to
suffer in the aftermath of the October Revolution: the defeat of the Finnish Revolution
and the White Terror imposed on Finnish workers by the victorious forces of reaction.
The Finnish Revolution is particularly instructive because it shows what might well
have been the outcome in Russia itself if the Mensheviks had prevailed over the
Bolsheviks in July 1917: not bourgeois democracy but military dictatorship and a White
Terror, a White Terror, moreover, that in Russia would, without any doubt, have cost
the lives of a significant proportion of the country‟s Jewish population, with hundreds
of thousands massacred. The fate of the Finnish Revolution is of vital concern. So what
factors led to revolution in Finland and what factors account for its defeat?

The Grand Duchy

Finland had been a province of Sweden until 1809 when it was annexed by Tsar
Alexander I. It was overwhelmingly agricultural with a largely Swedish-speaking minor
aristocracy ruling over an impoverished Finnish-speaking population. The nobility
effortlessly transferred their allegiance to Tsarism, with many of their sons serving as
officers in the Tsarist Army. The Grand Duchy was granted considerable autonomy for
most of the 19th century. Indeed, according to historian Anthony Upton, for “most
practical purposes”, the Tsars ruled the country as a “sovereign state”.1

From the 1870s Finland began to industrialise. The Grand Duchy‟s population grew
from 1.7 million in 1870 to over 3.2 million in 1914 (and this was despite the nearly
half a million emigrants, most shipping out to the United States). Whereas in 1870
industrial production was valued at only £3 million, by 1914 it was valued at £40
million. According to one historian, the growth rate of the Finnish economy in the
1890s was “one of the fastest in Europe” with the share of industry and construction in
GDP in that decade increasing “from 13 to 25 percent”. More generally, between 1860
and 1913, Finnish GDP “increased fivefold…with the 1890s the period of most rapid
growth”.2 The growth of the railway system was spectacular: from 67 miles of track in
the 1860s to 2,500 miles by 1914. And this industrial development bought into being
the industrial working class. The number of industrial workers rose from 28,000 in 1885
to 81,000 in 1905 and 110,000 in 1914. The great majority of the working class was still
made up of landless labourers, with more than 850,000 men and women working on the
land in 1900, living in often dire poverty.

The first trade unions were formed in the 1890s, and in 1899 the first socialist
organisation, the Finnish Workers Party (WP), was set up. The WP changed its name to
the Social Democratic Party (SDP) at its 1903 congress. From the very beginning
Finnish socialists looked to the German Social Democrats for inspiration and example,
with Karl Kautsky serving as their “master theoretician”.3 His works were routinely
translated into Finnish while Lenin remained virtually unknown. As far as the SDP
leadership was concerned, the party was an orthodox Marxist organisation that rejected
reformism and reformist illusions as offering any route to socialism, rejected
revolutionary activity as adventurism and instead looked to historical development as
the motor of socialism that would inevitably bring it about, even showing the ruling
class that resistance was futile. Socialism was to be introduced not through the agency
of the working class but would come about as part of an irresistible historical process of
economic and social development that would work itself out for the benefit of the
working class. With this strategic view, it was only a small step for working class self-
activity to be seen as an actual obstacle to socialism, risking the derailment of the
historical process by unreasonable demands and premature action. Alongside this
Kautskyite political strategy, the SDP also embraced the “stages” understanding of
historical development that was the orthodoxy of Russian Marxists, both Mensheviks
and Bolsheviks, at this time. From this perspective, Finland was a backward country
that still had to go through the bourgeois stage of development, a stage that would
require a bourgeois revolution led by the agents of the capitalist class. The role they
assigned to the working class in this process was one of acting in support of bourgeois
demands, participating in the revolution “as auxiliaries under the leadership of the
progressive bourgeoisie”,4 improving and strengthening the position of the working
class, but nevertheless limiting working class demands to those compatible with
bourgeois society and capitalism. All this would be put to the test in 1905.

At the same time as the Finnish labour movement was taking shape, Tsar Nicholas II,
who succeeded to the Imperial throne in 1894, attempted to curb Finnish autonomy and
carry through a programme of “Russification”. Russian was made the official language
and the rouble the official currency. The degree of control and oversight exercised from
St Petersburg was dramatically increased. What aroused most opposition was the
extension of conscription to the Grand Duchy in 1901. A petition of protest against
“Russification” signed by half a million people was collected but the Tsar refused even
to meet the delegation. He predictably ignored all the protests, ordering his governor-
general Nicholay Bobrikov to press ahead. The introduction of conscription met with
considerable opposition, with many young men refusing to serve. In April 1902 less
than half of those conscripted reported for duty. In Helsinki, where 870 young men
were conscripted, only 38 reported, with large crowds greeting them with “derisive
shouts and whistles”. There were serious clashes on the streets the following day with
the Cossacks riding protesters down, whipping them and slashing at them with their
swords. They “were met by a hail of stones and turned back”.5 The situation continued
to deteriorate, culminating in the assassination of Bobrikov on 16 July 1904.
1905 and after

What transformed the situation was the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1905. There
were a number of demonstrations and protests in Finland early in the year involving
both the left and the right, demanding the restoration of Finnish autonomy and
supporting the protests in Russia. On 24 and 25 January there were demonstrations
across the country against the Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg. These protests
often had a mass character with the demonstration against the police in Helsinki on 9
April mobilising some 30,000 people, a third of the city‟s population. Protests spread
throughout the country, including into rural districts where landless labourers and tenant
farmers took the lead. On 6 August there were nationwide protests against government
repression. This culminated in the decision by the SDP and trade union leaderships, who
were coming under increasing pressure from their rank and file, to call a general strike
that began on 30 October. The general strike had widespread support. Civil servants and
the police joined the walkout and in many areas, both in the towns and the countryside,
the strikers established Red Guard units that effectively took control of their localities,
enforcing the strike, taking over police stations and workplaces and imposing working
class control. The landlords and employers responded to this by setting up their own
White Guard units, popularly known as the “Butchers of the People”, that relied heavily
on recruiting right wing university students. The SDP leadership was terrified by what it
had unleashed. The Red Guards were a rank and file organisation, not under party
control, and they took a far more radical line than the SDP leadership, favouring direct
action rather than electoralism. When Nicholas II issued his 4 November manifesto
promising to restore Finnish autonomy with a parliament elected by universal suffrage,
giving both men and women the vote, the SDP leadership rushed to call off the general
strike on 6 November. They put more faith in the Tsar‟s promises than they did in the
workers!

The general strike had demonstrated that, while the stoppage had been called to demand
the restoration of Finnish autonomy, as far as the strikers themselves were concerned it
was a chance to settle accounts with employers and landowners. Indeed, the Helsinki
strike committee actually called on the Red Guard to remain in existence, ready “for a
new, even more severe battle, which the proletariat will wage from now on against the
bourgeoisie”. This was, of course, not at all what the SDP leadership had in mind,
pressing instead for the Red Guard to disband and doing their best to weaken it. For its
part, the Red Guard leadership established close relations with revolutionaries within
the ranks of the Russian garrison, in particular the Russian sailors stationed in Finland.
In July 1906 they supported an attempted naval mutiny at the Sveaborg fortress in
Helsinki harbour, calling for a renewed general strike. The SDP leadership refused and
the mutiny was put down. In the aftermath the Red Guard was effectively suppressed by
the authorities, but not before a bloody clash with White Guards and the police in
Helsinki that left two Red Guards and five White Guards dead. Upton describes this
clash as “the first blood…in the Finnish Civil War”.6 The following month at the party
congress in Oulu the SDP formally rejected violent revolution and committed itself to
work through the new parliament conceded by the Tsar, voting in favour of disbanding
the Red Guard. As one historian has put it, the SDP “constituted a radical opposition,
but not one that would resort to anything other than legal methods”.7

While this brief taste of revolution had terrified the SDP leadership, it had nevertheless
transformed the political situation in Finland. The SDP itself saw its membership
dramatically increase from 16,000 at the start of 1905 to 45,000 by the end of the year,
continuing to rise throughout 1906 until it reached 85,000 in October. By the end of
1906 it was “the strongest socialist party in relative terms in the world”.8 In the
parliamentary elections of 1907, with 38 percent of the votes, it won 80 out of 200 seats
making a particularly strong showing in rural districts. Its vote was to increase year after
year until 1916.

The conclusion that the SDP leadership drew from the events of 1905 was not that
revolutionary struggle actually produced results, but that it was to be avoided at all
costs. Instead the party was built up as an effective electoral machine and inevitably
began embracing reformism in practice, even while rejecting it in theory. Its members
and supporters demanded improvements in their lives now and if they were to be
persuaded that struggle was not the way forward, then this required parliamentary action
delivering reforms. The problem with this was that it all rested on the goodwill of the
Tsar. Once the revolutionary tide had turned, he proceeded to ignore the Finnish
parliament, vetoing its legislation, effectively emasculating it and, by 1910, formally
restricting its role to a purely consultative one. The only reform that the SDP had to
show for all its electoral success in the years before the First World War was a measure
regulating working hours in bakeries. This failure inevitably led to a decline in party
membership, which had fallen to 52,000 by 1910, but the SDP nevertheless successfully
maintained its parliamentary presence.

The revolutionary turmoil of 1905-6 had also given the trade unions a great boost with
increased militancy and a growing readiness to fight. In 1904 there had been 36 major
strikes, 93 in 1905 (excluding the general strike), 174 in 1906, 176 in 1907 and 128 in
1908. According to one somewhat hysterical contemporary right wing commentator,
Henning Söderhjelm: “Strike followed upon strike; the distrust of employers and
foremen was unlimited”.9 The employers responded to this militancy by importing
scabs from Russia, with wholesale victimisation and blacklisting, and successfully
contained the movement. 1907 also saw the formation of the Suomen Ammattijärjestö
(SJA), the Finnish TUC. As far as the union leaders were concerned, “it became the
major—almost the only—task of the unions to try to prevent strikes”.10

War and Revolution

The impact of the First World War was to once again open up the door to revolution in
both Russia and Finland. Russia led the way but the hardship and suffering inflicted on
the working class, both industrial and rural, in Finland made conflict inevitable. Once
again the SDP found itself confronted with the challenge of revolution.

The war brought with it a raging inflation that had cut real wages by a third by the start
of 1917. Many workers were left cold and hungry with their food consumption falling
dramatically. In 1915 average consumption per head of wheat was 459kg, of rye 174kg
and of potatoes 127kg. By 1917 the average had fallen to 8.6kg of wheat, 61kg of rye
and 113kg of potatoes. Working class life in Finland as in every other combatant
country involved endless queuing for food and other necessities that as often as not
were unavailable or sold out, the shelves empty. While the rich continued to wine and
dine regardless, for the working class there was a real fear of mass starvation.11 This
led to a great revival of militancy with the trade unions seeing their membership
increase from only 30,000 in 1916 to 165,000 the following year. The number of strikes
rose dramatically. In 1914 there had been 37 strikes involving 6,200 workers whereas
1917 was to see 483 strikes involving nearly 140,000 workers who were out for 2
million days.12 These strikes were often accompanied by violence as scabs were
cleared off the job, foremen were roughed up and working class control was imposed.
Söderhjelm complained bitterly of how “strikes broke out one after another”, and of
how even after concessions were made, “new causes for strikes were continually
found”. He was particularly outraged by the unrest in “the agricultural world” where
there was “strike upon strike…among the farm hands” who were demanding that the
foreman be discharged for striking as there was “something the matter with the food or
the houses”. A lot of it was just “pure spitefulness” that a reliable police force should
have put a stop to, as far as he was concerned.13 The revival of militancy provided a
tremendous boost for the SDP which again saw its membership rise—from 52,000 in
1916 to over 120,000 in 1917. While there was a growing left wing within the SDP, the
party still remained firmly committed to electoralism and parliamentarianism. Its
moment came in the summer of 1916 when the Tsar allowed a general election. The
SDP received 47.3 percent of the votes and won 103 seats, becoming the first socialist
party in the world to win a parliamentary majority. Nicholas II responded to this result
by refusing to allow the newly elected parliament to meet, a decision that the SDP
leadership tamely accepted. But the situation was changed by the outbreak of revolution
in Russia and the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917.

The revolution arrived in Finland with the mutiny of Russian sailors, seizing control of
warships and overthrowing their officers (38 officers were killed in the process). Arvo
Tuominen later recalled how the revolution spread to the socialist stronghold of
Tampere with armed Russian marines going to a restaurant where naval officers were
eating a far better meal than their men had ever had:

A red rosette was placed in front of each officer. Somewhat hesitantly the surprised
diners, one after the other, fastened the rosettes to their tunics. Only the fleet
commander—a rear admiral…refused. The leader of the marines thereupon pulled out a
revolver, gestured with it and demanded, “V goluvu ili v grud?”—“In the forehead or
the chest?” With trembling hands the grey-haired admiral fumbled with the rosette and
fastened it to the front of his tunic.14

In Helsinki a soviet was established with Russian soldiers and sailors leading the way,
but the way was cleared for the working class to take over. How did the SDP leadership
respond? They remained absolutely committed to the parliamentary road. The
provisional government that was set up in Petrograd allowed the Finnish Parliament to
assemble. This presented the SDP with a dilemma as they had a majority. As far as they
were concerned, Finland still had to go through the “bourgeois stage” of development.
The workers‟ time had not yet come. They resolved this dilemma by going into
coalition with the parties of the right. A coalition government, headed by Oskari Tokoi
and consisting of six SDP ministers and six from the parties of the right, took office.
Looking back on the decision to go into coalition with the parties of the right, Otto
Kuusinen, later to become one of the leaders of the Finnish CP and of the Comintern,
although a “centrist” at the time, described it as an “immoral union”. He blamed the
decision on the influence of “the Russian Mensheviki”. The decision had been hotly
contested within the SDP with many opposed to it, but as Kuusinen admitted, this
opposition “was of so passive a nature that it did not hinder for a single moment our
collaboration with those socialists who were hob-nobbing with Finnish and Russian
landowners”. The bulk of the SDP fell prey, he admits, to “the vague phantom of
parliamentary democracy”. And under increasing pressure from rank and file militancy
outside parliament, the coalition government did introduce a number of reforms: a
system of food rationing, the eight-hour day, the democratisation of local government
(which had had a property franchise excluding the working class). These reforms, he
subsequently recalled, “played their part in lulling us in the illusions of
parliamentarianism”. What they did not recognise at the time was the extent to which
these reforms were “the product of the tempestuous wind from without”.15 Tuominen,
another future leader of Finnish Communism, remembered being:

Like almost everyone else…enthralled by parliamentarianism…parliamentarianism

seemed to me to be the only saving faith… We cheered and praised Parliament. We had
dreamed of a socialist society as a devout Christian dreams of the Kingdom of Heaven
and now had tangible evidence that this ideal could be realised step by step through
parliamentary means.

These illusions were to be shattered, as far as he was concerned, at the end of July 1917
when, as we shall see, Alexander Kerensky sent in Russian troops loyal to the
provisional government to close the parliament down.16

Even while the coalition government was passing its reforms, which often remained just
on paper, the conditions under which the working class were living and working
continued to deteriorate, worsened by rising unemployment. One consequence of this
was that while the SDP leadership and many party activists were completely enamoured
with parliamentarianism, among the working class there was a growing disillusionment,
and a growing demand for action, for the workers to take control. At the time, though,
as Juha Siltala has pointed out, there were “few Bolsheviks among the Finnish
socialists”. Most of the party leadership were either completely opposed to revolution, a
position legitimised by the “stages theory” or, like Kuusinen, were “centrists” who,
“changed their position according to the situation”.17 At the SDP congress in June the
delegates voted to endorse participation in the coalition government by 70 votes to 37,
but the minority chose to remain in the party. At worst the SDP leaders were opposed to
revolution altogether and at best they could be carried along by the tide of working class
militancy and unrest. But there was no recognition of the need to prepare for the
revolutionary overthrow of Finnish capitalism and the establishment of workers‟ power,
to organise the most advanced workers for the struggle and to provide leadership. There
was no recognition of the need for an independent revolutionary party dedicated to
working class revolution. Looking back, Tokoi actually complained about the
“revolutionary and even anarchistic element” that was joining the SDP. There was a
“wild increase” in membership that was “unhealthy and caused the party to swerve from
the path it had marked out”.18

The decisive moment came when the coalition government declared Finland
independent in July 1917. The Bolsheviks had made clear their support for Finnish
independence and it looked as if they were likely to take power. But in the “July Days”,
Kerensky triumphed, the Bolsheviks were driven underground, many were arrested and
Lenin himself was forced to take refuge in Finland. As far as Kerensky was concerned,
the Finnish declaration of independence was treasonous and he suspended the
parliament, sending troops loyal to the provisional government to close it down and to
crush any resistance. The SDP denounced all this as an illegal coup d‟etat, but
predictably did nothing. Meanwhile, the parties of the right began preparations for a
settling of accounts with the Finnish working class, covertly establishing White Guard
units. Even though they supported Finnish independence they welcomed Kerensky‟s
overthrow of the Tokoi government, and with his endorsement established a
government of the right without the SDP. At the same time they were also increasingly
looking to Imperial Germany as an ally who would not only support Finnish
independence but would also assist in crushing the left. As Upton puts it, “the bourgeois
feared that the whole fabric of law and order, and with it the sanctity of property and the
ordered hierarchy of society, might collapse”.19 While the SDP prevaricated, the right
was actually preparing for revolution, that is, it was preparing to put it down. They
began smuggling in large quantities of German weapons to arm the White Guard.
Regardless of the SDP leadership, however, the working class did fight back. In August
there was a general strike against food shortages in Helsinki and the Red Guard was re-
established, recruiting thousands of members. By early November it was some 50,000
strong.

Kerensky ordered fresh elections which the SDP denounced as illegal. As far as they
were concerned the Tokoi government was still the legal government, but they
nevertheless, in the end, decided to participate. The general election took place early in
October in conditions of increasing conflict and unrest with the SDP leadership terrified
that a working class revolt was imminent regardless of whatever they did. As far as
Kuusinen was concerned, it was vital that “a general rising of the people must be held
off until the election is declared”, while another party leader, Matti Turkia, complained
that “the people cannot be got to obey”.20 They confidently expected to win the general
election and to then be confronted with the task of somehow managing working class
unrest, deflecting the workers from revolution. In the event, even though the SDP vote
went up numerically, their share of the vote went down, so that they lost their
parliamentary majority to the parties of the right. The SDP was reduced to 92 seats
leaving the parties of the right with a parliamentary majority. The problem for the SDP
leadership was that the working class was in no mood to stand by while a right wing
government proceeded to attack them and to destroy the labour movement. Finnish
workers were not prepared to accept a situation where the wealthy, those who always
had plenty of food and lived in grand houses, decided that the working class should
starve and freeze, should be homeless and unemployed, have their living standards
reduced even more. The hard truth was that the crisis that confronted the working class
was not one that could be resolved at the ballot box.

Looking back on these elections from a Bolshevik perspective, Kuusinen later put the
result down to electoral fraud with “whole masses of Social Democratic voting papers”
going missing, to the parties of the right uniting behind the same candidates, but mainly
to “the nascent disgust at parliamentarianism among the mass of the proletariat”. Even
those workers who went out to vote SDP had lost faith both in parliamentarianism and
in the SDP because of the decision to go into coalition with the right and the Tokoi
government‟s failure effectively to protect their interests and defend their living
standards. There was no enthusiasm for the SDP among the workers, no expectation that
it could solve their problems and, even though the party‟s vote went up, the right was
much more successful at mobilising its supporters. Indeed, there was great enthusiasm
on the right and a strong belief that a decisive settling of accounts with the left was
imminent.21 By now the country was already in a state of nascent civil war with the
right determined to prosecute it to victory, while the SDP leadership still desperately
hoped to find some way to avoid conflict, absolutely refused to prepare for it and when
forced to fight by pressure from the rank and file was half-hearted about it, always
looking for the first opportunity to call it off.

With pressure for action from the working class growing and with the Russian garrison
in the country having declared for the Bolsheviks, the SDP leadership was inevitably
pulled to the left, however reluctantly. As one of the party‟s leaders, someone very
much on the left of the party, Kullervo Manner, put it at the time: “We cannot avoid the
revolution for very long…faith in the value of peaceful activity is lost and the working
class is beginning to trust only in its own strength…if we are mistaken about the rapid
approach of revolution, I would be delighted”.22 On 1 November the SDP issued a
militant manifesto, “We Demand”, calling for the state takeover of the food industry,
the dissolution of the White Guards, old age pensions, free healthcare, increased
taxation of the rich, a purge of reactionary elements from the state machine and from
parliament, land reform, the implementation of measures introduced by the Tokoi
government such as the eight-hour day, the democratisation of local government and the
election of a national assembly. As Risto Alapuro has pointed out, however, the
manifesto was not intended as a rallying call for revolution, but was “motivated by the
party‟s desire to stave off the revolution”.23 They still hoped for “a legal revolution”.24
The right, however, refused even to allow any discussion of the manifesto in parliament.
In the circumstances, the SDP joined together with the trade unions to establish a
Workers‟ Revolutionary Council which they hoped could force the parties of the right
into some sort of compromise, compelling them to accept enough of the “We Demand”
manifesto to head off revolution. This hope was effectively crushed both by the
determination of the right and by the militancy of the workers, urged on by the Russian
Bolsheviks. On 14 November the Workers‟ Revolutionary Council launched a general
strike.

General strike

The government was caught unprepared. They had not expected such action, being
accustomed to the SDP leadership invariably capitulating rather than making a fight of
it. On this occasion, however, the SDP was forced into action. According to historian C
Jay Smith, certainly no sympathiser of the left, the general strike saw the country
“completely in the hands of the Red Guards… Factories were shut down; stores were
closed; trains stopped running; only one newspaper, that of the strikers appeared on the
streets”.25 The Red Guard, 50,000 strong, was mobilised, and with the support of
Russian soldiers and sailors, took over the towns and extended the general strike into
the countryside. They occupied police stations and set about disarming the White
Guards, arresting 200 of them in the process. The minister of the interior, Allan
Serlachius, who was busy organising the White Guards, was arrested in Helsinki. By the
end of the general strike 34 people had been killed, overwhelmingly rightists.
Effectively, the country was in the hands of the workers. The SDP leadership was
horrified by what they had unleashed. As Upton, a historian much more sympathetic to
the left than Jay Smith puts it, the SDP leaders were “the most miserable revolutionaries
in history behaving throughout like men contemplating their own funerals”. The general
strike had “massive, spontaneous support from all levels of the working class”. It “was
enormously successful…within 48 hours most of the country was firmly under the
control of revolutionary committees”. This was the work of “spontaneous local
initiative… The workers had delivered the country into the hands of their leaders
through their instinctive mass solidarity”. All their leaders wanted, though, was to hand
it back to the bourgeoisie. They were desperate for a way out. Kuusinen, a long way
from his later Bolshevism, appealed to the right for concessions. He spoke in
parliament, warning of “disturbances…if we who want to calm the workers down, do
not get some concrete results from parliament now”.26 Another party leader, Karl
Wiiks, privately compared revolution to modern painting so that “at a distance one can
discover form and beauty”, but close up it was all “chaos and ugliness”.27 The SDP
leadership were fearful that the Red Guards might actually invade parliament, shut it
down and forcibly install them in power.

Recognising that they were not yet ready for a decisive showdown, the right offered
concessions, promising reforms, and the SDP leadership, to the immense disgust of the
rank and file, called the general strike off on 20 November. According to Risto Alapuro,
there was “great resentment and bitterness” at what was a self-inflicted defeat, courtesy
of their leaders.28 And for many workers, there was a very real fear of victimisation and
of reprisals for their actions during the strike at the hands of the police and the White
Guards. As Victor Serge was to put it: “It was a revolution aborted”.29

How does Upton sum up these events? His The Finnish Revolution 1917-1918 still
remains, nearly 40 years after it was first published, the definitive and indispensable
account of these events. He shares Serge‟s belief that the Finnish Revolution had been
effectively “aborted” with the calling off of the general strike and the failure to seize
power. The strike had caught the right unprepared and was the moment the workers
should have taken over. This is certainly what many workers expected and hoped for.
Instead:

The socialist leaders had shown by their deeds that…they had no intention or desire to
lead a revolution, but that throughout their policy had been to prevent it if they could,
not just because they feared the bourgeois enemy, but even more because they were
fundamentally afraid of their own mass following.30

They had surrendered the initiative to the right which was to take full advantage of the
situation, acting with a ruthless determination that put the SDP to shame.

An extraordinary congress of the SDP was held only a week after the general strike was
called off. There was a fierce debate between those determined to hold to the
parliamentary road and those advocating revolution. For the right, Seth Heikkila
actually advocated a return to coalition government with the parties of the right, while
for the left, Eero Haapalainen urged that the workers were determined to take power and
that the SDP should recognise this and give the lead. The left case was bolstered by the
contribution of the fraternal delegate from the Russian Bolsheviks, a certain Joseph
Stalin. He brought “joyful news of the victories of the Russian Revolution”, made clear
the Bolshevik government‟s support for Finnish self-determination and urged the SDP
to take up the struggle for workers‟ power. He went on:

Comrades…your country is experiencing approximately the same crisis of power as

Russia experienced on the eve of the October Revolution… In the midst of war and
economic disruption, in the midst of the revolutionary movement which is flaring up in
the West and of the increasing victories of the workers‟ revolution in Russia, there are
no dangers or difficulties that could withstand your onslaught. In such a situation only
one power, socialist power, can maintain itself and conquer. In such a situation only one
kind of tactics can be effective, the tactics of Danton—audacity, audacity and again
audacity!31

The SDP congress voted 59 to 43 against the revolutionary seizure of power. They
chose timidity, timidity and again timidity.32

Civil War and White Terror

While the SDP leadership had surrendered, the working class movement was still strong
and militant and had certainly not given up the fight. In December the local Soviet in
Helsinki demanded that the municipality pay the costs of the general strike, including
paying the strikers their lost wages, and threatening that they would take the city over if
their demand was not met. A delegation from the SDP leadership met with them and
pleaded with them to abandon this demand because it might bring the right wing
government down “and the working class would be forced to put power into the hands
of the workers”. The municipality offered instead to introduce a public works scheme to
provide employment for the unemployed and the SDP persuaded the soviet to accept
that concession instead of taking over the city.33 But while the SDP leadership
desperately tried to restrain the workers, the parties of the right were preparing for civil
war. As Serge put it, while the general strike “had shown the workers their strength”, to
“the bourgeoisie it had revealed their danger”.34

The newly established right wing Svinhufvud government set about building up its
forces for a showdown with the left, looking to Imperial Germany for assistance. They
were committed to independence from Russia, but as a monarchy with the German
Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse installed as king, accepting client status in return for
German weapons and troops.35 The government appointed Baron Carl Gustaf
Mannerheim, a Finnish nobleman and former Tsarist general, to raise and command its
White Army. He had hoped to assist in the overthrow of the Bolsheviks and the
restoration of Tsarism, but had come to “despair” of Russia, whereas in Finland there
was, as he put it, “an unbroken determination to fight”.36 As was the way with much of
the Finnish nobility, he spoke Swedish, Russian and passable French, but not Finnish!
The backbone of the White Army was provided by the arrival of some one thousand
Finnish volunteers, the Jägers, who had been trained for service in the German Army,
many of them as officers. They were reinforced by another thousand volunteers from
Sweden, once again many of whom had military training. And the Germans provided
large quantities of weapons. The White Army was eventually to reach a strength of
some 70,000 men.

Confronted with White preparations for civil war and determination to crush the left and
urged on by the Red Guards, the SDP was finally driven to take action. As far as the
party leadership was concerned, this was very much a reluctant and defensive step.
Once again, as one of the party leaders, Matti Turkia, put it, they did not “strive
towards” revolution, and certainly did not “desire it”, but as it became clear that the
Whites intended the destruction of the labour movement a response from the SDP
leadership became necessary, not least because the workers were already beginning to
fight back. On 23 January 1918 the decision was taken to confront the government,
although this did not mean that concessions might not still have led the party to retreat.
As far as the SDP leadership was concerned they went into the fight “with very little
enthusiasm…in order to preserve and strengthen democracy against a perceived threat
of bourgeois repression”. Even at this stage, “social revolution had no place on the
agenda” and this was to remain the case throughout the civil war.37 On the 27th,
however, the Helsinki Soviet and the Red Guards took control of the city. The
Svinhufvud government fled Helsinki and established itself at Vaasa and Svinhufvud
himself ended up in Berlin.38 The SDP set up a revolutionary government, in effect the
SDP executive, headed by Manner but with the intention not of dispossessing the
landlords and capitalists and establishing workers‟ power, but instead creating “a
democratic, parliamentary republic with a controlled capitalist economy”.39

The civil war was to last for three months. Mannerheim made clear what was at stake
with his statement that “the Reds have risen in armed rebellion against the social order
and the punishment is death”, although even he was shocked by the excesses of the
White Terror that was unleashed and feared it might discredit their cause
internationally.40 The Whites were urged on to exact a dreadful vengeance on the Reds
in retaliation for their supposed atrocities by a hysterical right wing press.41 Meanwhile
Red Guard strength grew to over 100,000 men and women, perhaps as many as
140,000, there are no reliable figures (there were many women in non-combatant roles
in the Red Guard along with some 2,000 women volunteers fighting in the ranks42) and
there can be no doubt about the enthusiasm with which workers threw themselves into
the struggle. The problem was, however, that they were poorly armed and badly
organised and led, without an effective intelligence organisation, and the revolutionary
government remained, at best, half-hearted throughout the war. The SDP leadership did
not want to destroy their enemy, but rather hoped to force them to come to terms. After
all, as the “stages theory” taught, the time was not ripe for socialism. The Whites had no
such inhibitions. And the hoped for assistance from the Bolsheviks did not materialise,
although there were many Russian soldiers, perhaps a thousand, who actually fought in
the ranks of the Finnish Red Guard. The Bolshevik government was too embroiled with
its own difficulties to send help and moreover was determined to avoid confrontation
with the German military and put the vital Brest-Litovsk Treaty at risk. The result was
that despite often fierce resistance, the White Army began driving the Reds back. What
is often described as the decisive battle was fought for control of the Red stronghold of
Tampere, a town of 45,000 people. After an assault involving brutal street by street
fighting that saw over 600 White soldiers and 1,800 Reds killed, the town was captured
on 6 April. The Whites now exacted a terrible vengeance, summarily executing all the
Russian and suspected Russian prisoners taken in the fighting, including the wounded in
the hospital together with the medical personnel, between 200 and 500 men were killed.
They also executed some 90 Russian civilians living in the town who had been
uninvolved in the fighting. In effect, the Whites were carrying out a policy of ethnic
cleansing with Russians, whether involved in the fighting or not, being “killed because
of their nationality” everywhere they went.43 Upton describes this massacre of the
Russians as “a simple act of genocide”.44 Soon after, when Vyborg fell to the Whites,
over 300 more Russians were summarily executed. The number of Finnish Reds
executed at Tampere was, according to Upton, 150. Thousands more were despatched to
prison camps.45

Even though the defeat at Tampere was a serious blow to the Reds, it was not sufficient
to have lost the war. There was no reason to believe that the Reds would not recover
from the setback, especially if the Bolsheviks managed to send assistance. The setback
might have radicalised the revolutionary government and seen more revolutionary
elements prepared to wage war with more determination and ruthlessness at last begin
to take repressive action against the capitalists and landowners who were left
unmolested behind the Red lines. What was decisive was the intervention of German
troops. This tipped the balance against the Reds and ensured that there would be no
Bolshevik assistance. The German troops, some 12,000 altogether, began landing at the
beginning of April and immediately advanced on Helsinki, which was occupied on 12-
13 April. In his account, Victor Serge writes of “a bitter street battle” in the city with the
Germans and the Whites making “workers‟ wives and children march in front of
them—around a hundred of these were killed… A Swedish newspaper published the
following item: „Forty Red women who were said to have had arms were led out on the
ice and shot without trial‟”.46 By the end of April the civil war was over and the Whites
and their German allies were triumphant. The revolutionary government fled to Russia
along with thousands of others trying to escape the White Terror. Mannerheim held a
victory parade on 16 May. Not until 29 August 1918 was the Finnish Communist Party
formed across the frontier in Russia.47

The White Terror continued unabated. According to Upton over 8,380 prisoners held in
the camps were to be executed without trial, including 364 women and 58 prisoners
under 16, the youngest only 12 years old. They were often selected for execution by
local landowners and capitalists more for the trouble they had caused in the past and
might still cause in the future than for any involvement in the fighting. Trade union
militants and socialist activists were singled out and put up against the wall and shot. At
its height, from 5 until 11 May, the repression saw 200 executions a day. At the Hennala
camp some 500 prisoners were executed over a two-week period, nearly 200 of them
women. Another 265 prisoners were executed after “trials”. And for those not shot,
some 80,000 Red prisoners, there was a regime of brutality, starvation, cold and medical
neglect in the camps that killed another 11,783 men and women. Upton puts the total
number of workers killed in the fighting, subsequently executed or killed off in the
camps at about 23,000. There was, he concludes, scarcely “a working class family in the
land [that] did not have some direct experience of repression or injustice at the hands of
the victorious Whites”.48

Self-criticism

One of the founders of the new Communist Party, Otto Kuusinen, went on to write an
invaluable analysis of the revolution and civil war, The Finnish Revolution: A Self-
Criticism. It was first published as a pamphlet in English by Sylvia Pankhust‟s
Workers‟ Socialist Federation in 1919 and was reprinted by the Communist Party in
Labour Monthly early in 1940. It was Kuusinen who described the SDP as an “axe
without an edge”. He characterised himself as having been a “centrist” during the
revolution: “We did not believe in revolution; we did not trust it, nor did we call for it.
This, when all is said, is characteristic of social democracy”. Then when the Svinhufvud
government finally launched its offensive:

Social Democracy replied by revolution. But what was its watchword? The power of the
workers? No, it was democracy, a democracy which should not be violated. Our
position from a socialist standpoint was not clear and viewed historically was Utopian.
Such a democracy could at best be created only on paper. Such a thing has never existed
in a society formed of classes and can never develop there. In democracy a robber class
has always stolen power from the people.
He goes on to chronicle the “mistakes, irregularities and omissions” that led to defeat in
the civil war, a defeat that he quite correctly does not regard as inevitable. The SPD
were just not organised to wage war and were defeated before the weaknesses in
organisation, discipline, leadership and intelligence could be remedied. Once the
German troops had arrived “it was impossible to avoid defeat”. And by the end, he
comes round to a decisive rejection of bourgeois democracy and of parliamentarianism
and instead embraces workers‟ power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Kuusinen
building a Communist Party involved adopting a number of “fundamental principles”:

The working class must energetically prepare for an armed revolution, and not hang
back with the old system with its parliaments, trade unions and cooperative societies…
By the revolution the working class must take all power into its hands, and set up an
iron dictatorship. Therefore our efforts must lead to the suppression of the bourgeois
state… Through the dictatorship of the workers must be created a Communist society,
by means of the expropriation of all land and capitalist property, and by the workers
taking production and distribution into their own hands.49

This was the way forward.

Looked at from a revolutionary socialist perspective, what is clear is that the experience
of the Finnish Revolution demonstrates the fate of a working class revolutionary
movement without a revolutionary party to lead it in the struggle. In Finland in 1917
and 1918 the working class were ready to seize power but the SDP leadership
effectively sabotaged the movement, remaining committed to the parliamentary road
and a reformed capitalism when the workers were ready to overthrow the landowners
and capitalists once and for all. The result was defeat and disaster. This would without
any doubt have been the fate of the Russian Revolution but for the Bolsheviks.

The tragedy of Stalinism

The failure of the Russian Revolution to spread led to the rise of Stalinism, to workers‟
power being replaced by a state capitalist regime that undertook the forced
industrialisation of the Soviet Union at the expense of the workers and peasants. A
monstrous police regime had been imposed on the country. At the same time
Communist Parties throughout the world were transformed from revolutionary
organisations into tools of Soviet foreign policy. The history of Kuusinen‟s pamphlet,
The Finnish Revolution, provides a revealing miniature insight into this development.
Kuusinen was installed at the head of a puppet government in exile at Terijoki,
established by Stalin in an attempt to legitimise the Russian attack on Finland that had
been launched towards the end of 1939. By this time, of the leading figures in the
Finnish CP unfortunate enough to be living in the Socialist Fatherland, “only Kuusinen
survived”; the rest had died in the Great Terror. Kullervo Manner, along with 15 others
including Kuusinen‟s brother-in-law, had been purged as early as 1935, disappearing
into the gulag. Manner “perished in prison along with his wife Hanna Malm”.
Kuusinen‟s wife Ainu, herself a veteran Communist, was arrested in December 1937
and consigned to the gulag, serving nine years, eight of them in the terrible labour
camps in Vorkuta. She was released after the Second World War, but was rearrested in
1949 for spying for the Americans and only finally released in 1955.50 By the time
Labour Monthly reprinted The Finnish Revolution in 1940 some 20,000 Finns had
already been “sent to labour camps, where many died”.51
What of those Communists living in Finland in 1939-40? There was hardly any support
for the Russian attack especially once they began bombing Helsinki. As Kimmo Rentola
argues, in the first days of the war, “workers‟ blocks were heavily bombed, a fact denied
by Soviet radio. This lie did not console those whose homes were burnt out. One
Helsinki worker, a faithful party member then and afterwards, said that he accepted the
bombing of the bourgeoisie, „but shooting workers is too much‟”. Kuusinen‟s
government appealed to Finnish Communists conscripted into the army to defect to the
Russians. Very few did, but nothing better demonstrates the perversity of the Stalin
regime, its murderous paranoia, than the fact that those who did “were instantly arrested
and some even shot as spies”. Those not shot spent years in the camps, not released
until after Stalin‟s death.52 A similar fate befell those German Communists serving in
the German Army who crossed over to the Russian lines shortly before the German
surprise attack on 22 June 1941 hoping to warn their Russian comrades of what was
coming.53

The Russian attack actually precipitated the resignation of the general secretary of the
Finnish Communist Party, Arvo Tuominen. He was in exile in Sweden at the time of the
attack and wisely ignored a summons to travel to Moscow where he would have almost
certainly been arrested and shot. His memoir, The Bells of the Kremlin, is a grim
account of growing disillusion with Stalin‟s Russia as he experienced it on many earlier
visits. He describes a celebratory visit to the White Sea Canal that was spoiled by a
conversation with a Finnish American slave labourer, one of the prisoners forced to dig
it, who took his life in his hands to tell him of the “thousands of forced labourers
worked to death”, of how they were given just enough food “to keep them alive”, and of
how “the sanitary conditions were indescribable. Spotted fever and typhoid raged and
scurvy was prevalent”. The cost of digging the canal in human lives was, according to
Tuominen, anywhere “from sixty thousand to two hundred thousand”. He visited
Russian prison camps which were intended to impress him, but decribes them as “much
worse” than the camps he had been held in when he had been a prisoner of the Whites in
Finland. In one camp the prisoners were “all on the verge of death from starvation”.

He wrote of how all the Finnish copies of Capital were recalled after the arrest of “the
translator named Kangas” and of Edvard Gylling, the leading Finnish Communist, who
had written the introduction. And far from being a classless society, what he saw in the
Soviet Union was rampant inequality and privilege. Whereas under the Tsars there had
been first, second and third class carriages on the railways, in Stalin‟s “classless society
they had reached seven…the seventh was the cattle car”. In the midst of all this
suffering, misery, exploitation and massacre, Stalin was praised as a god, deified.
Tuominen cannot disguise his incredulity. Stalin “knew everything…was as great a
thinker and theoretician as he was a practical man in all fields. Stalin even taught
dancers to dance—a leading ballerina told an interviewer in all seriousness that she
could thank Stalin for her skill—ski jumpers to jump, skaters to skate, filers to file,
authors to write, and so on”. Now his own execution beckoned and Tuominen, at last,
broke with Stalinism.54

But why did the British CP reprint The Finnish Revolution? It was an act of
consummate cynicism. In effect the pamphlet was a repudiation of the whole strategy of
the Popular Front that the British CP along with the rest of the international Communist
movement had pursued since 1935, a strategy that had considerable similarities with
that of the Finnish SDP during the Finnish Revolution and that had, for example,
produced a similar outcome in Spain. This strategy had been abandoned overnight when
the Soviet Union allied itself with Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939. The Hitler-Stalin
Pact had, moreover, placed Finland within the Russian sphere of influence, preparing
the way for the Russian attack later that year. And, of course, the original meaning of
the pamphlet was emptied out. When Kuusinen had written of “an iron dictatorship” in
1919, he had meant workers‟ power and a workers‟ state that ruthlessly put down its
capitalist and landowning enemies who would have drowned the revolution in blood if
not defeated. This was a lesson he had learned through bitter experience. By 1940,
however, “an iron dictatorship” meant a murderous bureaucratic dictatorship that ruled
over the working class by terror and had allied itself with Nazi Germany. Indeed,
Kuusinen, who had transformed himself into one of Stalin‟s most faithful courtiers by
this time, was himself surprised at his own survival under this regime. He actually kept
a knapsack packed with toiletries and a change of underwear ready for when the NKVD
came to arrest him.55 When his wife Ainu was arrested her NKVD interrogators had
repeatedly demanded that she denounce her husband as a British spy.56 The Otto
Kuusinen of 1939-40 was, it is absolutely clear, a very different man from the Kuusinen
of 1919. And by his 70th birthday in 1951, the great survivor was rewarded by his
Soviet masters with his own “personality cult”.57

John Newsinger is a member of the SWP in Brighton. His latest book is Hope Lies in the
Proles: Orwell and the Left (Pluto, 2018).

Notes

1 Upton, 1980, p4.

2 Alapuro, 1988, p31.

3 Alapuro, 1988, p126.

4 Upton, 1980, p7.

5 Kirby, 1975, p92.

6 Upton, 1980, p9.

7 Kujala, 2005, p91.

8 Alapuro, 1988, p121.

9 Soderhjelm, 1919, p10.

10 Kujala, 2005, p91.

11 Upton, 1980, p18.

12 Jay Smith, 1958, p14; Haapala, 2014, p45.

13 Soderhjelm, 1919, p19.

14 Tuominen, 1983, p7.

15 Kuusinen, 1940, part 1, pp116-117.

16 Tuominen, 1983, p8.

17 Siltala, 2014, p63.

18 Tokoi, 1957, p141.

19 Upton, 1980, p69.

20 Upton, 1980, p126.

21 Kuusinen, 1940, part 1, pp117-118.

22 Upton, 1980, p133.

23 Alapuro, 1988, p165.

24 Siltala, 2014, p65.

25 Jay Smith, 1958, pp26-27.

26 Upton, 1980, pp148, 150, 153, 156.

27 Hamalainen, 1979, p47.

28 Alapuro, 1988, p170.

29 Serge, 1972, p183.

30 Upton, 1980, p157.

31 Stalin, 1917.

32 Hodgson, 1967, pp46-48.

33 Upton, 1980, pp206-207.

34 Serge, 1972, p184

35 One of the consequences of Germany‟s defeat in the First World War was that Prince
Friedrich Karl never came to occupy his throne and Finland became a Republic.

36 Screen, 2014, p3.

37 Kirby, 1986, p163.

38 Even Tokoi could not understand how on earth the Svinhufvud cabinet had been
allowed to escape—Tokoi, 1957, p155.

39 Alapuro, 1988, p174.

40 Arasolo, 1998, p155.

41 According to Upton there were certainly summary executions carried out by the
Reds, although considerably fewer than those by the Whites, but the reports of “torture,
mutilation, and atrocity, prisoners burnt alive or buried alive, are all fictions of the
White imagination”—Upton, 1980, p378.

42 For the part played by women in the Red Guard see Lintunen, 2014, pp212-218. The
German commander, General Rüdiger von der Goltz, complained in his memoirs of the
ferocity of these “women wearing trousers…fanatical defenders of the new canon of
barbarity” (p216).

43 Loima, 2007, p263.

44 Upton, 1980, p469.

45 Upton, 1980, p471.

46 Serge, 1972, p187.

47 For an interesting discussion of Finnish Communists and British Communism at this

time see Morgan and Saarela, 1999.

48 Upton, 1980, pp519, 522; Tikka, 2014, p110.

49 Kuusinen, 1940, part 2, pp175-176, 177, 179, 183.

50 Her account of the horrors of Vorkuta is in her memoir—Kuusinen, 1974, pp149-

180. Here she writes of the how prisoners died “in their thousands”, starved and worked
to death. On one occasion, she asked a guard how “the naked emaciated bodies”,
collected every morning, were disposed of? They were dumped in the tundra to be eaten
by the wolves. At another time she encountered 50 Finnish women prisoners with 18
children. They told her of how, together with their husbands, they had come to the
Soviet Union to help build socialism. Their husbands had all been shot, the children
subsequently died of diarrhoea and most of the women were to worked to death—
Kuusinen, 1974, pp175-176.

51 Upton, 1973, p214. It is worth noting that among Stalin‟s victims were many
Finnish-Americans, socialists and trade union militants, who had been persuaded to
emigrate to the socialist fatherland for a better life and to help build socialism. They
found it a graveyard—Sevander, 1996.

52 Rentola, 1998, p601.

53 Bellamy, 2007, pp155-157.

54 Tuominen 1983, pp70-74, 155, 208, 304

55 Jussila, Hentilä and Nevakivi, 1999, p174.

56 Kuusinen, 1974, p134.

57 Morgan, 2017, pp85-86.

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