Finnish People’s Delegation
핀란드 인민대표위원회
The revolutionary government of the Reds in the Finnish Civil War (28 January – 25 April 1918). Made up of left-wing Social Democrats and chaired by Kullervo Manner, it pushed aside Svinhufvud’s Senate and Parliament and issued its own laws in Helsinki and southern Finland. Its state is usually called Red Finland; the name Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic appears only in the treaty it signed with Soviet Russia on 1 March 1918.
In depth
The armed revolution was decided by the leadership of the Workers’ Order Guards and the Finnish Workers’ Executive Committee, split off from the Social Democratic party committee on 23 January and chaired by Eero Haapalainen. Its order on the night before 27 January to arrest the senators, 33 deputies and other leaders failed because a public notice spread first. The People’s Delegation was set up on 28 January to lead the uprising begun that morning, its list of members based on Haapalainen’s proposal. The former Speaker Manner became chairman and the former vice-chairman of the Senate’s economic department, Oskari Tokoi, took the lesser post of commissar for supply; the English-language cabinet list also includes Edvard Gylling (finance) and Otto Wille Kuusinen (education). On its first day it closed all bourgeois newspapers in the capital (elsewhere in the following days), and on 2 February it put the Red Guards on the state’s payroll, though in practice it could hardly control them. It met 89 times in Helsinki and nearly ten times in Viipuri and issued 45 statutes, modelled on the Paris Commune of 1871, Bolshevik legislation and above all the earlier programmes of the Finnish labour movement. The draft constitution of 23 February, mainly Kuusinen’s work, omitted the dictatorship of the proletariat and, influenced by the Swiss and US constitutions and the French Revolution, sketched a democratic socialism with extensive use of referendums, but it was never adopted.
Soviet Russia was the only state that recognised the People’s Delegation as the lawful government of Finland. After talks led by Gylling, the two governments signed a treaty on 1 March; it was Lenin who proposed adding “Socialist Workers’ Republic” to the name, and the Delegation later blamed its envoys for giving in. The majority of the Reds wanted a neutral, independent Finland; the treaty gave them Petsamo, while the question of East Karelia remained open. The English-language source judges that the treaty mattered little to the Bolsheviks, who were negotiating peace with Germany. After the loss of Tampere the government and the Red Guard staff moved to Viipuri on 6 April, and on 10 April Manner took over the supreme command with dictatorial powers. Most of the commissars fled to Petrograd on 25 April. After the defeat the moderate socialists joined the republican system, while the far left founded the Communist Party of Finland in Moscow in August 1918.