Finnish Red Guards
핀란드 적위대
The paramilitary units of the Finnish labour movement. First formed during the 1905 general strike and disbanded the following year, they were re-established as the Workers’ Order Guards after the February Revolution of 1917. In January 1918 they merged with the Helsinki Red Guard into the Red Guard of Finland, which fought as the army of Red Finland in the civil war until its defeat by the Whites and the Germans in May; by 1920 it had ceased to exist as an organised force.
In depth
During the 1905 general strike the National Guard set up to keep order split into the working-class Red Guards and the bourgeois Protection Corps; after the two clashed in a gunfight at Hakaniemi during the Sveaborg rebellion in August 1906, the Senate banned both. In the summer of 1917, amid food shortages and farm strikes, right-wing farmers began forming Protection Guards after the Huittinen clash of 13 July, and the labour movement answered with the Workers’ Order Guards. Within three weeks of the Trade Union Federation’s appeal of 20 October they numbered 237 guards with more than 30,000 members, and 40,000–50,000 by the end of the November general strike. The journalist Ali Aaltonen, a former lieutenant of the Imperial Russian Army, was their first commander-in-chief. On 6 January 1918 the Helsinki guard broke away from the Social Democratic Party as the Helsinki Red Guard, and when the Senate declared the Protection Corps government troops on 25 January the labour movement took it as a declaration of war on the working class. The guards merged into the Red Guard of Finland, and on the night of 26 January a red lantern lit on the tower of the Helsinki Workers’ Hall proclaimed the revolution.
Command passed from Aaltonen to Eero Haapalainen, on 20 March to the troika of Eino Rahja, Adolf Taimi and Evert Eloranta, and on 10 April to Kullervo Manner with dictatorial powers. The English-language source puts their strength at 30,000–40,000 at the outbreak and 80,000–120,000 at the peak, including 2,000–2,600 women fighters. The fighters were industrial workers, landless rural labourers and crofters; officers were elected, discipline was lax and most weapons came from the Russian troops. Despite the shared name they were recruited apart from the Russian Red Guards, through the local sections of the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the labour unions, and Russian participation was low: of some 40,000 soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army and the Baltic Fleet still in Finland, only a few hundred, including a few dozen officers, joined the Red Guards, and most simply wanted to go home. A train carrying 15,000 rifles and other arms that Aaltonen had bought from the Bolsheviks arrived in early February. At Tampere 10,000–11,000 were captured; after the war some 80,000 became prisoners, of whom 12,000–14,000 died in the camps of disease, malnutrition and execution. Between 10,000 and 13,000 fled to Soviet Russia, where some fought Finnish White volunteers in the British-raised Murmansk Legion or in the 7th Red Army during the Estonian War of Independence.