Heimosodat
헤이모소다트
Finnish for “kindred nations wars”: the series of armed conflicts and private military expeditions of 1918–1922 in which Finnish volunteers fought in former Russian imperial territories bordering Finland and inhabited largely by other Finnic peoples — East Karelia, Ingria, Petsamo and Estonia. The Finnish state was not officially a party, but some 9,000 to 10,000 volunteers took part, depending on the source.
In depth
In the Viena expedition of 1918, Kurt Martti Wallenius’s force crossed into northern Viena on 10 March, and Carl Wilhelm Malm’s force, crossing on 21 March, got near Kem before being thrown back on 10 April. British propaganda and food aid turned the Karelians against the Finns, and Toivo Kuisma’s expedition, which replaced Malm’s in July, was forced back into Finland on 2 October. The Petsamo expeditions of 1918 and 1920 both ended in withdrawal. The Aunus expedition under Gunnar von Hertzen crossed the border on 21 April 1919, quickly took Olonets and reached the outskirts of Petrozavodsk, but drew little local support and withdrew at the end of June. In the Estonian War of Independence Finns fought in Hans Kalm’s Sons of the North and Martin Ekström’s 1st Finnish Volunteer Corps, and in the Ingrian rising of 1918–1920 the North Ingrian regiment held a few villages that formed the Republic of Kirjasalo. The English-language source also lists the Murmansk Legion and the 1919 advance on Petrograd. The last was the East Karelian uprising of 1921–1922, in which some 500 Finnish volunteers served as officers of 2,500 forest guerrillas before 20,000 Soviet troops crushed it.
The motives were the idea of kinship, anti-Bolshevism, the Greater Finland idea and plain love of adventure. The English-language source links them to nationalism and irredentism in newly independent Finland, where many felt bound to help other Finnic peoples to independence, and to the trauma of the civil war, which made many White sympathisers radical nationalists. According to the Finnish-language source about 660 Finns died. Repola (1918) and Porajärvi (1919) joined Finland, but only the Estonian war succeeded. Apart from the East Karelian uprising, the wars ended with the Treaty of Tartu in 1920, which the kinship activists called a “shameful peace”. Nearly 20,000 East Karelians and Ingrians fled to Finland, prompting the founding of the Academic Karelia Society to keep the Greater Finland idea alive, and the East Karelian question strained relations between Finland and Soviet Russia in the early 1920s. The English-language source holds that the strenuous five years of the Second World War cooled this enthusiasm.