Today is January 28,
and on this date in history in 1918, Helsinki, the Capital of Finland fell to
the rebel Red Finns. The Civil War in Finland had started the day before but
the Reds quickly overran the southern and most populous area of Finland. The
map in the Wikipedia link shows the areas of Finland controlled by each side. The
Reds only had about one eighth of the country but probably the majority of the
population. What is interesting is that the Reds controlled old Feudal Finland
as well as most of the industrial areas. The Whites controlled the non-feudal
part of Finland with mostly free farmers. Both sides had enclaves and
strongholds in the other's territory as you can note from the
map.
The Reds were backed
by Lenin in Russia and the Germans backed the White Finns. The Red Guards had
an initial success but their offensive ran out of steam. The regular Finnish
army counterattacked and the largest battle ever fought in all
Scandinavian history was fought at Tampere. The two
armies fought house to house from late March to early April, 1918. The White
Finns had better leaders and won this bloody battle.
In the meantime,
Russian and Germany were negotating to end their part of WWI. Trotsky broke off
negotiations and Germany decided to teach the Red Russians a lesson. German
invited all the breakway parts of the old Russian Empire to ask for help against
the Reds, and the White Finns obliged. A German expeditionary force landed in
southern Finland and mopped up the Red Finns. It was all over by the start of
summer in 1918 with Helsinki falling to the Whites.
Both Reds and Whites
committed atrocities in the areas they controlled deepening the divisions among
the Finns to this day.
I have only read one
short book on the subject as most histories of this interesting conflict are
non-English language sources. If you have some time, look at the attached
article that does a fairly good job on the conflict.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War
