Red Guards

It would shine its red light over the capital every night for the duration of the conflict.

By Monday morning, the Red Guards had taken control of Helsinki's key government buildings.

The work of the Landtag was suspended and the Senate was declared ousted.

Rail traffic was temporarily halted, telephone connections to and from the capital were cut, factories stood idle and shops remained closed.

Martial law was declared and Red Guards patrolled the streets.

As a replacement for the Senate, a new government, modelled along Soviet lines, was established.

The People's Commissariat.

Anyone opposing the program or caught carrying an unauthorized weapon would be treated as an enemy and punished to the full extent of the law.

In the fall, the strike guard units morphed into the so-called Red Guard, modeled on the units set up by the Bolsheviks in Russia.

These Red Guards usually contained the most radical and violent members of the socialist movements, and the leaders of the Social Democratic Party came under increasing pressure to abandon the parliamentary struggle and instead go for revolution.

The politicians did what they could to keep the Red Guards at bay, but it became increasingly difficult as time went by.

So, by the fall of 1917, Finland had no national police force or army, but instead two rival paramilitary networks called the Reds and the Whites, meant to protect its own people and highly hostile to the other group.

that's not exactly a recipe for stability.

It didn't help that the early elections meant that the popular laws about 8-hour workdays and municipal election reform didn't have time to be implemented.

Add to that yet another bad harvest, resulting in hunger riots in a number of cities in southern Finland, such as Helsinki, Turku and Pori, cities that had been hit hard by the massive layoffs after the collapse of the imperial government.

The lack of food further radicalised the poor, both in the country and in town, and Red Guards stepped up their confiscation of private property.

However, sadly, this Soviet government was not fated to lead the Finnish working class to unite with the Russian workers and peasants.

Shortly after Soviet power was declared, the White Finns, supported to the hilt by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Sweden, led a counterattack on the Red Finns, launching the Finnish Civil War.

The Finnish Reds were supported by Soviet Russia, but as we now know, Soviet Russia was facing so much of its own economic and social turmoil that it was not able to provide substantial enough assistance to their comrades in Finland.

It was also geographically cut off from Finland by the occupying German and the Russian White Armies, which were parked just north of Petrograd in between that city and Helsingfors.