On this day in 1918, the Finnish People's Delegation declared a socialist workers' republic (known "Red Finland"), at the start of the Finnish Civil War. The burgeoning working class movement was crushed by imperialist German forces.
Prior to 1917, Finland had been ruled as a Grand Duchy, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Tsarist state in the wake of February Revolution and a long-term increase in nationalist sentiment, Finland declared independence on December 4th, 1917, formally recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks on December 31st.
Due to industrialized Finland having a strong revolutionary labor movement, conservative and proletarian forces were immediately thrown into conflict.
Red Guard paramilitary units representing the labor movement found themselves in a cycle of escalation with loyalist "White" Guards, culminating in a mass uprising of Reds in Helsinki on January 27th, 1918, marking the start of revolution. The following day, the Finnish People's Delegation was formed by members of the Social Democratic Party. Bourgeois forces fled to Vaasa, where they set up their own "White Senate".
The war saw the Whites, under the leadership of General Mannerheim, receive support from the German Empire, which was more well-established than the Reds' primary ally, the newly-created Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following an imperialist intervention by Germany on the side of the Whites in March 1918, the war ended in defeat for the Reds in May. Over 12,000 people perished from starvation and hunger while imprisoned in White-operated POW camps, and reparations were not paid to former victims of the White Terror until 1973.
Lessons of the Finnish Revolution of 1917–1918
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I have no way of knowing if they're OK. They don’t post on Reddit anymore (because of me), they unfriended me on Facebook; if I want to assure myself that they’re alive there’s Pinterest, and that’s all.
And it’s not so crazy to worry so much about them, because uhhhhhhhhh they are a sort of pharmacist. An unlicensed one, if you will.
Yeah. Couple months ago they posted on Reddit about this chick who’s trying to run them off the property they’re parked on, and the post mentioned that she pistol-whipped them.
What’s really funny though is when we were having our fight back in July, I mentioned this other bitch who was going around trying to pay someone to kill them, referring to her as “the bitch trying to kill you.”
They corrected me. In the middle of our fucking fight they stopped and said No, she’s trying to pay someone to kill me, and that it’s this other person who’s trying to kill them.
I thought that was funny.
Facebook -> mutual?
We don’t have any mutuals. We actually had a mutual friend but he died last year.
I know this person who used to park next to them and was really good friends with them; I’ve been trying for over a year now to get her to call them. She’s sympathetic, but I doubt she takes me very seriously. It could just be that she’s homeless (like me, like almost everyone I talk about) and addicted to opioids. And for how much people like to shit on drug addicts as wastes of space, opioid addicts are often VERY industrious. My friend used to make like $40 a day at least doing bottle returns. In other words she’s probably quite busy.
She once said that my friend and I would be “cute together” lmao.