Skip to main content

Echoes from 1918 - From the Finnish Civil War to Donbass

The social stability in Finland had steadily deteriorated as the newly independent nation lacked both police and military forces and the Russian army still had a strong presence within the Finnish borders. Both socialists and conservatives had begun to build their own security forces during the previous summer.
Red Guards and Russians supporting them
To solve the situation, that had already escalated into sporadic violence and acts of terror, the Finnish Senate, with a mandate from the elected Parliament, declared in 25th of January1918 that the Civil Guards would become the Senates army under the command of the General Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, a 30 year veteran of the Imperial Russian Army. The Reds immediately refused to obey the order to stand down their military forces. The Civil Guards began to disarm the Russian garrisons and used the captured weaponry to arm their forces.

During the 27th of January 1918 the Red Guards issued a full-scale mobilization within the areas they controlled and declared that they were starting a revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks sent representatives to the Red Guards headquarters in Helsinki. On the 27th a trainload of weapons and ammunition were sent from Petrograd to the Red Guards. As the Whites attempted to seize the shipment the two parties finally engaged in an all out warfare.
The volunteer Finns of Prussian 27th Jaeger battalion return to Vaasa.
The war raged on for four months and with the help of the 2000 Finnish jaegers that returned from Germany and the German Baltic Division the legitimate government ended the revolution. In the the experienced leadership and the superior discipline of the Whites tipped the scales in their favor.

The price of the Civil War was high. As the Reds had murdered some 1,100 people, mostly civilians, in the areas they controlled, the Whites retaliated ruthlessly, executing some 7,370 people after the recapture of the Red areas. Approximately 4,000 Whites and 4,500 Reds were killed in action. Furthermore the war and the general mayhem had caused a famine and 20,000 people died, many in the prison camps where the Whites rounded up the defeated revolutionaries.

What could we learn from the bloody events that happened a century ago?

If you mix a fractured society, even ethnically and culturally homogeneous one like Finland, with an outside influence, some highly polarized politics and biased news outlets and rumors, you can drive a nation apart. The Russian Bolsheviks aimed at destabilizing Finland so that the Finnish socialists would join the international revolution or that at least the still forming USSR could later on retake Finland with minimal effort.

USSR did indeed attempt to capitalize on this previous fracture within the Finnish society 21 years later. In 1939 when USSR invaded Finland, it created a puppet-government and attempted to appeal to Finnish socialists. That plot failed miserably and over 120000 Russians perished in the failed invasion.

Surprisingly many parallels can be drawn from those events to the modern-day conflict in Ukraine. While the reality of the Donbass war is that it is a Russian invasion disguised as a civil war and the war of 1918 was a genuine civil war where majority of the reds were in fact Finns.
Another centrury, but still fools join the Russian cause
If we step from reality in the realm of Russian propaganda the events start to look very similar. Russia says it backs and supports the local miners and tractorists in the Donbass. Just like the Bolsheviks supported the Finnish workers. Weapons, funds and advisers from Russia were present in both wars. Russia also using its mass media to manipulate both Russian and Ukrainian people to buy their false narrative.


While the Finnish civil war ended in the white victory and led the nation into freedom and prosperity we can only hope that the Donbass war will end with a similar results.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Russian Tanks 2022: Thicker and Blinder

  Since the all out invasion of Ukraine the Russian army has lost at least 1700 tanks. This has caused the Russian army some supply problems, when they are re-forming their mauled units. Fighting has also revealed the need for upgrades on most of the Russian tank designs. The most obvious issues with the existing Russian tank fleet are the insufficient armor protection, the lack of reverse mobility and the vulnerability of the automatic loaders and their ammunition carousels. Although the last one has gifted us the sport of Turret Throwing. T-72B obr 2022 tanks Very little can be done for the mobility with the limitations of the existing transmissions and the autoloaders can’t really be replaced with better designs or human loaders either. The armor part on the other hand can be improved during the activation and refurbishment of the deep stored Soviet-era tanks. The first new design that appeared in the battlefield was an upgraded T-72B3 with additional armo,r mimicking the T-90M layo

Russian Spring offensive 2023: Kyiv Take Two

Russian T-80U tanks stuck and abandoned in Ukraine in spring 2022   The spectacular Ukrainian victories during the 2022 forced the Russian army to the defensive. With the Russian retreat from Kharkiv and the areas north of the river Dnipro in Kherson, the focus of the fighting has returned to the Donbass. The Russian forces, with Wagner mercenaries and penal battalions doing the bulk of the fighting and dying, are trying to take Bakhmut in a battle that invokes parallels to the meat grinders of the Great war. The Ukrainian armed forces on the other hand are slowly making progress towards Kreminna. Despite the continuous rumors about a new massive round of mobilizations, the Russian army cannot sustain the present level of attrition indefinitely. By throwing enough men and material against the prepared Ukrainian positions manned by experienced and highly motivated defenders, Russians may be able to gain some localized breakthroughs. But even if the Russian mechanized forces are able to

Redut: Russian Mercenaries Controlled by a Finnish Citizen

  The recent conflicts where Russia has been directly or indirectly involved, like the invasion of Ukraine and the civil wars in Syria, Libya and Central African Republic have introduced the public to the Russian quasi-private military contractors. The most famous of these “private military contractors”  is undoubtedly the notorious Wagner-group that is presently waging an army corps level assault on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut after engaging in various war crimes across Ukraine. The group leader Evgeniy Prigozhin has used his close connections to the Kremlin to expand his private army with convicted criminals. But the Wagner isn’t the only such formation operating under the Kremlin's umbrella. Several rumors have been floating around about the increased friction between the Russian military and Wagner. Elements within the Kremlin and the Russian general staff are trying to elevate another private security company called Redut, Russian for a redoubt, to balance the growing power