The Finnish Civil War 1918

The Finnish Civil War 1918 offers a rich account of the history and memory of the short conflict between socialist Reds and non-socialist Whites in the winter and spring of 1918. It also traces the legacy of the bloody war in Finnish society until today. The volume brings together established scholarship of political and social history with newer approaches stemming from the cultural history of war, memory studies, gender studies, history of emotions, psychohistory and oral history. The contributors provide readers with a solid discussion of the Civil War within its international and national frameworks. Among themes discussed are violence and terror, enemy images, Finnish irredentist campaigns in Soviet Karelia and the complex memory of the conflict. Besides a historical narrative, the volume discusses the current state of historiography of the Finnish Civil War. Contributors are Anders Ahlbäck, Pertti Haapala, Marianne Junila, Tiina Kinnunen, Tiina Lintunen, Aapo Roselius, Tauno Saarela, Juha Siltala, Tuomas Tepora and Marko Tikka.

Labour Day, 1955. Near a creek in Port Arthur, Ontario, a man's body hangs at the end of a rope. The story of the body, and its missing shoe, begins in Finland, decades earlier and an ocean away. In January, 1918, civil war breaks out in Finland. Jussi Mantere and his friends, the Solbakken brothers-Anders, Karl, and Ivor, known as Rabbit-as well as Karl's wife, Viktoria, are swept into the fighting. The war rages for months and the country is laid waste. When peace is declared, the price of mending the fractured country is silence: to heal and forget, both victor and vanquished, White and Red, are asked to not speak of the war. In the ensuing years, Jussi and other survivors immigrate to Canada, bringing their silence with them. In Port Arthur's summer of 1955, events set in motion in 1918 come to haunt Jussi's family. A stranger-or is it someone Jussi knows?-threatens the peace and safety of his family. Jussi must decide whether and how to break his silence about the past and its horrors, and spare his grandson the bitter burden of generations-old resentments. Spanning nearly 50 years, this novel shows how a few months of fighting in the 1918 Finnish Civil War can still influence a family in Port Arthur, Ontario in 1955.

By analysing the experience of Finland, Risto Alapuro shows how upheavals in powerful countries shape the internal politics of smaller countries. This linkage, a highly topical subject in the twenty-first century world, is concretely studied by putting the abortive Finnish revolution of 1917-18 into a long historical and a broad comparative perspective.

An account of the little-known involvement of Royal Marines as they engaged the new Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as “Soviets”) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order. As Russia fractured into loyalist “White” and revolutionary “Red” factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 “Spring Offensive” which threatened Paris. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on several fronts in support of British trained and equipped “White Russian” Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against “White” Finnish troops in North Russia and the German “Iron Division” in the Baltic. It remains a little-known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today. After withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War remains forgotten. Wright’s book addresses that oversight, interspersing the broader story with personal accounts of participants.” —Military History Magazine