[thirteenfingers]

One question that I, as a non-Finn who has had more than a passing interest in Finnish history, have never seen a compelling answer to is how reconciliation was ultimately achieved after the civil war. The accounts I've read refer in very general terms to both sides making compromises after having been simply exhausted by it all.

Can any of you provide some details? Multiple viewpoints if possible?

[pasiaj]

Here are my two cents:

Lots of international pressure was put on Finland due to malnutrition and poor treatment of prisoners in the fall of 1918 that led to mass pardons in October of 1918.

My ancestors who fought amongst the "reds" and were convicted to prison camps emmigrated a hundred kilometers north after the war after being pardoned, as things got quite heated where they were from. They seemed to have regretted their actions in the war and expressed gratitude for being welcomed to the their new surroundings. My grandfather remained a communist, and was actually killed by a "white" veteran in 1958 after a municipal government meeting (got hit with a big log).

A new Finnish identity was built in 1920s as a unifying narrative. Sports were an important part part of it. Finland had been under the rule of other countries before, but now it started to develop an identity if its own. Paavo Nurmi, the original Flying Finn won 9 olympic gold metals in 1920, 1924 and 1928. Ville Ritola won 6 medals in 1924 olympics. Hannes Kolehmainen won the olympic marathon in 1920. (He was treated as a class traitor by the left.)

In 1930 there were significant anti-communist / anti-socialist / far right movements in Finland. "Meetings held by leftist and labour groups were also interrupted, often violently. A common tactic was "muilutus", which started with kidnapping and beating. After that the subject was thrown into a car and driven to the border with the Soviet Union." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapua_Movement

Politically the left and the right were united in 1937 in the selection of Kyösti Kallio as president. A coalition government was formed, largely based on the deep anger and resentment by the left against Stalin's empty promises.

The biggest unifiers in the end were the Winter War and the Continuation War against Russia in 1939. It forced ex-enemies to fight side by side against the Russians. Finland was at war from 1939 to 1944. Next, the nation united to take care of war reparations worth 5.52 billion in 2020 dollars. It took until 1952 to to pay off the debt, and I think Finland still claims to be the only country to have paid war reparations in full.

[drcongo]

This is a fantastic answer, thank you. It does however raise two other questions... 1. Why was Hannes Kolehmainen treated as a class traitor? And 2. What on earth happened with that big log?

[hn_throwaway_99]

Here's a good answer to #1:

> The working-class athletic clubs in which the Kolehmainen brothers first trained for victory opposed the participation of newly independent Finland in the 1920 Olympics, claiming the Olympic movement served the interests of the global bourgeois. William Kolehmainen, however, convinced his brother to abandon any working-class loyalties and to run at the Antwerp games, understanding the immense fame and fortune that another gold medal could bring the family. Finland's bourgeoisie embraced Kolehmainen's crossings of class lines, while his old working-class comrades denounced him as a traitor.

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/A_Berg_Flying_2012.pdf

[pasiaj]

A political opponent of my grandfather got angry at him in a meeting.

After the meeting the opponent followed my grandfather as he was walking home and hit him in the head from behind with a ”metrin halko”, a meter long log. He died of a hemorrage.

[drcongo]

Blimey. Thanks for the follow up.

[doikor]

1. To the white/nationalist press he became a hero (a Finnish speaking Finn winning). That alone is enough to make him an enemy of the communists and thus obviously a class traitor as he used to be member of the red/socialist/communist sporting club Helsingin Jyry.

At that time there was 2 sporting unions Jyry was part of the red one. There was a very hard political split along this line for a while (Kolehmainen got fired from his job due to joining Jyry for example).

2. Obviously got bludgeoned to death.

[throwaway2077]

>Many of the Finns deported by the Lapua Movement were later caught up in Stalin's Great Purge and executed; while persecuted in Finland as communists, Stalin accused them of being "Nationalists".[9]

heh

[nabla9]

The white-threat was not what scared to Lenin and Stalin.

It was every other type of socialism and communism. Social democrats, Democratic socialists, Anarchists, Syndicalists, Trotskyists, ... When Soviet Union took over, they hunted and killed other socialists first. Or tried to assassinate them beforehand.

People, especially those who live in North America have no idea how big and irreconcilable the differences within the left were. Saying that someone is a socialist don't really convey that much information.

[vidarh]

A key thing to remind people of is that the October "revolution" did not depose the Czar, but the socialist-dominated provisional government.

So many people seems to believe the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, but he and his family had been in house arrest for months by then.

And of course the Bolshevik purges didn't stop at the other groups, but also other factions within their own party.

[tehjoker]

True, but that socialist dominated government was filled with a lot of people that believed in an extremely orthodox theory of history that said that the capitalists should get a chance to develop society after the feudal era ended. There was also tension between "defensivists" and "defeatists" on the subject of whether WW1 was worth fighting. Notably, it was the bolsheviks that called for an immediate end to the fighting. That said, the final days of revolution were the bolsheviks trying to create facts on the ground to present to the national congress of deputies, packed with bolsheviks, as a fiat accompli as they thought it was possible to skip the capitalist phase of historical development (they were obviously right in retrospect though later mistakes doomed the experiment).

My understanding of the purges is less comprehensive (though I am taken to understand that while the program went overboard, they weren't paranoid, there were people infiltrating the party to interfere or assassinate members that later bragged about it in books) and my soviet history on what happened post 1917 is not very good. One book at a time...

[vidarh]

> that believed in an extremely orthodox theory of history that said that the capitalists should get a chance to develop society after the feudal era ended

Well, yes, they believed that trying to force socialism without a developed economy was doomed to result in the same class stratification all over again. The Bolsheviks didn't exactly prove them wrong on that count when they effectively established the party as a new upper class, and when they were forced to enact a deeply authoritarian government to retain control.

> That said, the final days of revolution were the bolsheviks trying to create facts on the ground to present to the national congress of deputies

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to here. The Bolsheviks allowed elections to the Constituent Assembly intended to form the new government to go ahead, only to shut the assembly down when they didn't like the outcome (SR and the Mensheviks won a solid majority). It was a coup. To get their opponents to call it a revolution was the greatest PR accomplishment of the Bolsheviks.

If you're talking about the Soviet's, they only got real power because of the Bolshevik coup d'etat. They were not representative of the population, and they simply declared themselves the rightful government because it was convenient for the Bolsheviks to use them to attempt to legitimise their coup in the face of their failure to win the Constituent Assembly elections.

> My understanding of the purges is less comprehensive (though I am taken to understand that while the program went overboard, they weren't paranoid, there were people infiltrating the party to interfere or assassinate members that later bragged about it in books) and my soviet history on what happened post 1917 is not very good. One book at a time...

They arrested and/or murdered a whole host of their on previous allies over disagreements and power struggles. They may have gotten some infiltrators too, but for the most part the purges were about getting rid of rivals within the party structure with a long time history of fighting alongside them.

It's one of the most dangerous features of Lenins vanguard approach that the Bolsheviks basically trained its own organisation to see dissent as a sign of betrayal.

[pavlov]

People in USA can get some idea if they think of how the Trumpist/QAnon bloc hates Mitt Romney despite both being technically conservatives.

That's the scale of the gulf between Soviet bolsheviks and Nordic social democrats a hundred years ago.

[exdsq]

It happened the other way around too. My wife's related to one-such example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Schauman of someone who assassinated a communist

[nabla9]

Eugen Schauman didn't assassinate a communist.

Schauman assassinated Nikolay Bobrikov, Governor-General of Finland, general of Russian Imperial Army, servant of Russian Empire.

Schauman was Finnish Nationalist fighting Russian Empire before Russian revolution and Soviet union.

[mannerheim]

This happened in Estonia as well. Communists attempted to overthrow the Estonian government in a coup in 1924, a couple of those involved were executed, many were imprisoned in the Patarei Prison in Tallinn (later gained notoriety under Soviet occupation for holding political prisoners), and some fled to the USSR. Ironically, those who were imprisoned fared slightly better than those who fled to the USSR, since many of the latter were purged by Stalin, while the former were given amnesty in '38, on the 20th anniversary of the founding of Estonia.

[rat87]

Also similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets (killing prominent members of the Jewish Anti-Facist Committee after they were no longer needed to appeal to the west during WW2 and started to write about Jewish topics the USSR was wary of like Israel and the Holocaust) and the turn against the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (and Yiddish both of which had previously been promoted) https://www.npr.org/2016/09/07/492962278/sad-and-absurd-the-... as part of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-cosmopolitan_campaign

[panick21_]

The new Stalin book by Kotkin goes into this episode. A totally crazy coup Stalin basically cooked up with some people and he didn't even inform the Politburo.

[inglor_cz]

Vicious sectarianism is pretty frequent in history and it can infect secular movements too.

Being a "Trotskyist" or a "Titoist" was a de facto capital offence at various points of the Stalinist era. Or being labeled as such, regardless of your true status.

[foobarian]

Heh Titoist was bad in USSR? But Tito was the best!

[smcl]

Stalin very publicly turned against Tito when it became obvious he couldn't be pushed around easily (wouldn't agree to extremely unfavourable trade deals, wasn't happy with the idea of joint-investments in Yugoslav industry that would've effectively turned them over to the USSR, and more). This ultimately lead to Stalin and the USSR-aligned countries denouncing him, despite originally being very close with newly socialist Yugoslavia. I think this was a really tough one for Tito - he'd spent time in Russia after the revolution, sought out Soviet help during war (without really receiving any) but for a while truly believed the USSR could've spearheaded a global socialist movement.

[nabla9]

Stalin attempted to assassinate Tito.

Tito and Stalin didn't see eye-to-eye. There was complete split after the WWII. Soviets blockaded Yugoslavia and Yugoslavia was included in Truman's Mutual Defense Assistance Program and received military aid.

[AutumnCurtain]

The reply letter from Tito following an assassination attempt from Stalin is one of the great political correspondences of the era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split?wpro...

[vkou]

Tito and Stalin split in a big way. When Europe split NATO-Warsaw, Yugoslavia headed off in its own direction - non-aligned.

[selimthegrim]

>Paavo Nurmi, the original Flying Finn

Is Mika Häkkinen the new Flying Finn?

[foobarian]

As a child of the 80s to me Matti Nykänen is The Flying Finn.

[euroderf]

And then there was Toni Nieminen.

[nabla9]

Reconciliation never fully came. People lived and died with their grudges and hate. I remember the bitterness of old people around the issue from the time when I was young.

Soon after the civil war Social Democratic party was the government and Finns had a president that was social democrat. It made it possible for reds and whites to live together without killing each other.

Then Winter War came (1939) and Finns united to defend the country against common enemy. That created aseveliakseli (comrade-in-arms axis) where both whites (captialists) and red (socialists) fought together against common enemy (Soviet Union)

[pasiaj]

Finns were segregated to different sports leagues, different youth groups, different stores etc. based on families political leanings for decades after the war.

If you go to any small town in Finland, you'll still find an "S Market" and a "K Market" that have their roots in this left-right segregation going back all the way to the civil war.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Kinda sad because that is definitely happening in the US. If you look at measures of political polarization over the past couple decades based on where people live, it has gotten much more extreme. You are much less likely to come into contact with people in your neighborhood who are of the opposite political side than a generation ago.

[vkou]

You're not radically less likely to come in contact with people of other political views, you are just more likely to be surrounded by people who keep their political views quiet, because they know what's good for them.

Most of the US is purple, the difference is whether it's a blue-ish purple or a red-dish purple.

[hn_throwaway_99]

You are much less likely to come in contact with people of other political views than in times past, and there is plenty of detailed research to back this up. One recent example:

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/research/resear...

[aqsalose]

It is difficult to give a comprehensive answer in a fly-by HN comment.

Very brief answer: It was complicated. It is complicated.

Slightly less brief answer: Define reconciliation. I doubt any kind of perfect, ideal reconciliation was ever reached. It is not like there were two sides who agreed to something: there were many political actors, with different opinions. It was a mess, and it still is a mess. Many people who had first-hand experience of the war or the terror or its consequences remained bitter. The distinction between the Red and the White social sphere continued for a long time (Anecdote: there were Red and White country-wide sports unions SVUL and TUL until 1993.)

Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter and legacy of Mannerheim and which was worse, the White terror or the hypothetical Red terror if the Reds had won.

Another anecdote. A couple of years ago a student chapter at one university put a portrait of Mannerheim on the wall of their club room. One professor made a very angry public complaint. I don't know what happened afterwards, but there were lots opinions in newspapers and social media, for a moment.

If we define "reconciliation" as "why there was no further violence, at least not much", one reason was that some of the political leaders on White pushed through torpparilaki (a land reform). SDP could participate in the elections, and due to efforts of some centrist politicians on White side, could once enter a government. Economy was good, the Great Depression wasn't as bad as in many other places. When Winter War happened, many regular people on the Red side felt their lives were improving and were distrustful of Stalin's clumsy propaganda moves (it helped that many Reds who "escaped" to the USSR during 1920s-1930s were shot or imprisoned with other ethnic Karelians and Finns in Stalin's purges; the word eventually got back that the USSR was not a paradise). The Reds were divided: non-communist socialists like SDP leader Väinö Tanner enjoyed electoral support among the working class, but were also quite hated by the pro-Soviet left. Maybe the White-aligned political police simply was very efficient at suppressing the would-be revolutionary left (some true believers on the Red side attempted to continue underground pro-Soviet / revolutionary efforts, not very successfully.)

Other part of the answer is that there was a lot of ...not-exactly-reconciliation for several decades.

Remember, some on the Red side continued with not necessarily reconciliatory political efforts? Some on the White side were actively not pleased about this at all, and some objected to any leftists being allowed to participate in politics at all. Feeling the legacy of their Independence War Victory was being squandered. In the 1920s/30s, for several years, some white extremists burned leftists printing presses, kidnapped and roughhoused lots of perceived communists, killed some, and the state apparatus turned a blind eye. Eventually they proceeded to kidnap bourgeois politicians not deemed anti-communist enough, including the ex-president Ståhlberg. At some point the danger of a genuine coup / intra-white civil war was real. (Google for Mäntsälän kapina.) In the end, after the parties and politics to the left of SDP were effectively banned, the extreme right lost its steam.

After the WW2, many outright communists and other on the Red side of left who had spent 1920s-1930s out of politics or in prison were able to enter the politics (thanks Finland mostly losing the WW2 to the Soviets) in force. In some respects, they got some amounts of revenge, when the most bourgeois party, Kokoomus, could not enter the government for decades because of Soviet objections. Google for Kekkonen and Finlandization.

[doikor]

> one reason was that some of the political leaders on White pushed through torpparilaki (a land reform)

This is a often overlooked but very important part of making the post civil war much more peaceful. A large portion of the reds were tenant farmers (torppari) and giving them their own land basically made them "whites" (basically all the landed farmers were on the whites side) and thus fixing one of the biggest issues a very large portion of the reds actually had with the situation before the civil war.

[jabl]

> Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter

It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events. Finland has these, yes, as excellently explained by the parent and parent's sibling comments. In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Heck, you'll even find people who somehow identify with ancient Sparta, apparently based on watching that really terrible movie (or even more terrible successor movies), and thinking that Spartans were uniquely badass and honorable and whatnot.

[kaitai]

It's not really a "strange human quirk". Last time I was at a gathering where some older friends had one beer too many and started getting heated about the war, it's because they were talking about family members who were tied to a fence and left to die. Pretty brutal stuff. To you it's a historical event. To my 80-year-old friend it's his uncle, and the trauma his mother carried with her having to take her brother's body off the fence.

I am not that old. When I introduced my now-spouse to my father, my father commented that now-spouse's family was from a town that was "a little Red, eh?" I'm quite aware that my family and my spouse's family were on different sides of the civil war. It's embedded in where our grandparents lived and the roles they had in life. It's embedded in their economic lives and the opportunities they had. Ironically, since my family was rural landowners, the children had to scatter and find different livelihoods, while spouse's family (pushed into factory work earlier) actually ended up more advantageously positioned as life moved to the cities...

You call it history; I call it great-grandparents, three of whom I was lucky enough to get to know.

[zokier]

> It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events

You have to keep in mind that Finnish Civil War is not some far history; it is something that touched peoples grand-parents. Somewhat naturally something hitting that close can still be pretty touchy subject

[rat87]

> > Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter

> It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events. Finland has these, yes, as excellently explained by the parent and parent's sibling comments. In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Because

1. It was totally because of slavery

2. Claiming it wasn't because of slavery tends to downplay historical racism and tends to be associated with modern day racism

[jabl]

Er, right, yes, I agree with you. It seems I got tangled up in my own explanations, sorry about that. That's what you get for writing a comment in a hurry. What I meant to say there seems to be a fraction of the population in the US who really think the US civil war was about "states rights" or whatever, and not slavery, and they get really angry if anybody suggests otherwise.

[johnyzee]

Weird. It was verifiably not about slavery - at least not from the beginning. It was not an issue until well into the war.

Also, I completely disagree with your interpretation. Recognizing that people at that time, on both sides, did not actually care all that much about the plight of the slaves, does not 'downplay historical racism', quite the contrary. It goes a long way to explain why blacks, even after emancipation, never really got a fair chance in America, to this day.

I am not an American and have no dog in the fight, for what it's worth.

[pchristensen]

I was a little startled by your statement, so I charitably tried to figure out where it was coming from. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederat...) said that the South seceded to protect slavery, but the North attacked the South to put down the rebellion, not necessarily to free slaves.

So I would say that you were technically right that the Civil War was not declared to end slavery, but the overall conflict (and 30+ years leading up to it) was unquestionably about slavery.

[t-3]

Try variable substitution.

If the modern right believed that the left wanted to take all their guns and destroy their way of life, and attempted to secede based on that, it doesn't matter that most on the left don't care at all about limiting gun rights, the war that results will still be about guns, because that is the simple answer. Republicanism (relating to republics, not asses and elephants), libertarian ideals, subordination of government to the people all CANNOT be discussed as motives, because the simple, loud and ideologically clear position of individual vs collective capacity for violence is too big and drowns out the nuance.

Similarly, the actual US Civil War cannot be reasonably discussed, because consideration of any other socioeconomic and historical factors in addition to that of slavery is seen as ignoring or attempting to whitewash the institution of chattel slavery. The rural/urban industrial/agricultural divide is still a big issue in the modern context, and we still avoid actually discussing it, instead focusing on the implications of such a divide: illegal immigration, migrant worker exploitation, human trafficking, etc.

The shifting of the Overton Window feeds back into our perceptions, and reinforces a black/white, everything has an answer worldview.

[krapp]

> Weird. It was verifiably not about slavery - at least not from the beginning. It was not an issue until well into the war.

The civil war was verifiably about slavery from the beginning[0]. South Carolina explicitly mentioned slavery as part of its rationale for secession[1], as did numerous other states[2]. Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, declared slavery to be its very cornerstone[3]:

    "our new government['s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Even the "states rights'" arguments around the Civil War boil down to specifically the Southern states defending their right to continue slavery without interference from the North. That's what they were seceding over.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...

[1]https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

[2]https://www.historynet.com/which-states-referred-to-slavery-...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

[johnyzee]

The fact that slavery was part of their state charters does not show that the war was started over slavery.

The fact is that Lincoln upheld the rights of the Southern states with regards to slavery, both before and after the start of the civil war. This is a quote from Lincoln on the campaign trail immediately before his election and the start of the war [1]:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. (He goes on like this at length)

From Lincoln's inaugural address, after secession and war had started [2]:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Lincoln also prohibited a policy of promising freedom for slaves that would support the Union in the early stages of the war (several states that were part of the Union were also slave states).

It was only well into the war that the tune was changed, at a politically opportune time, and, as we know, not always with great concern or a great outcome for the former slaves.

I am surprised that people would be taken aback by this. These are well established historical facts, and well known, I guess outside the U.S. educational system.

[1] https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp

[pasabagi]

You're misinformed. Read any current, mainstream work of scholarship on the issue.

EDIT: this is a bit short, but honestly, without any rancor, mainstream scholarship is pretty unanimous on this topic. Popular discourse is more divided.

[ZeroGravitas]

> In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Yes, and denying the holocaust happened gets people upset for some reason too. Something about telling bare-faced lies, about easily confirmed historical facts, as a way to flaunt a political affiliation to a group that openly considers some people sub-human is strangely political for reasons no one can figure out.

[jabl]

Well, I agree with that angle. I was more wondering about the opposing viewpoint, why do people get attached to a monstrous ideology and claim people under said banner did none of the things they historically did.

[mistrial9]

some of the resolution was the new territory boundaries, securing Vyborg as a Russian city ?

edit- incorrect, mixed the conflicts, reading more now

[eMSF]

Vyborg was annexed by the Soviet Union in WW2. That had nothing to do with the Finnish Civil War.

[Jensson]

All the red supporters were dead, in prison or fled to Soviet, they just lost. Reconciliation is very easy then, the whites just did what they wanted to do.

Or do you wonder why there was no more resistance afterwards? I think that the people were happy that they weren't under foreign rule for once, they didn't rebel against Russia so why rebel against a Finn ruler now? They were used to living under much worse conditions without complaining.