Myth, memory, and history
Finland’s history during the First World War has for long been seen and written about through the prism of two key events: on the one hand, the 6th of December 1917, the day of Finnish independence, viewed and even today ritually celebrated as the natural culmination point of a self-confident nation’s historical fulfilment; on the other hand, the Civil War of early 1918, the great cataclysmic experience of the newly emerging nation-state – an experience whose impact shook the foundations of Finnish society and whose memory remained divisive for generations to come. What both events, however, have in common is their conviction that there was no or only little proper history of Finland during the First World War prior to the watershed of 1917/18.1 In that, the public and historiographical consensus echoes patterns found throughout the entire region of Central, Central Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe that imperial buffer zone between the German and Russian empires occasionally referred to as ‘Zwischeneuropa’, most literally the Europe-in-Between.
If at all, Finland’s highly complex position before 1917 – a period amounting to more than two-thirds of the actual history of the war – is seen as a necessary precursor to independence, not as a historical condition in its own right. Being both nationalist habit and politics of memory, this has been practised most forcefully by the victorious, anti-revolutionary side of the Civil War, the so-called Whites, later then by their mostly conservative successors. In this narrative, both Finnish independence and the successful stabilization and ultimate survival of the Finnish state in the aftermath of the Civil War largely rest with a group of young nationalist activists, the ‘Jäger’, who were members of the mythicized Royal Prussian 27th Jäger Battalion. From 1915 onwards, almost 1,900 Finnish volunteers were educated in the German army camp Lockstedt and deployed – in mid-1916 – to active service at the German north-eastern front around Riga. In the context of Finland’s early independence, the heroized ‘Jäger’ became the epitome of the nationalist movement, allegedly propelling a self-confident cultural nation of the nineteenth century towards modern national statehood. As a founding myth, this certainly fitted the political and societal climate of the interwar period well, all the more against the backdrop of a deeply divided society traumatized by one of the bloodiest civil wars of the century.
As with all historical myths, however, the ‘Jäger’ – or rather nationalist – myth of the coming of the modern Finnish nation-state provides only a coarsened, politically, and culturally adjusted version of history. It amounts to what Michael Oakeshott once described as ‘abbreviated history’, long before deconstructivism became a fashion. In order to avoid the long road of reflecting ever evasive – and only allegedly – collective identities, one goes for numerous shortcuts, thereby making highly complex matters into simple, easily absorbed portions of belonging. This practice is not unknown to the historian. In fact, historians use these shortcuts themselves, at times deliberately, more often, however, unwittingly. They are, in any case, well advised to adopt Lord Acton’s attitude to sinking ships and thereby walk the road less travelled in order to recover forgotten or rather ‘unremembered’ history.2 This is not the first time that the almost clichéd idea of ‘forgotten history’ has been applied to the subject. The actual phrase is borrowed from the doctoral thesis of the Finnish historian Tuomas Hoppu (in Finnish: ‘Historian unohtamat’). Contrary to expectation, Hoppu’s study – published in 2005 – deals with a different group of Finnish volunteers during the First World War – those Finns who, in sizeable numbers, served from 1914 onwards in the imperial Russian Army.3
Hoppu’s unearthing of the at first suppressed, then conveniently forgotten aspects of Finnish history would have to be taken seriously. It adds nuance to a complex process and challenges the existing national-historiographical narrative. The latter assumes 1917 to be the vanishing point of the modern history of the country. Everything before that is seen as a quasi-natural progression towards the telos of national independence, no more so than in the context of the Russo-Finnish relationships since the nineteenth century: from, firstly, the creation of a model autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire through, secondly, the resistance against Russian imperial intervention in Finnish affairs from the February Manifesto of 1899 and the establishment of an own unicameral parliament, the Eduskunta, in 1906/07 onwards to, finally, the activist national movement embodied by the ‘Jäger’ and – later on – the victorious white faction in the Civil War. In this narrative, the tsar’s empire functions – at least during its more liberal periods – as a kind of benevolent midwife in the emergence of Finnish statehood and national culture. This image, however, changes drastically when it comes to the upheaval the empire and not least Finland experienced from the 1890s onwards. What is commonly termed ‘Russification’ surfaced in Finland in two periods, a first from the February Manifesto in 1899, ending with the 1905 revolution in Russia, and a second supposed campaign, which – from 1908/09 onwards – reintroduced more direct rule from St Petersburg and lasted until the First World War, some claim well into the war. The Finnish term for the alleged Russification policies sortokaudet (or sortovuodet) – times respectively years of oppression – is a result of contemporary anti-Russian activism and hence much more pointed. As with Russification as an analytical term in general, it only captures part of the multifaceted array of nationality policies the empire practised since the end of the nineteenth century. For the period after 1899, Russia – both in contemporary Finnish perception and in retrospect – appears therefore alien, despotic, outdated, and doomed, much closer, in fact, to Lenin’s influential anti-imperialist label of the empire as a ‘prison of nations’ than to conceptions of the tsar’s benevolent rule and of Russia as the grand duchy’s comparatively generous protector, as readily applied to the earlier period.4 In this extension of a contemporary and rather typically Russophobic prejudice, the empire forms the negative folio against which Finland’s national independence appears as the inevitable result of a deeply natural process of historical evolution. Russia becomes the alien, the other, from which one’s own and the self can be easily separated and indeed altogether defined, even more so in an increasingly divided society and a newly emerged, still unconsolidated nation-state.
Finland’s emergence as an independent nation-state, however, was conditional and not the inevitable process as which it is preferably seen in national historiography. Without the destabilization of the Russian Empire in the course of the First World War, the independent Finnish state of 1917/18 remains unthinkable. As so many of the nation-states of Eastern and Central Eastern Europe, independent Finland too is primarily a product of the war and first and foremost the result of the collapse of empire. Among the empires of continental Europe around 1914, with the exception of Ottoman Turkey, Russia was certainly the least stable, as the revolution of 1905 and its repercussions had illustrated to contemporaries inside the tsar’s realm and abroad alike. Yet, to assume that the Russian Empire before the First World War was somewhat anachronistic and moribund appears to be more of an ahistorical back projection than a balanced, historically contextualized analysis. The almost universal narrative of Russian imperial demise prior to 1914 and inevitable collapse in the course of the war is apparently well suited to explain and legitimize the outcome of the war: a zone of small- and middle-sized nation-states in Eastern Europe whose territorial and ideological foundations were being created on the ruins of imperial rule. As especially the example of the grand duchy of Finland illustrates, however, there was little in the situation before or even after 1914 that made the revolutions of 1917, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the emergence of an independent Finnish state inevitable or even probable.5
On the contrary, even under the pre-war distress in Finnish-Russian relations, Russian imperial rule over Finland as an autonomous grand duchy was at no point directly challenged. What the opponents of the so-called Russification programmes advocated throughout was the restoration and protection of the allegedly agreed legal status and modi operandi in the bilateral relationship between Helsinki and St Petersburg. The status of Finnish autonomy had indeed been consolidated in the wake of the 1905 revolution. The new constitution of 1906, which effectively transformed Russia into a constitutional monarchy, redefined Finland’s position within the empire along the lines of an enhanced autonomy. If not formally, then at least in effect, this reform retracted the restrictions of the February Manifesto of 1899 as the emblematic embodiment of St Petersburg’s so-called Russification policies. It primarily resulted in the establishment of an unicameral parliament in 1907, the Eduskunta, based on universal suffrage and eligibility, which made Finland into one of the most progressively governed states in Europe, certainly more in line with the British imperial decentralization towards the dominions around the same period than with any other comparable example of imperial rule in the borderlands between the Russian, Ottoman, and German empires.
In the years before the war, the Russian regime in Finland did certainly not amount to a perpetual state of emergency, as retrospective depictions occasionally indicate. The actual disturbances in the bilateral relations were largely limited to the area of constitutional politics and dealt with by the general governor (from 1909 the widely detested Franz Albert Seyn) and the Finnish Senate, that is, the government of the grand duchy, respectively the newly instituted Finnish parliament (Eduskunta).6 This is not to say that the confrontation did not reach a certain vehemence, as most aptly reflected in the public mobilization of the so-called great petition (suuri adressi) against the February Manifesto or the assassination of Nikolai I. Bobrikov in June 1904 at the hands of the Finnish nationalist Eugen Schauman.7 Furthermore, the international mobilization in favour of Finland gathered momentum, culminating in a formal address – ‘Pro Finlandia’ – of more than a thousand leading European intellectuals and figures of public life to the Russian tsar Nicholas II in the context of the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899. Finland had become the cause célèbre of European politics around 1900.8 With it, a new elite of Finnish politicians and decision-makers, often lawyers by profession, emerged that continued to shape the affairs of Finnish politics for the next half a century, among them the first president of the Finnish parliament, the constitutional lawyer and chief proponent of the legalist struggle Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, or the economist and fiscal expert Juho Kusti Paasikivi. Both went on to become Finnish presidents, from 1931 to 1937 (Svinhufvud) and 1946 to 1956 (Paasikivi) respectively.9
St Petersburg’s more controlling approach to Finland would have to be seen in both an imperial Russian and an international perspective. For Russia, Finland was crucial especially in security-political terms. The defence of the realm in the North, in particular the security of the capital St Petersburg at the end of the Gulf of Finland, heavily depended upon the grand duchy and the corresponding Baltic provinces south of the Gulf. In line with inner-imperial and international developments prior to the war, Russia systematically enhanced its control of these areas, militarily developing both Finland, the Baltic provinces and the Kingdom of Poland. In tandem, the empire as well enhanced its military control over its other borderlands further south, from Poland to the Governorate of Bessarabia. Not least the deep-seated shock of its defeat against Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 stimulated and – in the contemporary perception of the Russian government – necessitated such a development.10
The grand duchy in Russian imperial policy
St Petersburg’s more assertive approach to its imperial borderlands as well affected Finland. In the years leading up to the war, the Russian government permanently stationed several ten thousand troops in the grand duchy and enhanced this number even further to beyond 100,000 troops in late 1914 – an indeed substantial dimension for a country of only 3.3 million people. Furthermore, the Russian military considered the fortification of the Åland archipelago, which were formally part of the grand duchy, and – from 1915 – began to enhance the defence installations of the islands. In itself, this amounted to a blatant violation of the Åland Convention, as enshrined in the Treaty of Paris of 1856. This, in turn, greatly worried neutral Sweden and certainly biased Swedish neutrality further in favour of the German war effort.11 Before and after 1914, Russia’s main strategic opponent in the Baltic area was the Wilhelmine Empire. Especially Finland and the Baltic provinces were well suited for a potential German offensive, threatening the Russian capital and – beyond that – most of the empire’s structurally most developed Northwest. In that respect, the security concerns of the Russian political and military leadership only mirror the sensibilities of the other great powers, be it Constantinople’s attempts to fortify the Ottoman Balkans against probable Austrian or Russian invasions, or Austro-Hungarian largely unsuccessful efforts to stabilize its own borderlands in the years prior to 1914. In the Baltic, however, the only other great power of importance, the British Empire, exercised indirect control through its naval superiority.12 Potential hegemonic powers of the region, particularly Sweden, had been relegated to second rank in the course of the nineteenth century. While a segment of Stockholm’s elites continued to cultivate older hegemonic ambitions as to the Baltic area and not least Finland, its resources and capacities as a potentially imperialist power remained limited, even in the context of the unprecedented international crisis of 1917 and the subsequent years. The First World War and the ascendency of the social democratic dominance in Swedish politics put an end to these residual imperialist impulses and reconciled the Swedish polity with its newly found role as a small state in international relations.
Besides the rather typical great power ambition to gain strategic control over one’s borderlands, Russia’s policies towards Finland were part of a common imperialist pattern in other ways too. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, all territorial empires in Europe suffered existential crises in the face of a number of modern challenges. First among them was the rise and toxic threat of nationalism among the differing nations subsumed under the imperial – and largely dynastic – umbrella. The imperial centres responded to this challenge by furthering the emergence of an own, quasi-imperial nationalism, mostly rooted in the collective identities of the titular nations of an empire. This phenomenon applied not only to Russia, but also to most empires in Europe, if they had not already been based on nationalist principles like the French post-revolutionary state. It is reflected on manifold political and intellectual battlefields of the period around 1900, for instance in the nationality policies of the German Austrians or the Hungarians in the Habsburg Empire or of Berlin towards its minorities such as the Poles and the Danes. The heavily nationalist Young Turks adopted an own, rather distinct form of ‘nationalizing empire’, which ultimately paved the way for the ethnic cleansing the Ottomans practised in the First World War against most of the empire’s traditional minority populations, the Orthodox Christians of largely Greek origin and the Armenians, to name the two most prominent cases.13 By any standard of the period and especially by inner-Russian and international comparison, the catalogue of measures heaved upon Finland first from 1899, then from 1908/09 onwards, amounting to what is usually described as Russification, appears distinctly lenient on the part of the imperial centre. The appointment of F. A. Seyn in November 1909 was therefore symptomatic for a larger development in Russia’s domestic and imperial structure, bureaucratic centralism as an ideal of imperial modernization. It was, as Pertti Luntinen has rightly stated, ‘an indication of the centralisation, unification and bureaucratization of the Russian administration under a unified Council of Ministers’.14
This correlates with the position Finland held in the Russian Empire. In and around 1914, the country was clearly one of the most stable factors of the Romanov realm, ‘an island of relative peace and relative security’ in a world out of joint, as the British historian of Finland Anthony Upton once described it.15 Apart from the constitutional and political upheaval, this applied to virtually all sectors of public life in the grand duchy, especially to the Finnish-Russian economic relations. The period of forceful industrialization in Finland in the last two decades prior to the First World War would have been, in any case, unimaginable without the country’s integration into the much bigger – and equally expanding – Russian market. The Finnish-Russian balance of trade, amounting some decades earlier only to a few million (Finnish) marks, increased drastically to more than 100 million marks for both import and export in the final years before the war. Finnish industrialists and companies profited so heavily from their trade relations to Russia and their unlimited access to the imperial market that their Russian competitors again and again complained about the fact that a people actually colonized by the Russians could exploit the mother country so successfully. The war did actually not end this period of relative boom, but complicated the Finnish situation considerably. The country’s dependence on the volatile Russian economy, in particular in terms of food supply and other utilities, increasingly affected Finnish society. The consumption statistics, to name but one example, sharply illustrate the progressive shortage in basic foodstuffs. While the average Finn in 1915 still consumed 45.9 kg of wheat, 174.6 kg of rye, and 127.3 kg of potatoes, this dropped to 8.6 kg of wheat, 61 kg of rye, and 113 kg of potatoes two years later.16 Just as in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and even in Scandinavia, the drastic shortage of food supplies gradually destabilized the social and political situation in the grand duchy.
The outbreak of the war left Finland in an ambivalent, even peculiar situation. As part of the Russian Empire, the grand duchy was formally a participant in a major global conflict. Petrograd, as the Russian capital had been renamed at the onset of the hostilities, considered Finland as a potential springboard for a German invasion of the Baltic and Northern Russia.17 In terms of military planning, this was undoubtedly not without justification and further heightened by the difficult general situation of the country and especially in the Finnish-Russian relations before 1914. Like the Empire as a whole, Finland too was placed on war footing, accompanied by the introduction of special regulations for a possible state of emergency. These regulations remained in place until 1917 and primarily applied to the trade and the economy of the grand duchy, to its pricing policy and industrial production, but as well to the press landscape and legal issues governing the public space, such as the right to assembly. The actual implementation of these measures was, however, readily – and loyally – ensured by the local Finnish bureaucracy. This can be easily generalized: there were hardly any indications of disloyalty towards the empire’s war effort and authority within Finnish society in the early period of the war, if one disregards the highly unorthodox example of the activist movement of Finnish nationalism, especially the – by then – largely négligeable Jäger mobilization. The war and Finland’s exposed strategic situation brought with it a drastically enhanced deployment of Russian troops stationed in the country. At its peak, it is estimated that at least about 80,000 to 125,000 troops were stationed on Finnish territory. Helsinki became the central basis for operation of the imperial Baltic Fleet. Along with Åland, the coastal defences in the South and the West of the country were developed further.18
In effect, though, Finland’s participation in the war bore sporadic features. Before early 1918, the country was at no point a theatre of war. The original Finnish conscription army, which had been instituted by law by the Finnish Diet of Finland and Tsar Alexander II in 1881, was disbanded in 1901. Further schemes on the part of St Petersburg to force Finns into Russian military service collapsed. Even the most traditional fighting force from Finland, the Finnish Guards’ Rifle Battalion, an elite contingent of the imperial Russian guard established in Helsinki in 1829, was discontinued in August 1905 against the backdrop of the political upheaval in the country. Since then, the grand duchy did not possess any organized military force and was not subject to imperial conscription. Instead, the Finnish Senate paid a substantial tax for military purposes to the imperial treasury.19 While conscription and eventually distinct Finnish forces had to be abandoned, career officers from Finland continued to serve actively – and self-sacrificially – in the Russian army. This largely Swedish-speaking and aristocratic segment of Finnish society had joined the Russian military – and, in turn, St Petersburg’s high society – early one in the imperial period and adopted the empire as a source of both career opportunity and collective identity. Forty-five of these officers lost their lives in Russian service in the course of the First World War. The by far most prominent example for this milieu behaviour remains C. G. E. Mannerheim, whose loyalty to Nicholas II and the tsar’s family long outlived the Romanovs’ execution in mid-1918. Not only his private letters of the interwar betray an unbroken sense of loss after the demise of the monarchy, even years later. Also in his residence, Mannerheim – in this a rather typical product of empire – sustained the grievance inflicted upon him. The sitting room of his manor house in the Ullanlinna quarters of Helsinki displays this in spectacular fashion: in the centre of the room, on a little pedestal and surrounded by pictures of his actual family, the later Marshal of Finland, emerging from the imperial ashes as a figure of national salvation, had purposefully placed portrait photos of the tsar and the Russian royal family.20 In this respect, Mannerheim and the Finnish career officers in Russian service would have to be viewed as rather typical examples for the way in which the Romanov Empire ruled, keeping together a diverse imperial population, of which only 44 per cent – around 1900 – were Russian in the narrower sense. Non-Russian populations such as the Finns were integrated ‘by co-opting local aristocracies into the imperial ruling elite’.21 This only failed in the Polish case – and was nowhere more pronounced and successful than in the smooth and – by and large – extremely flexible incorporation of the grand duchy and its society into the wider imperial framework.
Besides the imperial elites of Petrograd and despite the absence of conscription in the grand duchy, a considerable amount of young Finnish men joined the Russian imperial forces during the First World War. Russia’s pendant to the German Augusterlebnis, the at least partly government-sponsored and certainly not universal ‘euphoria as well as fury and joy of war’ in the late summer and early autumn of 1914, swept through Finland with equal intensity as through other parts of the empire.22 This is especially obvious in the masses of people that came together to farewell the troops, especially in Helsinki, but also in smaller Finnish towns where Russian military contingents were stationed. Other, more profane motives underpinned the decision to volunteer for the imperial army. In social and economic terms, service in the Russian armed forces promised employment and probable career prospects. The first of the two certainly applied primarily to recruits from working-class quarters, the latter to the bourgeois middle classes. Furthermore, the collective psychology of a generation without any experience of war disposed many youth throughout the whole of Europe to volunteer, especially in the initial weeks and months of the war. Finland was no different in that respect. Even before the outbreak of the war, the inherent radicalism of male youth had moulded an entire generation. Though no phenomenon exclusive to youth, bellicism was widespread, as blatantly captured by the twenty-two-year-old German poet Georg Heym, an ardent proponent of expressionism and radically modernist visions in literature. Heym noted in his diaries on 6 July 1910:
It always is the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing is happening, nothing, nothing, nothing. If something were for once to happen that would not leave this insipid taste of banality. … What would I give for barricades to be built again. I would be the first to be on them, I would want to feel the frenzy, the excitement, even with a bullet in my heart. Or, even a war would do, it can even be an unjust one. This peace is so idle, so greasy and smeary like glue polishing on old furniture.23
Similar features can be found throughout the whole of warring Europe, culturally less pronounced in Britain and France, however, and all the more – besides Germany – in Russia and Italy, as evidenced by the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’, published in Le Figaro in 1909: ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn of woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism.’24
Aware of the potential for mobilization, the imperial authorities began as early as August 1914 to systematically recruit in Finland, mobilizing more than 700 Finnish soldiers – as volunteers – for the Russian army. Around 600 of them actively fought on the Russian side for substantial periods of the war; 160 lost their life.25 The potential for recruitment in Finland, however, was much greater than indicated by this figure, if the Russian military authorities had watered down the recruitment standards. Recruitment generally was hampered by the serious lack of military training on the part of possible Finnish volunteers and by the fact that – at least in 1914/15 – integrating substantial proportions of non-Russian-speaking recruits into the imperial military apparatus formed an organizational problem. On the other hand, especially as the war progressed, recruitment waned and eventually evaporated altogether, leaving Russian expectations disappointed.26 Historically contextualized, the decision of these Finnish volunteers to join the Russian military machinery appears far less questionable than in retrospect. None of the major European empires – and not even an overseas empire like Britain – had difficulties in mobilizing its manifold population for the war effort in 1914. In fact, the war effort of the major players was substantially rooted in the effective mobilization of their imperial resources. In turn, it is much more likely that it was actually empire that sustained the war for the British and the French to a far greater extent than this was possible for continental realms with limited or – due to the naval blockade – virtually no overseas resources like the Central Powers.27 Even there, however, as the imperial mobilization of the Habsburg monarchy and even the Ottoman Empire strikingly illustrate, war was inconceivable without the involvement of the imperial peoples.28
A royal visit: 10 March 1915 – Nicholas II in Helsinki
The Russian Empire mirrored this logic. What primarily bound the differing peoples to imperial rule was a sense of collective belonging, as generated primarily through the dynastic component of loyalty. As grand duke of Finland, the emperor had been an overarching presence in Finnish public life for more than a century. Finland in the long nineteenth century, David Kirby has rightly insisted, firmly belonged into the category of national movements with a strong conservative streak in political, social, and economic terms, affirming the existing system rather than revolutionarily challenging it. ‘Thus, loyalty towards the ruling dynasty, belief in the established social and political order, fear and distrust of the “revolutionary” model – the Mazzinian vision – all tended to direct this “awakening” away from confrontation with state power, and did little to create or foster the political ideal of a nation free and independent.’29 Matti Klinge, Osmo Jussila, and – albeit on different grounds – Risto Alapuro have interpreted this peculiarity of Finnish history less as a deficiency, but as a prerequisite of the steady and astonishingly calm character of Finnish nation-building. ‘Internal national consolidation in Finland’, Klinge – by then provocatively indeed – stated already in 1975, ‘occurred calmly and steadily during the nineteenth century. By international standards, the changes were accompanied by relatively little conflict. Chauvinism and bragging about own race, language, and past – which played a conspicuous role in several other countries – remained minor here, particularly because of the non-sovereign position of the country and the linguistic division within the educated class.’30
Despite the legal restrictions imposed upon Finland in the lead-up to the war, the grand duchy’s fundamental sense of loyalty to the tsar was rarely in doubt. As grand duke, Nicholas II, while certainly lacking the popularity of some of his predecessors, remained the ultimate point of reference, even during the fundamental constitutional and political crises of the pre-war period.31 As in any monarchical order, this applied to the elites in particular, but also to the larger public. During the First World War, imperial solidarity and mobilization for the empire seemed only natural to a population that had actually largely benefitted from imperial rule. Before 1914, indeed even in the initial stages of the war, the more radical and separatist nationalists, advocating the breakaway from the Russian Empire and the establishment of an own Finnish nation-state, remained at the fringes of the Finnish political landscape. Instead, throughout the first years of the war, Finnish society supported the imperial war effort – and, at least initially, economically benefitted from it. Besides the increased financial burden on the grand duchy and in the absence of active military support, other measures were sought to express loyalty and solidarity. Among them was the establishment of military hospitals in the country, especially in Helsinki, in order to provide for the injured of the Russian imperial army.32 Considering the political upheaval of the pre-war years, the local Russian authorities were even perplexed by the extent to which Finnish society displayed signs of loyalty to the empire and its sovereign.33
The widespread sense of loyalty to the imperial crown obviously suffered the longer the war lasted. It was, however, still vividly obvious half a year into the conflict in the only visit Nicholas II ever paid to Helsinki. Anatomizing the visit and its organizational and ceremonial make-up furthermore unveils a few of the manifold layers that defined the grand duchy’s existence under the Russian imperial umbrella. Despite having spent most of his summers on board his royal yacht in the Gulf of Finland and at the southern shores of the grand duchy, Nicholas had only once visited the Finnish capital – and that before his coronation in 1894. His second and only visit as tsar and grand duke of Finland on 10 March 1915 was a carefully managed one-day affair, primarily intended as an inspection trip of the Baltic Fleet battle ships stationed in the Helsinki harbour. Nicholas’s inspection travel coincided with the rather encouraging news from the Russian Western front. The siege of the Austrian fortress of Przemyśl was apparently nearing its end. By early March, the Austrian army had been effectively expelled from Galicia. This enormous Russian military operation, more or less from the autumn of 1914 until the surrender of the Austrian troops within the fortress on 22 March 1915, formed the longest continuous siege – 194 days – in the short history of the war (and indeed, as it turned out, of the war altogether). The final Austrian attempts to relieve the fortress were failing in early March, eventually leaving the local garrison and reinforcements – about 117,000 troops and 700 heavy guns – with no choice but to surrender to superior Russian forces.34 Nicholas rightly considered the conquest of Przemyśl ‘enormous in both moral & military importance’.35 After the effective loss of Galicia, this defeat resulted in yet another Austrian military crisis and the gradual take-over of Vienna’s war efforts in the East by the German Supreme Army Command (OHL). Just before that particular climax, but already increasingly optimistic about the more recent course of the war, a cheerful emperor arrived in the Finnish capital.36 The newspapers of the following day, from Helsingin Sanomat and the Swedish-speaking Hufvudstadbladet to the working-class press, reported virtually every detail of the emperor’s visit and also dealt with the situation at Przemyśl.37 The press reporting generally, but also in this peculiar case, followed strict censorship guidelines, enforced by Petrograd. This applied especially to the filmed material of the tsar’s visit. Remarkably, however, an almost an hour-long recording of the visit escaped censorship and has survived. It was created by the film-maker Oscar Lindelöf and – in a shortened censored version – shown in Helsinki’s three major cinemas in the subsequent weeks. In order to escape censorship by the Russian authorities, which intended to confiscate the material, Lindelöf spent – according to the film’s introduction – four days in effective hiding.38
At 8.40 in the morning, Nicholas and his staff – among them the grand marshal of the court, general lieutenant Paul von Benckendorff – arrived by train from Petrograd. In the heavily decorated railway station of Helsinki, the tsar was received by the grand duchy’s general governor, F. A. Seyn, and the governor of the province of Uusimaa, general major Bernhard Otto Widnäs, as well as the locally based imperial forces, among them units of the Helsinki garrison and the commander of the Russian naval forces in the Baltic, admiral Nikolai von Essen, the rising star within the imperial navy until his premature death two months later. The Russian naval minister Ivan Grigorovich and his closest staff accompanied Nicholas, heightening the importance of Helsinki as the headquarter of the Imperial Baltic Fleet. The obligatory welcoming parade was held at the station, arranged for by the garrison and its military band. Still within the building, representatives of the grand duchy’s public life and politics had gathered in order to receive the emperor. Heads of different departments of the Finnish Senate, the general governor’s and local administrative staff, the highest representatives of the city’s administrative, political, and educational life, among them the vice chancellor and rector of the Imperial Alexander University in Finland, and the remaining consular corps formally welcomed the monarch.39 In their presence, the tsar received a number of delegations, first the Helsinki City Council, represented by its head, bank director Alfred Norrmén, and a number of distinguished members. Furthermore, the local peasant organization as well as the Jewish and Orthodox communities had sent delegations, with the latter handing the traditional Slavic welcoming gift, bread and salt, to the emperor. Ovations were given, expressing gratitude – on the part of the city – for the ‘gracious’ and ‘significant visit’ of the emperor to Finland’s capital, made all the more important, as several newspapers noted, as it was the first visit of Nicholas as emperor to the city.40
The Jewish community even donated 10,000 Finnish markka in order to support the care for the wounded in Russian military hospitals, of which some were situated in the grand duchy.41 This was undoubtedly a substantial gesture with political overtones. Helsinki was one of a few places in Finland where Jews, who only received citizenship through parliamentary act at the turn of the year 1917/18, were by then allowed to settle. The Lutheran majority population of Finland – as Finnish nationalism in general – had traditionally been hostile to the alleged influx of Russian Jews to Finland, albeit a marginal phenomenon. Before the passing of numerous restrictions on Jewish settlement in the grand duchy in 1889, it had been the imperial authorities that enforced the right of – at least – Jewish veterans of the Russian army stationed in Finland to be able to remain in the country.42 This is less bewildering than it might appear, especially against the backdrop of the frequent pogroms in the empire, which time and again heightened the virulence of Russian Orthodox anti-Judaism and – from the early 1880s onwards – modern anti-Semitism. What the bureaucracy imposed upon its self-governing entities was a typical imperial agenda. This agenda rewarded services to the empire independently from the national, ethnic, or religious background of an individual. Russian nationalism, however, which effected the politics of the empire increasingly, excluded Jews from its own nation-building project just as much and vehemently as the nationalisms of imperial sub-groups like the Finns, Poles, or Romanians (in Bessarabia).43 By contributing substantially and by being seen to do so publicly, the Helsinki Jewish community seized upon the grand duke’s visit to symbolically demonstrate the loyalty of the Finnish Jews to the imperial war effort and the empire in general.
While most of the ovations closely followed protocol, there were other parties – besides the local Jewish community – that used the emperor’s visit for a thinly veiled political intervention. The spokesman of the Finnish workers’ association (Suomalainen työväenliitto), the journalist Emil Forsgren, used his ovation to effectively celebrate the virtues of Finland’s autonomous status in the empire, which had been badly rattled by the so-called Russification schemes of the Russian imperial government. For that, he had composed a poem, closely resembling a prayer: ‘Fear God’, Forsgren is reported to have exclaimed in Finnish, ‘our faithful monarch and the empire, the majesty of our faithful law and our own nationality’. As emperor, he insists, Nicholas should promote these virtues to ‘awaken this and the coming generations’ love and blessing’.44 In his piece of deft rhetoric, Forsgren skilfully combines the obligatory ovation in honour of the emperor with the main tenets of the resistance to the imperial policies of the previous decade: legality and nationality politics, that is the return to the rule of law and the grand duchy’s autonomy privileges, especially with regard to self-government. It is unlikely, however, that Nicholas, who was forced to rely upon the interpretation of Uusima’s local governor Widnäs, decoded Forsgren’s Finnish poem in the manner in which it seemed intended.
In front of the station, the Helsinki garrison with its infantry, artillery, and cavalry forces formed a guard of honour, while the military band intoned the emperor’s hymn. From there, the tsar travelled in an open car through the city centre, along Mikonkatu and the boulevard Pohjoisesplanadi, to the Orthodox cathedral, Uspenski, the largest Orthodox church in Finland. The cathedral had been built in the 1860s in order to enhance the presence of the Eastern church in the grand duchy. Acc ording to the local press, the response of the public was favourable, with hundreds of people lining the streets and enthusiastically cheering the emperor and his entourage, among them many children, who had received three days off school marking the grand duke’s visit.45 Outside the cathedral, the pupils of the Russian-speaking Alexander gymnasium, inaugurated in 1913 as one of the most modern school buildings of the empire, greeted the grand duke with a chorus, joined by the cheers of bystanders. On the steps of the church, Nicholas was received by the archbishop Sergius, the highest representative of the Orthodox church in Finland, and guided through the church interior. This clearly was the natural environment for the Russian emperor. Since 1809, the Finnish archdiocese had been a part of the Russian Orthodox Church. In effect, however, the Orthodox everyday before the turn of the century was largely finnicized. In the years before the First World War, however, that situation changed drastically. Despite its autonomy in church organizational terms, the archdiocese outside Orthodox Karelia and even more Uspenski in Helsinki were directed from Moscow and, at least from 1905, Russian-speaking. In Helsinki, the church’s primary function was the pastoral care of the large Russian diaspora population, further increased by the war-related troop deployments to the coastal areas of the grand duchy.46 In the building, the devout Orthodox Christian Nicholas prayed alongside the archbishop and the amassed priesthood of Uspenski. Considering his faith and the public signal emanating from such a gesture, placing Uspenski at the top of the emperor’s itinerary seems to have been meant as both a symbolic and a personal act.47
From Uspenski, Nicholas moved on to the ceremonially more complicated visit of Finland’s heart of governance and public life, the Senate Square with the University’s main building, the Senate, and – most prominently – the Lutheran Cathedral of the city, St Nicholas’ Church. The latter had been built in tribute of the tsar’s great grandfather, Nicholas I. It was in the classicist Senate building where the general governor of Finland, Nikolai Bobrikov, had been assassinated by a Finnish nationalist activist, Eugen Schauman. A minor clerk of the Finnish Senate, Schauman came from a Swedish-speaking aristocratic family with an impressive record of service in the Russian army. In that respect, Bobrikov’s assassin was – rather ironically – a symptomatic product of the tsar’s empire.48 For the tsar, the other building right opposite the Senate, the Imperial Alexander University, was an equally difficult place to deal with. It had been, after all, the nucleus of opposition to Nicholas’s tightened rule in Finland in the pre-war period. The war, however, had apparently muted the resistance in the grand duchy and brought the political elites and the country’s public life into line. In the city centre of Helsinki, Nicholas was therefore met with the prerequisites of the official protocol. Navy soldiers in full dress uniform occupied the Senate Square in front of the cathedral and the surrounding streets, through which the emperor passed on his way from Uspenski. On the main stairs of the university, the rector, staff, and a number of students of both the Imperial Alexander University and Helsinki’s Technical University had gathered to greet the emperor. Within the cathedral, the Lutheran church hierarchy received the grand duke, led by the head of the Finnish Lutheran Church, the long-serving archbishop of Turku, Gustaf Johansson, and the archbishop of Borgå (Porvoo), Herman Råbergh, for the Swedish-speaking church of Finland. In his welcoming words, Johansson drew upon the heritage of survival in war, referring to Alexander I. in the ‘grave days of 1812’, throughout which the Russian tsar had been strengthened by Psalm 91’s faith in god: ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’49 After that, a prayer was said and Fredrik Pacius’s ‘Suomen laulu’ intoned by the church’s male chorus. The main ovation was given – first in Finnish, then in Swedish – by Råbergh, who prayed for the well-being and preservation of the emperor and the royal family as well as for the restoration of peace and general salvation.50 The rather modest ceremony ended with the first verse of the so-called lantdagspsalm.51 The choice of the songs and prayers, most obviously Pacius’s ‘Suomen laulu’, manifestly intended to highlight the Finnish character of the occasion and – by symbolic implication – addressed the emperor as the grand duke of a country that felt alienated from its original rights and privileges.
After the stop at Senate Square, Nicholas and his entourage crossed the city via Unionin- and Alexanterinkatu towards the northern harbour for the actual purpose of his visit, the inspection of the local battle ships, and the fortress of Viapori (Sveaborg).52 On board, the emperor handed out decorations, especially Crosses of Saint George, a relatively common occurrence during the war, considering that at least 2.5 million imperial subjects received crosses in all four classes (first to fourth) in the course of the war.53 While on Viapori, Nicholas inspected the local garrison and visited the second major Orthodox church in Helsinki and environs, the Alexander-Nevsky-Church, the most impressive of the newer Orthodox sacral building in the grand duchy, established in the 1850s for the Russian garrison. Viapori fortress – like the southern coast of Finland in general – formed an integral part of the imperial defence system of Petrograd, the mythicized Peter the Great’s Naval Fortress along the Tallinn-Porkkala line. As an island fortress, it corresponded strongly with the Porkkala and Hanko peninsulas, both heavily fortified with coastal artillery. Massive pendants to the Finnish fortifications had been erected and further developed at the opposite side of the Gulf of Finland, in and around Tallinn.54 Because of its defensive function, Viapori did formally not belong to the state territory of the grand duchy of Finland, but remained – until 1917 – a Russian military exclave. Considering the strategic importance of the fortress and the increasing amount of troops stationed there, the emperor’s inspection visit amounted to a necessity. Its function was not only for the tsar to confer with the local military hierarchy, but also to bolster the troops’ morale, which in early 1915 – despite the exorbitant losses of the first months – was still largely intact and even further reinforced by the conquest of Galicia.55
Having returned to the mainland, Nicholas visited the local military hospitals, first among them a major establishment housed in the Imperial Palace, then the city’s general hospital and further facilities for the war wounded at the railway station.56 His inspection of the care of the war wounded was even more important, as his mother, the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna, was the president of the Russian branch of the International Red Cross, while his wife, the empress Alexandra, and their two daughters – Olga and Tatiana – both worked as trainee nurses in the active care for the wounded.57 In Helsinki, the care for the wounded of the war was instituted by the Finnish Senate and represented by the wife of the general governor, alongside whom Nicholas visited the hospital at the Imperial Palace. After that, the emperor returned to his train, where dinner had been arranged for a larger group of military and civilian dignitaries. Nicholas eventually left Helsinki in the late evening around 10, continuing directly to the imperial family’s residence at Tsarskoye Selo, where the empress and their children already eagerly awaited him.58
The tsar’s visit to his grand duchy’s capital left mixed impressions. Nicholas II seemed greatly pleased with what he considered an extremely successful inspection travel. To his wife, he briefly telegraphed in the midst of the actual inspections on 10 March 1915: ‘Travelled most comfortably. Much warmer [in Helsinki] −3 degrees. Saw all the ships, lots of friends, in very high spirits. Excellent impression. Fondest love. Niki.’59 Considering the existing fears and rather limited expectations, the grand duke’s visit would have to be seen as an accomplishment for the imperial administration. In a society strongly alienated from Russian rule, the carefully staged presence and ambitious public itinerary of the emperor, accompanied by celebrations, parades, and receptions, contributed to the mobilization of Finnish society for a war effort, in which it otherwise only peripherally participated. Negative expectations of the tsar’s arrival, as, for instance, voiced by Jean Sibelius in his diary, only partly applied. ‘The Emperor in the offing’, Sibelius noted. ‘H.M. is forced to travel incognito and strongly guarded. What [an] irony of fate. Criticism of the current.’60 Notwithstanding such scepticism and the all-encompassing military character of the emperor’s visit, Nicholas II had been seen and celebrated by his Finnish subjects, albeit with a certain degree of indifference. Further imperial mobilization could have – at least in principle – built on that, if the war, the ensuing crisis and the empire’s eventual collapse would not have rendered such a process obsolete. In one respect, however, Sibelius was right: the entire position Finland and its grand duke found themselves in amounted to a slightly perverted irony of fate. The immediate pre-war years had undermined a relationship whose legal preconditions, politics, and everyday practices had grown over a century and turned the populace of the grand duchy into a model of imperial arrangement and loyalty to the crown. By the time of Nicholas’s accession to the throne in 1894, hopes for a continuation and even further expansion of Finland’s status in the empire had been high. Almost exactly two decades later, the grand duchy’s almost unrivalled loyalty had been effectively eroded. For Sibelius, this had particularly bitter overtones, as he had himself written a coronation cantata for mixed chorus and orchestra (Kruunajaiskantaatti, 1896) on the occasion of Nicholas’s accession to the throne. The cantata had been commissioned by the University and consisted of two movements entitled: ‘Terve nuori ruhtinas’ (Finnish for: Hail the Young Prince) and ‘Oikeuden varmasa turvassa’ (In the Sure Security of Justice).61 The latter movement’s title almost amounts to a statement on the Russo-Finnish relations in the late nineteenth century. In that, it certainly was symptomatic for both contemporary sensibilities and the heightened expectations in the grand duchy.
As the tsar’s visit illustrated, however, the dynastical and imperial bond between Finland and its grand duke remained largely intact. To paraphrase Ernst Kantorowicz’s dichotomy of the king’s two bodies: while Nicholas II was certainly contaminated by his rigid, at times oppressive policies towards Finland, ‘the king’s other body’ transcended the earthly and continued to serve ‘as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule’.62 In the modern Finnish case, it is obviously less the divine right to rule, but an institutionalized body of quasi-constitutional arrangements that invested the grand duchy’s status in the empire and hence the grand duke’s rule with legitimacy.63 If the emperor’s visit in March 1915 is indicative of anything, it is rather this preserved collective sense of an institutionalized loyalty than the demise of an allegedly doomed empire.
Disintegration: The Russian revolutions and Finland
This phenomenon becomes particularly apparent once it unravels. When the tsar was removed from power and arrested in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917, the residual imperial umbrella that had kept the empire together collapsed irretrievably. On the local level, this became most obvious in the arrest of the top imperial administrators that had governed Finland in the previous years, especially the general governor Seyn and the vice-chairman of the Finnish Senate’s economic division Mikhail Borovitinov, who had been effectively second in rank within the government. Both were arrested by the commander of the Baltic Fleet stationed in and around Helsinki, admiral Andrian Nepenin, the last figure of some imperial authority left in the Finnish capital.64 Despite rumours spreading through Tallinn, the political elites in Helsinki were left in the dark about the revolutionary developments in Petrograd. On 16 March 1917, right after the arrest of Seyn and Borovitinov and their transport to imprisonment in Petrograd, Nepenin invited representatives of the major Finnish parties aboard his flagship – the Krechet – and briefed them about the revolution in Petrograd, the abdication of Nicholas II, and the establishment of the Provisional Government. A brief anti-Russian uprising ensued, killing almost one hundred Russian soldiers and – most prominently – Nepenin himself. Within a few days, however, the rioting was contained and the remaining Finnish authorities went about re-establishing control over the city. Without a legitimate government in Finla nd, the main parties of the country agreed to push for the reinstatement of the old legal privileges of the grand duchy’s autonomy, including the reinstatement of the Eduskunta, but symptomatically not for independence from Russia. Their demands were swiftly met by the Provisional Government. Along with the Act of Confirmation of the Constitution of the Grand Duchy of Finland and Its Full Implementation, decreed on 20 March 1917, the government commissioned a new governor general for Finland, Mikhail A. Stakhovich, a former member of the State Council, who had been one of the most influential opponents of the so-called Russification policies of the previous years and hence enjoyed a degree of creditability. His governorship was shrewdly seconded by appointing the Helsinki politician and businessman Carl Enckell, a fluent speaker of Russian with an aborted career in the imperial military, as minister state secretary with the Petrograd government. Enckell replaced a hardliner among Russian Finland politicians, Vladimir A. Markov, who had been Borovitinov’s predecessor prior to the war before being moved to the Russian capital again. It is only symptomatic for the bloodletting of the revolutionary period in Russia, especially among the imperial elites, that the three highest-ranking government officials of the grand duchy, Seyn as governor as well as Markov and Borovitinov, lost their lives in the troubles of the revolution, Seyn and Borovitinov presumably in 1917 or 1918, Markov in 1919.65
Tuomo Polvinen, followed by Irina Novikova on the basis of Russian sources, has illustrated the difficulties the Provisional Government had in containing a probable Finnish gravitation towards independent statehood.66 The political parties in Finland, however, were confronted with a situation they had not necessarily anticipated. Even throughout the periods of enhanced Russian control and the war, demands for all-out independence had never been more than a fringe phenomenon. In the turbulent revolutionary situation of early 1917, this changed, even if not immediately. There were strong, if not entirely convincing constitutional and international legal grounds on which the grand duchy – without its grand duke – could consider itself a sovereign entity, sovereignty having passed from the grand duke to the Finnish parliament. This was the argument of the more radical majority of socialists and nationalist activists in Finnish political circles. Opposed to that, the largely bourgeois-conservative milieu of politics advocated what Juho K. Paasikivi labelled a ‘policy of conciliation’ (myöntymyksen politiikka). Constitutionally, the more moderate jurists – like Rafael Erich – considered government authority to have passed on to the Provisional Government, not a social democratically dominated Finnish parliament.67 Their evaluation of the legal situation as well reflected their preference for a somewhat slower, more evolutionary resolution of the Russian-Finnish dilemma.
Evolution, equally preferred by the Provisional Government, was not to be had, though. The so-called July Days experienced by the Petrograd government seemed to foreshadow the radicalization of the revolution in favour of the government’s opponents on the left – the Bolsheviks – and the right – Russian anti-revolutionary circles in both politics and the military.68 With an end to the Provisional Government seemingly in sight, the Finnish socialists attempted to push further than Finnish politics ever had. On 8 June 1917 the Finnish Senate tabled a compromise proposal within parliament, intended to reconcile Finnish national aspirations with Petrograd’s interests in keeping together an empire still at war. In the two previous terms, the Eduskunta had been dominated by the Finnish Social Democratic Party, which at the last election in 1916 had gained more than 47 per cent of the vote and an absolute majority – 103 – of the 200 parliamentary seats. On the basis of the Senate’s more moderate proposal, the social democratic leadership around the Eduskunta’s spokesman Kullervo Manner and the party’s absolute majority in parliament established a much more radical law on supreme power – valtalaki in Finnish – that effectively parliamentarized the grand duchy. According to the ratified constitutional law, supreme governmental authority was supposed to rest not with Petrograd or the Finnish Senate, but with parliament, which as well received the right to convene and dissolve itself. Only foreign representation and military affairs were retained in Petrograd, but even that obviously provisionally.69 Simultaneously, the socialists in Finland increasingly gravitated to the Bolshevist faction of the Russian Civil War, primarily because Lenin was prepared to grant Finland independence unconditionally and immediately – and Kerensky and the Provisional Government not.70
Against Finnish expectations, the Petrograd government, however, recovered from the unrest of the July uprising and further challenges to its authority, with Kerensky as the new prime minister at least temporarily stabilizing the situation. In the Finnish question, Kerensky’s first move – in late July 1917 – was the dissolution of the Finnish parliament and the imposition of new elections for October.71 Kerensky’s decision was not only intended to recover the government’s authority in Finland, but also due to the acute context of the war, in which revolutionary Russia faced mounting German operations to destabilize the (former) imperial borderlands. Berlin’s Randstaatenpolitik began eating away at the borders of the imploding empire, first in the South, then increasingly in the North, especially in the Baltic area. In that conception, Finland could – and eventually did – easily function as a springboard, its geostrategic location vis-à-vis Petrograd central for any German offensive in the imperial North-East.72 Containing the Finnish independence process and securing the country militarily therefore remained central to Kerensky’s and the Provisional Government’s strategic and security-political premises.73 By the time of the new elections in October 1917, however, both the Finnish and the Russian situation had changed drastically. The conservative-bourgeois-agrarian coalition managed to obtain a majority in the Eduskunta against an increased vote for the Social Democrats. The swiftly arranged new proposals, though, envisaged to normalize and consolidate Finland’s relations to Russia, became obsolete while still under deliberation.74 Ironically, the newly appointed governor general in Finland, Nikolai V. Nekrasov, and minister state secreta ry Enckell were literally overtaken by developments, while travelling to Petrograd with the new parliament’s proposals in hand. On their arrival on 7 November, the revolution had already swept away the Provisional Government, leaving Finland – more by accident than design – effectively master of its own fate. A week later, the Bolshevik government’s anti-imperialism resulted in the public declaration of the right of self-determination, allowing for the secession not only for Finland, but ‘for the Peoples of Russia’ in general. Against such a backdrop, the Eduskunta on 15 November, this time united, assumed the powers of the sovereign, whose status had remained contested since the abdication of the tsar. On 6 December 1917, parliament eventually ratified a proposal set up by the country’s new Senate (led by Svinhufvud) and declared Finland’s independence.75 As David Kirby has early on observed, the idea and, in fact, the entire process of independence originated less with genuine Finnish nationalism, but would rather have to be seen as ‘an exploitation of the opportunities which war and revolution had suddenly opened up’.76 It effectively amounted to filling the very vacuum in terms of power and legal authority that the disappearance of imperial rule had left.
While Petrograd increasingly descended into all-out revolutionary war between the differing parties, Finnish society as well experienced an hitherto unknown polarization. The period of relative limbo was nearing an end, both in terms of the country’s relations to revolutionary Russia and in the increasingly escalating domestic conditions that, in many ways, prefigured the Civil War of the turn of the year 1917/18. The escalation within Finnish society of early 1918, the – by any given standards – exceedingly bloody Finnish Civil War, should thereby not be seen as without its own rather specific context. Against the backdrop of both mid- and short-term developments in society, the conflict appears if not unavoidable, than at least historically explicable. Both Risto Alapuro and Pertti Haapala have, albeit with apparently different emphases, forcefully pointed to the socio-economic implications of the situation in Finland, preconditioning social conflict in a society affected by war, mass mobilization, and mounting class disparities.77 In a dense, psycho-historically informed reconstruction of the escalation since especially the summer and autumn of 1917, Juha Siltala has impressively recreated the dynamic of mutual suspicion, hatred, and retribution in the Finnish Civil War.78 Russian imperial authority had somewhat contained this dynamic until the end. It was only against the backdrop of the sudden vanishing of empire that antagonistic preconditions and divergent interests within Finnish society surfaced and battled one another on the seemingly existential question of the country’s post-imperial future. Despite manifold differences in character and concrete make-up, in that respect, Finland closely resembles comparable cases of societal conflict in the wider region. Just as the Baltic area in general, it would have to be regarded as part of an almost all-encompassing war and conflict zone in Central and Eastern Europe that Robert Gerwarth has rightly identified rather as an element of the First World War, not – or at least not necessarily – as its aftermath.79