Finland’s Revolution
The forgotten Finnish Revolution has perhaps more lessons for us today than events in 1917 Russia.
In the past century, histories of the 1917 revolution have usually focused on Petrograd and Russian socialists. But the Russian empire was predominantly made up of non-Russians — and the upheavals in the imperial periphery were often just as explosive as in the center.
Tsarism’s overthrow in February 1917 unleashed a revolutionary wave that immediately engulfed all of Russia. Perhaps the most exceptional of these insurgencies was the Finnish Revolution, which one scholar has called “Europe’s most clear-cut class war in the twentieth century.”
The Finnish Exception
The Finns were unlike any other nation under tsarist rule. Annexed from Sweden in 1809, Finland was allowed governmental autonomy, political freedom, and eventually even its own democratically elected parliament. Though the tsar attempted to limit this autonomy, political life in Helsinki resembled Berlin far more than Petrograd.
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