Socialism in Finland
[1] Yrjö Mäkelin would become the chairman of the labour movement in the 1890s,[2] and would found Kansan Lehti, a socialist newspaper in December 1898.
[1] This led to the Second Workers' Association Assembly being held in Tampere, in which more socialist ideas were adopted to the belief of the labour unions.
[7] The Social Democrats grew fast in popularity and were unordinary compared to the Russian Socialists, who were forced to operate underground.
[8] All camps of the political spectrum grew to disdain the Russian Governorship, especially the nationalists, leading to the assassination of Nikolai Bobrikov by Eugen Schauman.
On 30 October, a general strike was proclaimed in Helsinki's Senate Square and in Tampere's Keskustori by workers, who were later joined by students.
However the general strike had moved the Social Democrats towards the left with the influx of new people sympathetic to the cause, in which the moderates and unionists became the minority.
[8] Workers' strike committees were established in Tampere, and across many cities "street parliaments" became a common occurrence.
[10] National Guards [fi] were created in 1905 as a united front of workers and students against the Russian Governorship.
[12] The Red and White Guards were dissolved following the end of the general strike, and would not come back officially until the Finnish Civil War.
On 29 January 1918, Red Guards and radicals in the Social Democratic Party succeeded in a plot of occupying the Senate House in Helsinki.
[13] The Red Government would silence criticism by banning anti-revolutionary newspapers such as Det Vita Finland and Valkoinen Suomi.
Following the capitulation of the Red Government, several prominent socialists would flee Finland to Soviet Russia in fears of persecution.
Sometimes landowners, police officers, industrialists, civil servants and teachers were also executed by the Red Guards.
In the Soviet Union, with Stalin's Great Purge, the influence of the SKP was significantly limited, as leaders and members of the Communist Party were executed/killed.
[20] Olavi Laiho, who led the Forest Guards in Turku,[21] was a communist that spied for the Soviet Union, and also the last Finn to be executed.
[20] In Tampere, a socialist youth resistance movement would oppose the war by performing domestic terrorism against trains and public infrastructure.
The Social Democrats began to skew their foreign policy to be more favourable to the Eastern Bloc and the USSR, in hopes of warming relations with the Soviet Union.
[26] The Social Democrats, from the 1950s to the 1960s would cooperate with the National Coalition Party, this phenomenon would be called the Aseveliakseli [fi], or the Brothers-in-Arms Axis.
[28] The Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL) was founded as a big tent socialist political party after the Continuation War,[29] when Communism had been forcefully relegalized by the Soviet Union as per the stipulations of the Moscow Armistice.
