Finnish Civil War - Background

Background

The main factors behind the Finnish Civil War were World War I, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the February and October Revolutions of 1917. These events led to the formation of a large power vacuum and subsequent power struggle in Eastern Europe. The autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, as a part of the Russian Empire, became a part of the vacuum and the struggle for power. Although actual combat didn't spread to Finland until 1918, the war between Germany and Russia had a major impact on the Finns from its beginning in 1914.

Both the Russian and German empires had political, economic and military interests in the Finnish region. The military significance of the Grand Duchy of Finland had been increasing for the Russians from the mid-19th century with the rising tensions and competition among the major European powers. The northwestern territory was part of the gateway and buffer zone (with Estonia) to and from the imperial Russian capital Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), via the Gulf of Finland towards the Kronstadt naval base and the Karelian Isthmus. The Grand Duchy had also become a vital source of raw materials, industrial products, food, and labour for the growing capital city of Russia.

From the beginning of World War I the German Empire had seen Eastern Europe—mainly Russia—as a major source of vital products and raw materials for sustaining the capacity of the nation, both during the war and in the future. Her resources overstretched by the two-front war, Germany pursued a policy of breaking up Russia from inside by providing financial support both to revolutionary groups such as the Bolsheviks and separatist factions such as the Finnish activists leaning toward Germanism. A total of 25 million German marks were spent on Russia. Controlling the Finnish area would allow the German army to enter Russia at Petrograd and to penetrate northeast, towards the Kola Peninsula, an area rich with raw materials for the mining industry. Finland itself had large ore reserves and a well-developed timber industry.

From 1809 to 1898, a period called Pax Russica, Finnish-Russian relations had been exceptionally peaceful and stable compared with other parts of the Russian Empire. Russia's defeat in the Crimean war, in the 1850s, led to attempts to speed up the modernization of the country. This caused more than 50 years of positive economic, industrial, cultural and educational development in the Grand Duchy of Finland. The improvement in the status of the Finnish language was especially striking. These developments also encouraged Finnish nationalism and cultural unity through the birth of the Fennoman movement, which bound the Finns to the domestic governmental system and led to the idea that the Finnish Grand Duchy was an increasingly autonomous part of the Russian Empire.

In 1899 the Russian Empire initiated a policy of integration through Russification in the Finnish Grand Duchy. By that time the military and strategic situation of Russia had become more difficult due of the rise of Germany and Japan, and Russian central administration and the idea of Pan-Slavism had grown in Saint Petersburg. As a consequence the Russian Tsar and his military leaders had attempted, since the 1870s, to unite their large, heterogeneous empire, described as a Russian multinational dynastic union.

The Russification of Finland and the crisis of governmental leadership in the country, following the 1899 imperial order, was the result of a collision between the ideologies of peripheral authority (the Grand Duchy as a state of the Russian empire but a separate part of the Russian governmental system) and central power (an undivided Russia dominated by Saint Petersburg). Russification aimed to increase military and administrative control over the Grand Duchy. The Finns called the integration policy "the first period of oppression, 1899–1905."

After 1899 Finnish-Russian relations worsened, and plans for disengagement from Russia or sovereignty for Finland were drawn up for the first time. This led to the rise of a host of different political and economic groups in the country. The most radical one, the activist movement which included anarchistic groups both from the working class and the Swedish-speaking intelligentsia, engaged in terrorist attacks. During World War I and the rise of Germanism, the Svecomans began covert collaboration with Imperial Germany, and from 1915–1917 a "Jäger" (Jääkärit) battalion consisting of 1,900 Finnish volunteers was trained in Germany. Conversely, a few thousand Finns sympathetic to Russia joined the Tsar's army in 1914.