Finland Declares Independence
Finland declared independence on 6 December 1917, five weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. It had been an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire since 1809, with its own laws, currency, postal service and diet, and had never been part of Russia proper. Russification measures from 1899 had eroded that autonomy and produced a national movement in response, including the assassination of the governor-general in 1904 and a general strike in 1905. The February Revolution of 1917 removed the tsar, who was also the Grand Duke, and with him the constitutional basis of Russian authority. The Finnish parliament passed a law claiming supreme power in July; Kerensky's provisional government dissolved it. The Bolshevik coup removed even that. The parliament declared independence, and Lenin's government recognised it on 31 December, consistent with its stated principle of national self-determination and with the calculation that a Finnish revolution would follow. It did, and it failed. A civil war broke out in January 1918 between the socialist Reds, who held the industrial south and Helsinki with Russian support, and the Whites under Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, backed by German troops. The Whites won in May after about four months. Some 36,000 people died, the great majority not in combat but in executions and in prison camps where thousands starved. The country became a republic in 1919 rather than the German-ruled monarchy briefly planned, and the civil war's divisions shaped its politics for decades. Mannerheim commanded again in the Winter War of 1939 and became president in 1944. Finland is the only country bordering the Soviet Union that was neither occupied nor absorbed.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Political
