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Originally Posted by Tegyrius
Good stuff, Medic. Thanks for putting this together!
Other than polite avoidance of the topic, does the Finnish Civil War have any lingering effects on modern Finnish culture or politics?
- C.
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Unless you count the right-wing hardliners, no. Some of the Finnish rednecks tend to call everyone on the left a commie still, but after the WW2, communism is not banned anymore. Too bad, that applies to nazism - just before the previous parliamentary elections in Finland some people tried to form the Finnish National-Socialist Worker's Party, but as far as I recall, they didn't get the 5000 signatures required for forming a political party in Finland.
Most of my relatives were Reds, though more of the social democrat lines than hard-line communists. There is more to the matter in the later posts, but I can say that even though the nation pulled together regardless of political beliefs during the WW2, there are known cases of people having borne grudge towards those who fought on the other side in the Civil War even until the WW2 and acted upon those grudges when opportunity came. One such case was my maternal grandmother's brother, having been a Red in the Civil War, vanished during the war. as far as we know from the war records and some unofficial statements by men from his company, he was killed by an officer, ex-White, from the neighbouring municipality.
My generation of Finns are pretty open about the matter, but had you asked my grandmother when she was still alive, she would probably thrown you out.
Actually, after the Civil War, a huge number of Reds were interned at several garrisons (and some of them were executed), including that of Hennala in Lahti, which is in Southern Finland about 100km from the capital, Helsinki. A relative of mine, who had been Red in the war, was taken there after the fighting was over and he had surrendered, and they stood the prisoners on the field outside the old Russian-built barracks. My relative saw Whites erecting tables at the edge of the field so he went and asked if they were serving food. The reply was curt, 'No, we're cataloquing the prisoners. You are prisoner number one. Name?'. Eventually released from the prison camp, he also became the first member of the sports club 'Leppävaaran Sisu', which was a covert organization for the leftists.