Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic

From Freepedia

The Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic was a short-lived socialist state created after a socialist revolution on January 18 1918 that occurred in Finland in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution was led by the dominant militant faction of the Social Democratic Party of Finland led by Otto Ville Kuusinen. A government, the Council of People’s Representatives, was formed which undertook the negotiation of a treaty of friendship with Soviet Russia which was finalized on March 1st and signed in Petrograd. The Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic only existed in the southern part of Finland and ceased to exist in April 1918 when its army, the Red Guards, was defeated in the Finnish Civil War by the White Guards supported by Imperial Germany.

The socialist republic's programme and draft constitution, written by Kuusinen, was heavily influenced by social democratic ideals; by the generally liberal ideas of the United States Declaration of Independence, and by the Swiss cantonal system. The main goal was social reform, and the declared means to achieve this was parliamentary democracy based on the principle of sovereignty of the people and of national self-determination. Bolshevist thoughts such as proletarian dictatorship and widespread nationalisation were not parts of their program. The rebellion in Finland thus differed from the October Revolution and from the various uprisings on the European continent that followed the world war such as Béla Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Spartacists in Berlin, or the Bavarian Soviet Republic in southern Germany. The embryonic republic was heavily dependant on Soviet Russia for support and, had it survived, it may have taken a more radical trajectory under the influence of its Bolshevik neighbour and under pressure by Bolshevik sympathisers within the Social Democratic Party (including Kuusinen himself), the trade unions and the Red Guards. A few months following the defeat of the republic in the civil war in which much of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party was killed, the party split with a faction of refugees led by Kuusinen forming the Communist Party of Finland in exile in Moscow .