October 14, 1920. End of the Heimosodat

On this day in 1920, Finland and the Soviet Union entered into the Treaty of Tartu which fixed Finland's first post war borders with Soviet Russia.  This came in the context of ending the Heimosodat, a Finnish sponsored effort in the Finnish regions of Russia that sought to join the land inhabited by Russian Baltic Finns with Finland.

The story is complicated as the entire story involves a series of wars including wars of independence in neighboring states that were formerly part of Imperial Russia.  In some instances Finnish volunteers sought to aid independence movements in hopes of a friendly state being established, in others they hoped for outright annexation of Finnish lands that lay inside of Russia's boundaries.  The entire matter demonstrated, as the wars of the Poles we've recently dealt with, that former European imperial boundaries were rarely ethnic ones.

Finland itself occupies about 60% of the landmass inhabited by the Baltic Finns.  Estonia is the second state that has a Baltic Finn population, with Estonians also being Baltic Finns, but Baltic Finns speaking a branch of the overall Finnish language.  Finns from Finland sent volunteer units into Estonia to support it independence movement, which was successful at the time, a fairly remarkable thing to do as it was more or less concurrent with the Finnish Civil War.

Finnish volunteers in Estonia.

More serious, from a Russian prospective, were a series of Finnish supported efforts to secure the annexation of the large Finnish landmass to Finland's east.  This lead to a complicated series of wars, the Heimosodat, that are now largely forgotten outside the region but which form an important aspect of the situation from that point forward.

From March 1918 until October 1918, Finnish volunteers attempted, and nearly succeeded, in taking Karelia from Russia.  They were defeated not by Russian troops, with Russia collapsing into civil war at the time, but by British ones who feared the Germans securing access to the White Sea.  Conservative Finns, the Finnish Whites, had support from Imperial Germany and the British saw the Finnish effort in that context. British efforts successfully caused the Finnish advance to fall apart and the Finns ultimately retreated. Following that, the British attempted unsuccessfully to sponsor Karelian independence.

Murmansk Legion, a British organized and equipped Finnish unit in Karelia that fought the Finnish volunteers in that region. The unit was made up of, in part, refugee Finnish Red Guards, making it essentially a Finnish communist unit organized to fight the Finnish whites in Karelia.  When the British left Russia in 1919, many of its members went to Canada, with some securing reentrance to a less than enthused Finland. Some officers stayed in Soviet Russia and would later fight for the reds in the Spanish Civil War.

Also in 1918 Finnish volunteers attempted to annex Petsamo, the large northern landmass bordering the Arctic Sea, but were also pushed back by the British.

Finnish volunteers in Petsamo in 1918.

Finnish volunteers tried again for Karelia in 1919 in the Aunus expedition, now that Russia was fully in turmoil. The plan depended upon a Karelian uprising that didn't materialize, and after two months it retreated back into Finland.

In 1920 they also tried for Petsamo again, but were pushed back this time by Soviet troops.

In 1920 an uprising in North Ingria, the southern part of Karelia, ended up establishing a putative independent state that had the goal of being annexed to Finland, but which would have required the balance of Karelia to join Finland in order to succeed.

The Treaty of Tartu largely followed the former Imperial Russian boundaries of the Grand Duchy of Finland, excepting that the Finns received a portion of Petsamo including a port, which had been promised to them by the Imperial Russian government in 1864. They withdrew from some territory taken in in the other expeditions and abandoned support for North Ingria.  The treaty largely held until the Soviet's unwarranted invasion in 1939 although the Finns supported an uprising in Karelia in 1921-22 which severely strained their relations with the USSR at the time.

The entire matter is another example of the mess of imperial boundaries and the complicated nature of the break apart of imperial regimes.  By and large, Finns who dreamed of incorporating all Finnish lands into their newly independent state were justified in that goal.  Imperial Germany ironically ended up supporting their aspirations and the British helped crush them. German support of Finnish whites helped prevent Finland from becoming a Soviet state that would have been annexed to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but its probable that had the Finns succeeded in establishing themselves beyond their imperial boundaries the Soviets would have taken that territory back in any event, and perhaps the rest of Finland as well.  At any rate, a good deal of Finnish ethnic territory remains outside of modern Finland today, and the territory, such as it was, that was gained by Finland in the Treaty of Tartu was lost at the end of the Continuation War.

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: 1919 Advice About Substituting Foods in U.S. to Help Needy Children Abroad

A look at the immediate post World War One World:

1919 Advice About Substituting Foods in U.S. to Help Needy Children Abroad

It's interesting how, in our American memory, when World War One ended, it just ended.  Looking back we just recall the end of the war as the turn to peace and all that was good about that.

But in reality, millions of Europeans were refugees.  We've published some photos of them here recently.  A lot of the French were attempting to return to their homes only to find them destroyed.  French farmers who had been driven out of their lands due to the fighting returned in many cases to find a totally altered landscape (a landscape that we'll be posting some images of here soon).

And this wasn't limited to Europe.  In the Middle East millions were adrift.  An entire people, the Armenians, had been in peril since the beginning of the war and many had been victims of genocide.  Those who had survived had been driven east and west, with some ending up as far away as the United States.  In the region of their homeland, the opportunity to break free from former colonial masters meant border combat with other regions doing the same which were their neighbors.

Fighting raged on elsewhere also.  In Germany fighting went on in individual cities and towns over what Germany was to become.  Germany had been on the knife's edge of starvation in the Fall of 1918 and now that the war had ended, the situation was somewhat alleviated, but only somewhat.  On Germany's borders a war raged with Polish revolutionaries, supported by a newly born Poland, over whether certain regions would be Polish or German.  Likewise, the Poles were fighting off a Czech invasion from the south over which border regions would be Polish or Czech. At the same time the Poles were fighting the Ukrainians over large sections of their frontier due to the rarely noted ethnic fact that the Poles simply grade into the Ukrainians, and the two people are closely related.  And the Poles were fighting off a Red Army invasion as well, part of an effort to impose a Communist regime on Poland and whose Red Army commander, Trotsky, imagined might carry his Red forces all the way to Berlin.

Russia was in an enormously violent civil war, which the United States and the other Allies were participating in, in varying degrees. And not doing too well at the century removed moment either.  The Russian Civil War would prove to be a human tragedy of epic proportions, in no small part because both sides became vicious in regard to the other, and the Communist became genocidal nearly from the onset.  Millions would die in that war, following the Great War in which millions of Russians had died.  Millions more would die due to Communist violence, purges and acts of intentional starvation after the Civil War ended in a tragedy that, for the Russians, started in 1914 and would really only abate just before 1950.

The Reds were also fighting in the Baltics, with all the Baltic nations struggling to break away from the Russian Empire, aided in their struggle mostly by the British, but to a degree by the Finns, who had succeeded in that effort and who had fought their own, brief, very violent, civil war in the closing days of World War One.  All over western Russia and what had been parts of the Russian Empire stranded German troops had yet to return home, with some them still serving in combat at that against Red forces they'd helped come about through their late Imperial government's ill thought out intrigues. 

In a bit of a foretaste of what was to come for all of the remaining European colonial powers after World War Two, the United Kingdom was suffering a rebellion in its oldest colony, Ireland.  The UK was pursuing a policy of ignoring the newly formed Irish Dail, but the IRA wasn't ignoring the UK and had already commenced a terrorist rebellion against it.

Things were a mess.

The Finnish Civil War Ends

On this day in 1918 the brief but violent Finnish Civil War ended.

 German soldiers in Helsinki following the surrender of the Reds there.

Finnish Reds and Finnish Anarchists were already defeated in the field.  No peace treaty was concluded, nor could there have really been one. The end of the war came with Finnish Whites taking over Fort Ino from the Russians.

The war had been very violent, to say the least, with executions on both sides.  The Whites had been substantially assisted by German intervention, and the Germans remained in the country and would indeed find themselves fighting in the Balkans post World War One.

German Army lands in Finland at the request of the Finnish Parliament

Gustav Adolf Joachim Rüdiger Graf von der Goltz, German infantry commander.  He'd remain in the region until June 1919, leading elements of the Freikorps that were very closely connected with Germany against the Reds, and others,  in Finland, Latvia and Estonia.

The Finnish parliament had been driving out of Helsinki by Finnish reds.  That resulted in its request for German assistance.  Accordingly, on this day in 1918 German troops landed on the Finnish mainland and would soon commence advancing on Helsinki.  The German force consisted of the : 95. Reserve Infantry Brigade and 2. Guards Cavalry Brigade, augmented by additional German support, naval and artillery forces.  About 10,000 troops in all.

This demonstrates how the Germans remained capable of being diverted at the same time they were suffering devastating losses in the West.  Perhaps this commitment made more sense, however, in that Finland falling to the Reds would have been a disaster for the Germans, and ironically the world as well.

Which shows us how complicated things had become by this point. The Germans would actually fight on in the region after World War One ended, with troops who had volunteered to do so in a thin guise of their being Freikorps.  Things were, by this point, really confused.