On this day in 1918, the Finnish People's Delegation declared a socialist workers' republic (known "Red Finland"), at the start of the Finnish Civil War. The burgeoning working class movement was crushed by imperialist German forces.
Prior to 1917, Finland had been ruled as a Grand Duchy, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Tsarist state in the wake of February Revolution and a long-term increase in nationalist sentiment, Finland declared independence on December 4th, 1917, formally recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks on December 31st.
Due to industrialized Finland having a strong revolutionary labor movement, conservative and proletarian forces were immediately thrown into conflict.
Red Guard paramilitary units representing the labor movement found themselves in a cycle of escalation with loyalist "White" Guards, culminating in a mass uprising of Reds in Helsinki on January 27th, 1918, marking the start of revolution. The following day, the Finnish People's Delegation was formed by members of the Social Democratic Party. Bourgeois forces fled to Vaasa, where they set up their own "White Senate".
The war saw the Whites, under the leadership of General Mannerheim, receive support from the German Empire, which was more well-established than the Reds' primary ally, the newly-created Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following an imperialist intervention by Germany on the side of the Whites in March 1918, the war ended in defeat for the Reds in May. Over 12,000 people perished from starvation and hunger while imprisoned in White-operated POW camps, and reparations were not paid to former victims of the White Terror until 1973.
Lessons of the Finnish Revolution of 1917–1918
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Currently I'm at 12.4 and I started in the middle of December, it's great really
it is! i heard it mentioned on a podcast and went "hang on, this sounds kinda cool. i'll check it out sometime," didn't think about it for months and then read the whole thing in a few weeks
i am going to keep boosting it here because i think so many people on hexbear and lemmygrad would enjoy it
The Kreuzung section felt a bit slow to me, but perhaps I read it too slow lol
What do you think of Violet Lehner?
kreuzung worked for me but i could see it dragging given the new pov character and relative lack of connection to prior stuff. i know people have problems with the first bit with elena and gertrude for similar reasons
i think it's fascinating (and manages to make more sense than i would have expected, given the way she plays the faction that's into all the esotericism and her family connections) how she manages to rise to power as a relatively open trans woman within the fascists ranks, and the way she twists her thinking to justify that is interesting. she's not a character i think a lot about but i think she's a good villain
my favorite characters are all the super sympathetic ones lmao. homa, shalikova and maryam, elena, etc. i just want all the girls to be happy!
Ya the cognitive dissonance with Violet is interesting to say the least. Right now I'm when Aatto got captured by the Brigand.
When I got started I didn't expect this amount of trans people in the cast, really fun lol
Didn't expect Elena to progress like this, nor Shalikova, Zachikova is also interesting, and Arabella is fun to say the least. I like the dynamic between Aaliyah and the Captain, even if they had a rough start to say the least
i love aaliyah and ulyana so much lmao. arabella and zachikova are also super cool. aatto is fascinating. what a weird fucked up girl
my theory is that every unjust depths character is a lesbian unless there's an important reason for that to not be the case, and then the author flips a coin for them all to decide whether they're trans or not. that might actually undersell the number of trans characters though, it might be over 50% even without the possibility that more characters are trans and it just hasn't been mentioned yet. i was talking with someone about this and karuniya's basically the only major character i feel 100% sure is cis, because murati is worried about getting her pregnant