Finland did not have a standing army or a long military history in 1918. Apart from a small minority, the soldiers fighting for Red and White Finland were hastily mobilized citizen soldiers, that presented a microcosm of the Finnish people. People from all walks of life participated in the war. Over the course of the war, the Reds and the Whites would both raise armies of roughly 100,000 combatants each, for a grand total of 200,000.[1] Approximately 6.5% of the entire Finnish population took up arms at some point in the Finnish Civil War.

Neither army was a cohesive movement. Divisions and factions existed within both the Reds and Whites, and would at times massively restrict the operations of either side. Both the Reds and the Whites would also have to deal with issues relating to the Finnish people themselves, such as ethnicity, language, gender, and national identity. How they dealt with these issues depicts a great deal about the culture and politics of both sides.

The majority of the fighting, and dying, was done by Finns, but they were joined in the conflict by a number of foreign powers and their citizens. These foreign powers would have a massive influence on the outcome of the war. Foreign intervention took many forms: ideological influence, diplomatic maneuvering, indvidual volunteers in the war and full scale military intervention.

Click Below for an analysis of the different armies and of the issues that they faced:

Citations

[1] Pertti Haapala and Marko Tikka, “Revolution, Civil War, and Terror in Finland in 1918,” in War in Peace – Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, ed. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73.

Banner Photo – Officers of the Whites 1^st Grenadier Regiment. Credit: Vapriikki Photo Archives