Tepora, Tuomas and Roselius, Aapo (eds). The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 574 was a new determination to choose practical philanthropy over party politics. Lastly, as Hartnett’s rigorous use of gender analysis highlights, Figner both defied expectations of her sex, but also exploited them to enable her survival and success as a revolutionary. While her early life and career as a terrorist is a compelling tale, Figner’s experiencesafterherreleasefromprisonarealsoanimportantandilluminating element of the biography. Figner was elected to the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies (ahead of Gor´kii, Kropotkin and Lenin), joined the Council of the Republic/ Pre-parliament and was a member of the Constituent Assembly. She also dedicated herself to promoting a vision of a humane revolutionary society by forming and working on committees to improve women’s rights, to help the starving and to support political prisoners. Lastly, she helped preserve the history of the revolutionary movement by co-founding Culture and Liberty, overseeing the publication of her own considerable memoirs and publishing numerous works on other revolutionaries. On her death she merited a halfpage obituary on page 4 of Pravda. Although Figner was a famous and politically active figure throughout her life, historians have overlooked her part in the events of 1917 and after. Hartnett’s biography is an excellent and comprehensive effort to correct this situation, but there is always the danger that once one book has been written about a prominent woman, no further works are published. N. K. Krupskaia has not had a new English-language biography since Robert McNeal’s Bride of the Revolution (London, 1973). The greatest achievement of Hartnett’s impressive work would be that it encourages further study of a woman who did not simply survive the Revolution, but lived it. School of History and Anthropology K. Turton Queen’s University, Belfast Tepora, Tuomas and Roselius, Aapo (eds). The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy. History of Warfare, 101. Brill, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2014. xii + 454 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. €162.00. The Finnish Civil War of 1918 was one of the bloody sideshows of the Russian Revolution. The conflict was a national tragedy characterized by reprisals and terror which were high even by the standards of wartime European paramilitary violence. Fresh English-language academic literature on the war has been regrettably scarce since Anthony F. Upton’s The Finnish Revolution (Minnesota, MN, 1980), which placed its emphasis mainly on the portrayal of the vanquished Red side. During recent decades, domestic Finnish research on the war has REVIEWS 575 gone further, with the new cultural history of warfare augmenting previous descriptions based on political and social history. The new Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy, published by Brill, provides the international public with a successful compilation of these accomplishments. Edited by Tuomas Tepora and Aapo Roselius, the book is structurally similar to Brill’s earlier magnum opus, Finland in World War II (2012). The book includes contributions from established old-school historians as well as from the younger generation of researchers. The articles are thematically divided in three parts. The first focuses on the political and social history of the war; the second on the cultural history of war and individual war experience; and the third on memory politics. While the Civil War may still be a matter of controversy among Finnish pundits and the general public, the articles indicate a consensus on the political and social background of the war amongst historians. This is particularly evident in the opening articles by Professor Pertti Haapala and psycho-historian Juha Siltala, which augment each other quite nicely. Whereas Haapala portrays the structural disintegration of Finnish society, Siltala offers a presentation of the mentalities of the working class and bourgeoisie, as well as the emotional reasons for the vicious circle of violence. These explanations have already become part of the Finnish historiographical canon. They are followed by Marko Tikka’s equally systematic analysis of wartime operations and organized terror amongst Finnish Reds and Whites, whereas Roselius covers the subsequent ‘tribal wars’ waged by the victorious Whites in Estonia, Ingria and East Karelia in 1919–21. Roselius also approaches the symbolism and ideology of the White irredentist campaigns against Bolshevik Russia. Well...