Symbolic Start of Finnish Civil War

Date: January 26, 1918 • Location: Kallio, Finland

This milestone marked the outbreak and beginning of this historic period, which spanned 1918.

Finnish Civil War: A group of Red Guards hangs a red lantern atop the tower of Helsinki Workers' Hall to symbolically mark the start of the war.

The Finnish Civil War was fought in 1918 for the leadership and control of recently independent Finland between White Finland and the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic. The clashes took place in the context of the national, political, and social turmoil caused by World War I in Europe. The belligerents were the paramilitary Red Guards, led by a section of the Social Democratic Party with backup of the Russian bolsheviks, and the paramilitary White Guards of the senate. General C. G. E. Mannerheim led the White Guards with major assistance by both the Finnish Jäger Battalion trained in Germany and from March-April 1918 by the German Imperial Army, along the German goal to control Fennoscandia and Petrograd of Russia. The Reds, composed of industrial and agrarian working class people, controlled the cities and industrial centres of southern Finland. The Whites, composed of land owners and the middle and upper class, controlled the rural central and northern Finland.