Oskari Tokoi

Oskari Tokoi as speaker of the Finnish Parliament in a painting by Albert Gebhard (1915).

Antti Oskari Tokoi (originally Antti Oskari Hirvi ; born May 15, 1873 in Kannus , Finland , † September 4, 1963 in Fitchburg , Massachusetts ) was a Finnish politician . Coming from the labor movement , he made a parliamentary career before the First World War as a representative of the Social Democratic Party of Finland up to and including parliamentary speaker. After the Russian February Revolution in 1917 he became the head of government of Finland, which was becoming independent. His government could not ensure internal peace and broke because of the unresolved relationship with Russia . The following year he was a member of the People's Commissariat in revolutionary Finland during the civil war . After the war ended, he fled to Russia and then spent the rest of his life in exile in the United States .

Origin and young years in America

Oskari Tokoi was born in the western Finnish region of Ostrobothnia in a farm called Tokoi , whose name he later took as his family name. From this region, there was a particularly strong emigration to America , and also Tokoi, which only a primary education had received, moved in 1891 to the United States and took his first job in the coal mines of Wyoming on. He later worked in gold mines in South Dakota .

He soon gained his first experience working in associations and organizations, initially primarily in abstinence clubs , where he took on various positions, including chairmanship. In Lead , he founded such an association himself. The actual labor movement here was still in its infancy at that time. Tokoi joined the Western Federation of Miners , founded in 1893 , the largest and strongest union in the country at the time . Even later, after the gold mines were closed due to the poor economic situation and when Tokoi moved through the western United States and Canada in search of jobs , Tokoi gained a lot of experience in union work.

In 1897 Tokoi married Hanna Räimä, who was born in Lumijoki , Finland, and settled in Leadville , Colorado , for three years , where mining had resumed. The family earned enough money working independently in the mines to move back to Kannus, Oskari Tokois' hometown, around 1900, and to buy a farm. In addition to agriculture , Tokoi was in charge of the town's first consumer cooperative business and acted as an advocate in court.

Politics and trade union work before 1917

Soon the tense political situation in his home country prompted Tokoi, who had previously been active in abstinence associations and trade unions, to turn to politics. The autonomy of the Grand Duchy of Finland seemed to be endangered in the beginning of the century by the Russification efforts of Tsar Nicholas II . The conscription law passed in 1901, with which the Finns were obliged to serve in the Imperial Army, met with almost unanimous and bitter resistance in Finland. Oskari Tokoi participated in political resistance groups and in 1902, as a representative of his hometown, took part in several national secret meetings that organized the conscription strikes.

In the autumn of 1905 the workers carried out a general strike , which made a decisive contribution to the parliamentary reform that followed and to the abolition of the State Council. During the strike, the local workers' association was founded in Kannus under Tokoy's leadership . Tokoi also helped found numerous other workers' associations in Österbotten. In the elections of 1906 for the first Finnish unicameral parliament , Tokoi entered the list of the Social Democratic Party. After proving his oratorical skills on an extensive constituency tour, he surprisingly prevailed against more prominent candidates as the only Social Democratic member of his constituency.

Tokoi was also represented in the following parliaments. He made a name for himself as an expert on questions of agriculture and the controversial legal position of the Finnish small lease farmers, but also made a name for himself through his speeches against the Russian oppressive policy. In 1909, for example, in front of parliament, he demanded that the tsar be given the public's opinion on the renewed Russification program openly, and that the people be prepared to accept the consequences. A year later he interpreted the proposals for uniform legislation as a call to the Finnish parliament to commit suicide. Tokoi gained confidence in his parliamentary group through his work, but was not very popular among the more radical party base. Nevertheless, Tokoi was elected speaker of parliament in 1913 when the bourgeois majority in parliament could not agree on a candidate. After the next election in 1914 he became deputy speaker.

Tokoi played a central role in the Finnish trade union movement. From 1912 to 1918 he served as chairman of the then Finnish trade union federation Suomen Ammattijärjestö during a time in which social differences in Finnish society were building up in a threatening way. The moderately minded and rhetorically gifted Tokoi succeeded in many cases in defusing acute conflict situations through personal intervention.

Head of government in times of upheaval

The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 as a result of the February Revolution heralded a period of upheaval in Finland. Autonomy was restored by the new Russian Provisional Government and the Finnish political forces were preparing to form a new Senate . The Social Democrats, who had a parliamentary majority after the 1916 elections, agreed after tough negotiations and against resistance from large parts of the party base with the bourgeois parties on a coalition senate. The office of deputy chairman of the economic department of the Senate, which in fact corresponded to the office of the head of government, took over as a compromise candidate Oskari Tokoi.

Tokoi's Senate set an ambitious program. This included the expansion of democracy, especially at the local level, the limitation of the influence of the Provisional Government, the improvement of working conditions, especially working hours and social security, as well as the introduction of compulsory schooling and freedom of religion. However, the work of the Senate was confronted with enormous problems. Police violence in the country collapsed after the February Revolution and was practically exercised by workers' militias. There were repeated attacks and acts of violence. At the same time, the food shortage took on alarming forms and led to additional unrest, further fueled by the Russian Bolsheviks who made propaganda for a socialist revolution.

Tokoi repeatedly intervened personally in conflicts and was often able to have a moderating effect, for example on May 30 in Turku , where striking workers had appointed the members of the city council in the town hall and made far-reaching political demands. Tokoi's intervention led to the liberation of the councilors and an end to the strike the next day. Notwithstanding such occasional successes, Tokoi was unable to calm the general situation in the country. An important role was played by the fact that Tokoi's government had little support in his own party because of its ideological concerns. Tokoi countered demands of the bourgeois camp for decisive action against the militias and the rapid rebuilding of the bourgeois police system, which he considered hopeless in the current situation. In his speech to parliament on June 12, 1917, he countered his critics:

“If there is anyone here, if there are social classes in this country who believe that legalism in this country, with all its severity, can be restored just as it was restored after the general strike [of 1905], I ask : Go ahead, step forward, just try ... "

While Tokoi on the one hand admitted the illegality of the prevailing conditions, he at the same time indicated the irreversibility of the mass movement that had begun. This balancing act was expressed in his various speeches to the increasingly militant Red Guards, in which he condemned acts of violence on the one hand, and announced the unbroken progress of the revolution on the other.

Ultimately, however, the Tokoi government fell not over internal security, but over the constitutional question and the relationship with Russia. To everyone's surprise, Tokoi declared the independence of Finland as the goal of government policy on April 20 before parliament:

“So I dare to trust that the right of the Finnish people to self-determination, the beginning of the independence of the Finnish people is now firmly established, and it is our duty to fearlessly and consistently develop this so that the independence of the Finnish people already will be secured in the near future. "

The choice of words was not discussed with the Senate colleagues and, as Tokoi later explained, arose from the enthusiasm of the moment. Public opinion in Russia reacted irritably, the Finnish national activists enthusiastically. Negotiations between the Senate and the Provisional Government on Finland's future status were ultimately unsuccessful.

The Social Democratic Party soon joined Tokoi's declaration and played the most active role in the preparation of the so-called state law (valtalaki) , passed on July 18 , by which Parliament declared that it would now exercise supreme power in the state itself. Tokoi had considered the enforcement of the state law possible because he thought the Provisional Government had been weakened by a Bolshevik uprising. For the time being, however, this emerged victorious from the unrest, whereupon the bourgeois parties backed off their support of the state law. The Provisional Government dissolved parliament. The dissolution manifesto was proclaimed and implemented against the resistance of the socialist senators by the bourgeois representatives, who held half of the senate seats, with the decisive vote of the governor general Mikhail Stachowitsch . On August 16, 1917, Tokoi and the other socialist senators withdrew from the government.

People's Commissar in Red Finland

The internal tensions, which had already burdened the work of the Tokoi Senate, subsequently came to a head and culminated on January 27, 1918, a few weeks after Finnish independence was achieved , in an attempted socialist coup and the subsequent Finnish civil war . After the Red Guards had brought the southern part of Finland under their control, a People's Commissariat was set up as the government of Red Finland . In this Oskari Tokoi, as a representative of the trade union confederation, of which he was still chairman, was commissioner for food issues.

The food situation, which is Tokoi's responsibility, was one of the main challenges facing the People's Commissariat. As early as January 30, the People's Commissariat publicly announced that the supply situation was serious and that one had to be prepared for shortages and hunger. However, the commissariat promised to ensure a fairer distribution. The following day, the police station gave the local food committees unlimited rights to carry out searches and seizure of food. A nationwide food inventory was ordered on February 3.

Oskari Tokoi personally tried hard to get food from Soviet Russia . He traveled to Petrograd , where he was promised help. However, the city itself was on the brink of famine, and it was not until the end of March that after several interventions by Tokoi's Lenin , the first deliveries actually arrived. The People's Commissariat purchased large quantities of grain directly from inner Russia, but had to take care of the transport itself. With great logistical effort, it was finally possible to put together a train transport. It arrived in Helsinki on March 31st with 49 freight wagons full of grain. The second train, however, was stopped in the increasingly anarchic conditions of the Russian hinterland and did not reach its destination.

Tokoi also had great problems with distributing the food inside. In addition to the food committees, which were often still made up of commoners, the Red Guards were initially authorized to confiscate food for their own purposes. The often arbitrary and haphazard seizures of the guards made a systematic distribution of food impossible. On February 23, Tokoi threatened to resign in the event that a central body was not tasked with distributing the food. After tough struggle, a food council was finally formed on March 18, which was composed of representatives of all interest groups and from then on had the sole right to procure and distribute food. In the short time of its existence, the council actually managed to steer the situation in a more orderly direction.

Soon, however, Red Finland collapsed under the attacks of the bourgeois whites . Together with most of the other People's Commissars, Tokoi fled from the Germans approaching Helsinki on April 6 to Viipuri , where the Commissariat initially continued its work. On the night of April 25, just before the conquest of Viipuri by the whites, Tokoi escaped with his family and most of the red leadership by ship to Petrograd.

exile

The leadership of the Reds who had fled to Russia dispersed, Tokoi moved to Murmansk in August 1918 . In Russia the civil war was raging in full. After Soviet Russia had made peace with Germany , British troops landed in Murmansk in June, in particular to secure the strategically important Murman Railway . Meanwhile, various military campaigns were undertaken from Finland to Eastern Karelia , which is part of Russia . The British saw these activities by the Finns as a threat and in the summer formed the "Murmansk Legion", which operates as part of the British Army , from Finnish Red Guards who had fled . This joined Oskari Tokoi with the rank of lieutenant colonel .

Lenin's supporters among the Finnish socialists who had fled saw joining the Murmansk Legion as treason and announced the death sentence for Tokoi. The British withdrew from northern Russia in late 1919 and agreed with Finland to return members of the Murmansk Legion to Finland, where some of the returnees were sentenced to mild prison terms. Tokoi did not want to return to Finland under the circumstances, first traveled to England and in the autumn of 1920 to Canada. In 1921 he settled in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he was accepted by a large Finnish and social democratic congregation.

From 1922 on, Tokoi worked as editor of the Finnish-language social democratic, later liberal, magazine Raivaaja . Every now and then his articles appeared in Finnish magazines, but Tokoi no longer had a significant influence on the political events of his home country. On a personal level, he maintained contact with Finland, but a return was out of the question due to the expected prosecution. During the Winter War he was very committed to collecting financial support for Finland in North America and, after the Continuation War, was among other things deputy chairman of Help Finland . In February 1944 the Finnish parliament passed an amnesty law pardoning all former members of the People's Commissariat. This law, which is obviously tailored to Tokoi, is known in Finland as Lex Tokoi .

Tokoi's wife Hanna, with whom he had six children, died in 1938. The following year he married the American Eva Whiteker. Despite his rehabilitation, he only returned to his homeland as a visitor, for the first time in over 30 years in 1949, and then twice more. Oskari Tokoi died in 1963 at the age of 90.

Afterlife

This shoreline in Helsinki, opposite the heart of the Finnish labor movement, the Siltasaari peninsula, was named after Oskari Tokoi Tokoinranta .

In the turmoil of the civil war, Oskari Tokoi was often regarded by the bourgeoisie as one of the worst rebels. In 1938 a storm of protest was triggered by that on record recorded speech Tokois was played at an event of the trade union movement. Today its role in Finnish history is assessed more nuanced. He is credited with the fact that he felt primarily committed to consensus and peace and tried to bridge the ruling antagonisms of his time. On the other hand, his government work is viewed as unsuccessful as a result. He said that he had made numerous misjudgments, especially in relation to Russia, that he was weak as a political leader and, above all, had benefited from his rhetorical skills.

Even if no significant monuments were placed on Oskari Tokoi, there are traces of his life and work. There is a Tokoi museum in the house of the workers' association in his hometown of Kannus. A bank of a bay near the old center of the Finnish labor movement in Hakaniemi , Helsinki, was named after Tokoi. Tokoi honored his adopted home for over 40 years, Fitchburg, with a memorial stone in the local Saima Park in 1989 . The President of Finland, Mauno Koivisto , who came for the occasion , saluted Tokoi with the words:

“Oskari Tokoi, Vice President of the Imperial Senate of Finland which constituted the first national government of Finland, was a major national leader in those difficult years leading up to independence. He has an enduring place in Finland's political history, not only as one of the nation's founding fathers, but also as a great master of the labor movement. "

literature

• Olavi Aaltonen: Antti Oskari Tokoi , in Hannu Soikkanen: Tiennäyttäjät 2 . Tammi, Helsinki 1967 (pp. 63–110, cited: Aaltonen ).
• Auvo Kostiainen: Oskari Tokoi , in Matti Klinge (ed.): Suomen kansallisbiografia 9 . SKS, Helsinki 2007, ISBN 978-951-746-450-5 (pp. 855-857, cited: Kostinen ).
• Anthony F. Upton: Vallankumous Suomessa 1917–1918, I osa . Kirjayhtymä, Helsinki 1980, ISBN 951-26-1828-1 (quoted: Upton I ).
• Anthony F. Upton: Vallankumous Suomessa 1917–1918, II osa . Kirjayhtymä, Helsinki 1981, ISBN 951-26-2022-7 (quoted: Upton II ).
• Pentti Virrankoski: Suomen historia 2 . SKS, Helsinki 2001, ISBN 951-746-342-1 (quoted: Virrankoski ).
• Väinö Voionmaa: Oskari Tokoi , in Kaarlo Blomstedt u. a. (Ed.): Kansallinen elämäkerrasto. V osa. WSOY, Porvoo 1934 (pp. 444-446, cited: Voionmaa ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Aaltonen, p. 72
2. ↑ Upton I, p. 117 f.
3. ↑ Upton I p. 58 f.
4. ^ Upton I, p. 115
5. ↑ Quote from Voionmaa, p. 445. Translation by the author.
6. ↑ Voionmaa, p. 445
7. ↑ Quote from Upton I, p. 78 f. Translation by the author.
8. ^ Upton I, pp. 78-80
9. ↑ Upton II, p. 170 f.
10. ↑ Upton II, p. 171 f.
11. ↑ Upton II, pp. 172-176
12. ↑ Upton II, p. 433 f.
13. ↑ Upton I, p. 70; Aaltonen, p. 109 f.
14. ↑ Virrankoski, p. 706.
15. ↑ Upton I, p. 79 f.
16. ↑ Quoting from the Saima Park website ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Translation by the author. 

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on September 3, 2007 in this version .