White Army (Finland)
The Whites (also known as Whitefins or White Army ) was one of the two parties in the Finnish Civil War . As in the civil war that broke out in Russia after the October Revolution , the opposing party was the Red Army .
The whites were mainly recruited from supporters of agrarianism . Its leadership was dominated by people with a Finnish-Swedish background as well as officers who had served in the Imperial Russian Army before Finland's independence . The political leader of the whites in Finland was Pehr Evind Svinhufvud , their military commander in chief Gustaf Mannerheim . On January 25, 1918, the Finnish Senate declared the Protection Corps to be its official government troops and a core force for the White Army.
While the soldiers of the White Army of Finland were mainly peasants and members of the lower middle class , poor farm workers and urban workers fought on the side of the Red Army . The whites established a government in Vasa , called the Vasa Senate , while the reds established a revolutionary government in Helsinki , called the People's Commissariat of Finland .
literature
- Lavery, Jason Edward: The History of Finland . Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut 2006, ISBN 0-313-32837-4 (English).