Sami Suodenjoki & Mervi Kaarninen
ABSTRACT
Lived nation in the writings upwards of the defeated in post-Civil War Finland
In early-1918, soon after seceding from Russia, Finland was plunged into a bloody Civil War between the socialist Reds and the non-socialist Whites. Three months of fighting and a prison camp catastrophe that followed the war left 38,000 people dead and over 20,000 children orphaned. Consequently, the newly independent nation-state was deeply divided throughout the interwar period. While the victorious Whites bolstered the agrarian-bourgeois state and nurtured the fear of a new revolution, the experiences of many defeated Reds were marked by exclusion, humiliation, and revanchism.
In our paper, we use “writings upwards” as a source for studying how people who were affiliated with the defeated Red side lived out the nation, that is, experienced the Finnish nation-state and expressed national belonging or non-belonging toward it after the Civil War. The concept of “writing upwards”, coined by historian Martyn Lyons, refers to the diverse writings of the weak to the powerful, and in this case, to the letters of request and complaint from distressed people to the state authorities. We focus on women’s writings and argue that these writings were marked by the experiences of humiliation, resistance, compensation, and wounded confidence towards nation-state institutions. Our theoretical framework is the history of experiences, which approaches experiences as cultural, social and societal phenomena, bound to power relations, institutions, and systems of meaning. Studied from this perspective of socially and culturally mediated experiences, nations can be seen of as a series of encounters and negotiations between individuals, social groups and institutions, as well as between bodies, spaces, and objects.
Our source material consists of three samples of letters to the authorities, all of which show how female senders negotiated their relationship with the Finnish nation in the post-war situation. The first sample includes letters sent to the Office of the President of Finland between 1919 and 1921 by Red-affiliated people such as family members of imprisoned or fallen Red Guardists. These letters show how the senders fashioned themselves as citizens deserving state aid and viewed the new presidential institution, the image of which was shaped by the liberal and social reformist profiles of the first President and his wife.
The second sample comprises letters of complaint written by the so-called Red widows, that is, the spouses of fallen Red Guardists, to the chief inspector of the Ministry of Social Affairs between 1919 and the mid-1920s. A backdrop to these complaints was the pension scheme created in Finland after World War I that excluded the Red widows, who had to resort to the Finnish social welfare institutions instead to provide for themselves and their families. Our third sample includes complaints and pension applications written by Red widows in the 1940s. During World War II the policies of the Finnish government towards Red veterans and widows changed due to the need to seek national unanimity and to connect the defeated side to the common fatherland. Consequently, the Finnish government prescribed that Red widows would be eligible for pension, which led to a flux of pension applications.
Sami Suodenjoki is a senior researcher working in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences HEX at Tampere University.
sami.suodenjoki@tuni.fi
Mervi Kaarninen is a university lecturer in history and a member of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences HEX at Tampere University.
mervi.kaarninen@tuni.fi