The Periphery's Civil War: Memory, Monuments and Battlefields in Karelia (original) (raw)

The confrontation between the Reds and the Whites was the main plot of the Civil War in Russia, although a comprehensive understanding of the process is impossible without considering other actors and regional features. National movements in Asia and the Caucasus, peasant uprisings in the Volga region and Central Russia, and Allied intervention from the Far East to the Baltic Sea formed a complex picture of the Civil War, and therefore the war on the periphery did not always coincide with the main plot. Karelia, to choose just one region, is an illustrative example of its own, peripheral Civil War, the memory of which is intertwined with the memory of the Second World War and with the idea of fighting an external enemy. The features of the Civil War in Karelia could be explained in many ways by its geographical location. Karelia, inhabited by Russians and Karelians and located between Petrograd and Murmansk, was a typical Russian province that found itself at the epicentre of the opposing forces in 1918. Despite the official establishment of Soviet power, the position of the Bolsheviks was not strong enough, as White and Allied forces advanced from the north along the Murmansk Railway. Across the province, the peasantry, dissatisfied with the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks, staged uprisings. The main factor, however, was Finland, which gained independence from the Russian Empire in December 1917 and supported some of the peasant uprisings and even sent volunteers to Karelia. Formally, the Finnish authorities did not participate in these events, however, the government knew that Finnish officers were sent to Karelia and that timber merchants and public organizations financed them.