Page:Finnish Communist Party - An Open Letter to Lenin (1918).djvu/4

 By failing to do its duty in November, our party of could not long prevent armed conflict. The democratic administration of the State, the eight-hour day, and other Parliamentary reforms which seemed so near, we could not secure by Parliamentary tactics. On the contrary, all these democratic prizes were, week by week, more evidently endangered because the capitalists were preparing to frustrate our efforts to obtain reform by forming armed organisations for civil war. Under this menace our Party also began to prepare the workers for self-defence. But this work was not done with the great energy and enthusiasm we could have shown had we been mustering for a campaign that our hearts desired instead of for one we wished to avoid.

At the end of January, 1918, Finnish capitalism set its troops to attack the workers.

Our Social Democratic Party replied with revolution; but the situation, both in home and foreign possibilities, was now less favourable to the workers than in November. On the eve of the revolution it was difficult to foresee this clearly; nevertheless we ought to have known that the time was coming. in which the workers and their Party would have no other choice. In any case a proportion of the workers would certainly have taken up arms to protect their rights; thousands of them must in any case have been butchered. It is questionable whether our organisations would have been spared, even had our Party withdrawn from the struggle, and certainly had it done so it would have split the workers' front and so helped the bloody dictatorship of the bourgeois. We could not thus degrade our Party. In every district where it was possible, the whole Labour movement, political and trade unionist, rose as one man to campaign under our leadership.

But still we had no clear understanding of the nature and mission, even of this our proletarian revolution. The armed conflict was only, in our view, a necessary evil, and we who were in charge of the revolutionary movement gave less attention to the organisation of the campaign than to law making and the re-arrangement of administration. When the fierce revolution was already raging and within a few. weeks we got into fighting order a Red Army of 80.000 men. That this was possible in a dominion which had but half its population of three million still left to it, and where for the last fifteen years there had been no native military, so that the workers had no source from which to draw trained officers and war technicians, must be attributed rather to the general organising capacity of the workers than to the military talents of the revolutionary administration.

In its political aims our revolutionary adminis-