Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/132

 who one tried to imagine had been beaten, the gloating over the fact that "the bourgeoisie had now been forced on their knees to the Labour class."

The extremists in the Labour Party had forced it to revolution. These were found in the Red Guard. When the insurrection broke out it was therefore only natural that the Guard played the most prominent part, and felt like the real ruler of the country. Numerous arbitrary acts on the part of the Guard showed what a feeling of absolute power reigned within it. The troops lived as in the country of an enemy. Whatever they liked they took. You wanted a hotel, or a restaurant, or a motor car, or a special train. All this sort of expropriation was called "sequestration." You showed a stamped paper, or wrote a receipt, and the owner had to content himself with that. The Red Government had no little trouble with their armed forces, for they did not even respect their own authorities. They particularly made food regulation difficult by taking all the supplies they got hold of for their own use, and by stopping the food trains to the towns and looting them. But generally the desires of the Red were, of course, towards the property of the citizens. This was considered as quite lawful booty. The whole commissariat of the Red Guard was founded on the possibility of expropriation, and only the firms entering into continuous relations with the Red, and having contracts with them—and they were few—were compensated for what they took. There was a special Red "commissioner of sequestrations."

This branch of the activity of the Red mostly affected business men and manufacturers. They, of course, suffered considerable losses. A greater, personal