Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/69

 post and telegraph minister Proschjan, expressly declares, "trusting that it will not be long before the proletariat of Finland begins the fight of the revolution and takes the reins of its country into its own hands." This "trust" was plainly based on a promise, given by the Finnish Labour Party, before the independence was acknowledged by the Bolshevik Government. This promise was apparently the reason why the acknowledgment was granted at all.

The position of the Labour Party was, however, most difficult. The activities of the bourgeois government had successful, the independence of Finland had been acknowledged, and now the leaders could turn with greater energy upon the interior anarchy, and particularly upon its most essential cause: the Russian troops. The demand that these should be at once withdrawn could now be preferred with greater force after even the Bolsheviks' own government had acknowledged the independence of Finland. And it required a lot of Russian evasions about "a general plan of evacuation" and all sorts of vague phrases about the necessity of "defending the roads to St. Petersburg, the heart of the revolution, against German imperialism," in order to hold out against the well-founded and peremptory demand of the Finnish Government that the undisciplined troops should be withdrawn. But deprived of these Russian soldiers the position of the Labour Party was not of course very strong.

On the other hand the Red Guard caused its party anxiety. Its ravages and looting, its growing interference in all concerns, the arbitrary seizures of all the stores of the food regulation authorities which it indulged in, in short, the complete terrorism it practised, could not strengthen the "cause of the revolution." According to the statutes of the Guard it ought to be under the complete