Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/83

 thing for their own greatest convenience. Thus, e.g., the sailors of the Baltic fleet had several really first-class places of entertainment at their disposal. At St. Petersburg they had seized two very large and very fine Imperial steam-yachts, the "Standard" and the "Polar-star," and taken them to Helsingfors, and they had purchased one of the largest and most fashionable hotels in the city with a theatre, etc., and made it into a sailor's club. Balls were given at the barracks, and several of the lady guests lived for weeks and months in the barracks. All sorts of new organisations were formed. Thus an anarchist club took up its quarters in the fine officers' casino, and hung out its flag there—a skull with crossbones on a black ground. One night two bombs were thrown against the building; it was apparently some super-anarchist organisation at work. One society called itself terrorists, and their banner was red with a black star in the middle. They also got a fine house for themselves, the Russian harbour captain's, and a couple of motor cars (and I may insert here that motoring was one of the greatest pleasures of the "proletariat") and advertised for members. The programme ran: "war against imperialism in all the world, not a life struggle, but a struggle to the death."

These examples show how far removed the Russian military were from all order and discipline, and yet the Labour Party opposed their departure from the country, yet the party held a banquet in honour of liberty together with the soldiers on the occasion of Finlands' independence, inviting the soldiers on the grounds that the Finnish working-man's place is by the side of the soldiers, not by that of the bourgeois.

And so events took their course. The Labour Party would not let go the power they held by the aid of the mob and demoralised bands of Russian soldiers, while