V. I.   Lenin

31

TELEGRAM TO KULLERVO MANNER AND KARL VIIK


Written: Written on January 24 (February 6), 1918
Published: First published in 1933 in Lenin Miscellany XXI. Printed from the original.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1975, Moscow, Volume 44, pages 59c-60a.
Translated: Clemens Dutt
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive.   You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.README


Urgent. Governmental

Prime Minister Manner
and Karl Viik
Helsingfors

Radio transmissions in Swedish and telegrams on behalf of the unions of Swedish workers in Finland should be sent to Sweden as frequently and in as great detail as possible in order to refute the extremely mendacious reports of the Swedish bourgeois press about the events in   Finland.[1] Please let me know whether you are taking all measures.

Lenin


Notes

[1] This refers to the reports in the Swedish bourgeois press concerning the revolution that had started in Finland.

On January 27 (new style), 1918, the bourgeois government of Svinhufvud was overthrown and power passed into the hands of the workers. On January 29, a Finnish revolutionary government was set up—the Council of People’s Representatives— which included E. Gylling, 0. Kuusinen, Y. Sirola, A. Taimi and others. But the proletarian revolution was victorious only in southern Finland. The Svinhufvud government, entrenched in the north, appealed to the government of imperial Germany for assistance. Owing to the intervention of the German armed forces, the workers’ revolution in Finland was crushed on May 2, 1918, after a bitter civil war which lasted for three months. A period of white terror set in in Finland and thousands of revolutionary workers and peasants were executed or tortured to death in the prisons.


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