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Violence and Its Control… This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published in Kinnunen T. & Kivimäki V. (eds) Finland in World War II : History, Memory, Interpretations. History of Warfare vol. 69. Leiden: Brill. ISBN: 978-90-04-20894-0. ISSN: 1385-7827. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004214330_007 5. Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice? Violence and Social Cohesion in Wartime Finland Ville Kivimäki & Tuomas Tepora An exceptional practice of the Finnish military during World War II was, whenever possible, to bring home all the fallen soldiers. They were consequently buried in the so- called “Hero’s Cemeteries” in the churchyards of their own localities. The practice had its roots in the Civil War of 1918, when the fallen combatants of the “White” side were usually brought back to their home parishes in a similar fashion. In 1939–45, this evacuation and burial of the fallen developed into a culturally and emotionally focal ritual, which built a strong bridge between the front and the home front and which placed the sacrificial death of a soldier at the heart of each locality, both materially and symbolically.1 A crucial challenge for the wartime society was to be able to give these violent deaths an acceptable and, even more, a regenerative meaning. The social cohesion of the national community was largely determined by this question, and it occupied a central place in individual minds and in the collective imagination alike. In the following chapter, we will 1 Ilona Kemppainen, Isänmaan uhrit: Sankarikuolema Suomessa toisen maailmansodan aikana (Helsinki, 2006), pp. 65–77, 166–71. – There are over 600 “Hero’s Cemeteries” in Finland, at least one in every town and parish. Kivimäki & Tepora, Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice 1 discuss the meanings and controversies of wartime violence in Finland. We hope that such a study of death and sacrifice will also open a wider perspective to the Finnish cultural history of World War II. The importance of violent sacrifices, national martyrs and the cult of fallen soldiers for the nation-states has been thoroughly observed and analyzed.2 Yet each culture and nation has its own historical experiences, connotations and emphasis in using the idea of a sacrificial death, and these differences may be revealing for understanding the historical specifications of each case. In general, the nationalist cult of death can be conceptualized as “regenerative violence,” which vitalizes the nation, combines patriotism to religious cosmology and forms a binding legacy for future generations. Thus, the (sacrificial) violence is at the root of nationalist thinking, constructing a prerequisite for the feelings of unity and oneness among the members of the national collective. With the concept of social cohesion we point to the weft of social relations of a given modern community, made possible by both symbolic representations and concrete practices of solidarity, reciprocity and identity. Consensus, or at least an acceptable compromise, of the meaning of common sacrifices and of the legitimacy of violence exercised in the name of the community is essential for this cohesion to survive. Using the famous notion by Max Weber, the state seeks to authorize itself a monopoly on violence; a legitimate, exclusive right to use violence on behalf of its members to control and to protect. Indeed, it must succeed in this task in order to be a sovereign community. 2 For influential examples, see e.g. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991); Reinhart Koselleck & Michael Jeismann, eds., Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne (Munich, 1994); George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990); Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples (Oxford, 2003). Kivimäki & Tepora, Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice 2 Regarding the totalitarian or autocratic regimes, Weber’s idea can be taken even further: the authority of the monopoly on violence is not only a premise for social stability – the potential to exercise ultimate, deadly force has actually been the final evidence of the state’s or monarch’s supremacy, demonstrated in acts of violence towards the subjects.3 Thus, the violence may become the very legitimatization of itself. But in a democratic society such as Finland in 1939–45, the monopoly on violence requires a more nuanced balancing participated in by other citizen-actors than a single autocrat or a small hegemonic elite.4 If the legitimacy of power comes from the people, at least symbolically, then the state’s violence, too, must have the acceptance of the people. This includes the violence in the form of requiring sacrifices on the nation’s behalf and, more problematically, the coercive violence of the state to control its own citizens.5 Should the justified nature and the shared meaning of such violence become challenged, the authority of the state and the community’s social cohesion are consequently threatened.6 From the basis of this short theoretical introduction, it is our task in the following to discuss the phenomena of wartime violence in empirical detail. 3 Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht, rev. ed. (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 52–7. 4 For the complexity of controlling violence and for the historical differences between various state formations, see Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis & Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009). 5 Cf. Carolyn Marvin & David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge, 1999) drawing from René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, transl. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD, 1977). 6 Cf. Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 3–9. Kivimäki & Tepora, Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice 3 I. The Prolonged “War of Independence,” 1918–41 Polarizing Violence: The Trauma of 1918 in Pre-World War II Finland When one looks at the Finnish war experience in World War II, it is impossible not to confront the memory of the Civil War of 1918. Many of the reactions and decisions in 1939–45 become understandable against this background: the Finnish interwar society was both a product of and an answer to the divisions of 1918. Thus, in order to understand the circumstances from which the Finns related and oriented themselves to the social and cultural phenomena of World War II, it is essential to start with the experience of the Civil War. Following the Russian October Revolution, Finland declared independence from the former Czarist Empire on 6 December 1917. However, the hot-tempered political and social situation soon escalated into a socialist revolution and a civil war in late January 1918. The war between the “White” troops of the bourgeois government and the insurgent “Reds” lasted for three and a half months. The initial goal of the Finnish revolution was to establish an independent socialist state, not to incorporate Finland into the newly formed Soviet Russia, whereas the Whites aimed at suppressing the revolution and disarming the Russian troops still in Finland. Violent purges and lawless executions belonged to the means of warfare on both sides. The real catastrophe, however, unfolded after the Whites had won the war in May 1918. Thousands of defeated Reds were imprisoned in camps, in Kivimäki & Tepora, Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice 4 which hunger and the pandemic Spanish flu raged on.7 The total death toll of the war was about 36,000 out of the population of 3.2 million people. Around 27,000 of the deceased were Reds.8 Regarding the subject matter of our chapter, the cultural history of violence, the situation in Finnish society prior to the Civil War developed quickly towards a power vacuum. The state authority and the control of violence dissolved along with the revolutionary developments in Russia. The Weberian question about the monopoly on violence seems to be decisive in understanding the fratricidal and introspective violence of the Civil War. The war indicated the loss of boundaries between those who traditionally controlled violence and those who were controlled. The locus of power became contested and blurred.9 As so often in civil wars, the scale of rapidly escalating, uncontrolled violence was horrific – especially when one considers the relatively short duration of the conflict and the small size of the Finnish population. 7 For a general depiction of political and military aspects of the Civil War, see Anthony F. Upton, The Finnish Revolution 1917–1918 (Minneapolis, MN, 1980); on the terror in the Civil War, see Marko Tikka, Kenttäoikeudet: Välittömät rankaisutoimet Suomen sisällissodassa 1918 (Helsinki, 2004); on the psychology of the prewar enemy images and the wartime violence, see Juha Siltala, Sisällissodan psykohistoria (Helsinki, 2009). For an excellent overview on the legacy of the Civil War, see Risto Alapuro, “Coping with the Civil War of 1918 in Twenty-first Century Finland,” in Kenneth Christie & Robert Cribb, eds., Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy (London, 2002), pp. 170–81. 8 Finnish National Archives, War Victims in Finland: The Registry of the Names of the War Dead Between 1914–1922, http://vesta.narc.fi/cgi-bin/db2www/sotasurmaetusivu/main?lang=en, accessed 1 March 2010. 9 Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley, CA, 1988), pp. 191–6; Pertti Haapala, Kun yhteiskunta hajosi: Suomi 1914–1920 (Helsinki, 1995), pp. 218–43. Kivimäki & Tepora, Meaningless Death or Regenerating Sacrifice 5 The White victors forcibly re-established their power in the wake of the Civil War. Despite the fact that the country had already declared independence in December 1917, the war became known as the War of Independence (vapaussota, literally the Freedom War). The official view of the conflict saw it as a fight against the Bolshevik Russians and their domestic allies, the Finnish Reds.
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