William Trotter - A Frozen Hell

A stroke of luck removed the Baron from the front during the period immediately before and after the revolution of November 7. He had fallen from his horse, suffered a sprained ankle, and was recuperating in Odessa; otherwise, loyalist that he was, he would likely have suffered the fate of so many other aristocratic officers.

His journey back to Petrograd was distinguished by both good luck and boldness. A timid man would have traveled incognito; Mannerheim engaged a private pullman car and made the entire journey clad in the full dress uniform of an Imperial corps commander. In one of the few flashes of subjective insight to light up the otherwise arid flatness of his autobiography, the Baron described his arrival in the Petrograd railway station: “It disgusted me to see generals carrying their own kit. However, I found two soldiers who quite willingly took charge of mine.” [3] Mannerheim, 112. He crossed the Finnish border just after Finland declared independence.

His return to Finland did not generate parades in the streets; after all, outside of his own class hardly anyone knew him very well. He was coming “home,” but it was to a land to which he had paid little attention during the thirty-five years he had served in the Imperial army. Still, he was the most experienced warrior the Whites had, and under the circumstances, his fierce anti-Bolshevism counted for much more than his past infatuation with the tsar. Some idea of the bloody-mindedness of the campaign, and of Mannerheim’s willingness to prosecute the White cause ruthlessly, can be mined from a reading of his Order of the Day for March 14, 1918: “The hour has come, the hour for which the whole nation is waiting. Your starving and martyred brothers and sisters in southern Finland fix their last hope on you. The mutilated bodies of the murdered citizens and the ruins of the burntdown villages call to Heaven: vengeance upon the traitors! Break down all obstacles! Advance, White army of White Finland!” [4] Rintala, Marvin, Four Finns—Political Profiles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 30.

By the time it was all over, there would be mutilated bodies and burntdown villages enough to go around on both sides. During the period when the Reds controlled Helsinki, Tampere, and much of southern Finland, the “Red Terror” duplicated, on a smaller scale, its namesake in Russia. At least 1,500 people were murdered in the winter of 1917–18. Battle deaths in the campaigns that followed eventually totaled 6,794. But worse would come.

Mannerheim earned the nickname “The Bloody Baron,” not for his role as a battlefield commander, but for his perceived role in the ghastly events that happened after the guns fell silent. At least 80,000 Red sympathizers—women and children not excepted—were herded into makeshift concentration camps. Almost 10,000 died in them during the next six months. The “White Terror” that swept Finland paid the Reds back with heavy interest; hangings and firing-squad executions totaled more than 8,000.

This episode was the most shameful in Finnish history, and even at this date, the extensive research on the period has not been able to assign a precise portion of blame to Mannerheim. Conditions throughout rural Finland were hideous during the winter of 1918: hunger was rampant (from some remote districts, there were rumors of cannibalism), and an influenza epidemic raged in the camps unchecked by any efforts on the part of the Whites who ran them.

Mannerheim-haters held the Baron responsible for every death; Mannerheim’s hagiographers claimed that he did not know the extent of the butchery and that, even if he had known, communications were so poor that he had little control over what was happening in the interior of the country. It is true that communications between Helsinki and much of rural Finland were poor to nonexistent, but a commander of Mannerheim’s authority can usually get his orders through if he is really determined. Whether, in the heat of revenge, those orders would have been obeyed, is questionable.

Mannerheim’s avowed policy for dealing with the rebellion was pragmatic and simple: shoot the leaders and put the workers back to work as quickly as possible. Nothing in the record of his life suggests a personal streak of cruelty. His only hatred was of Bolshevism, an abstraction; wholesale vindictive retribution was a tactic that fit neither his character nor his plans for Finland.

It is hard, however, to imagine that Mannerheim was not aware of what was going on in his own backyard—indeed, only a short boat ride from his office—in the confines of the old tsarist fortress of Suomenlinna, in Helsinki harbor. The largest White concentration camp was there, and modern Finnish historians estimate that at least 3,000 Red prisoners were summarily killed within its walls: shot, hanged, bayoneted, and in some cases simply beaten to death. If Mannerheim did not order these killings, he surely did little to stop them, and his silence would have been taken, by the murderers, as tacit approval of their atrocities.

Whatever the Baron’s degree of culpability in the White Terror, there was no denying that he had won a smashing, and permanent, victory over the Bolsheviks. At the conclusion of his campaign, Kaiser Wilhelm awarded Mannerheim the Iron Cross—thus making him the only military commander who had fought against Germany to receive that coveted decoration.

Mannerheim personally favored a monarchy for Finland, but the reality was that Finland had chosen to become a parliamentary democracy. Mannerheim was not comfortable with the idea of democracies, or with their squabbling and undignified political parties. He challenged the system in the first-ever presidential elections, in July 1919, and was trounced by Professor Stahlberg. Although he lobbied for the job, Stahlberg refused to appoint Mannerheim commander of the Civic Guard, fearful of giving him access to even that limited instrument of power.

The new era in European politics was decidedly not to the Baron’s taste. As Marvin Rintala, one of his best biographers, states the matter:

No longer sustained by the stagnant but outwardly serene domination of the hereditary aristocracy, the Continent was buzzing with the tumultuous contentions of inexperienced parvenu bourgeois (or ostensibly proletarian) politicians. Baron Mannerheim’s orderly world—where a self-perpetuating elite governed and the commoners knew their place—had suddenly disappeared. An agitated and boisterous new regime replaced it. He never became fully reconciled to Democracy; when the new Constitution was being formulated, he urged empowering as head of state “a strong hand that will not be moved by party strife or forced to fritter away the power of government by compromise,” not appreciating the fact that compromise is the essence of democratic rule. [5] Forbes, Rosita, These Men I Knew (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 240.

After losing the election to Stahlberg, Mannerheim in effect was frozen out of domestic politics. He didn’t fit in with any political party, and no political party knew quite what to do with him. In fact Mannerheim despised political parties as a species, regarding them as undisciplined, selfish, and obstructionist. His concept of political service was almost Roman, wholly oriented toward the half-mystical idea of the individual man of honor who steps forward to serve the state. In his speeches he often referred to “the will to take risks and the readiness to bear responsibility.” [6] Rintala, 40.

Thus, by the end of 1919, Gustav Mannerheim was no more than an unemployed soldier. He dabbled in domestic affairs in two major areas: right-wing politics and charitable public works. If the combination seems paradoxical, that is because a late-twentieth-century citizen no doubt has trouble penetrating the mind-set of a nineteenth-century monarchist. He founded the Mannerheim Child Welfare Association in 1920, and two years later became chairman of the Finnish Red Cross. In both organizations he succeeded in establishing strong, effective administrations and in tying them to international networks.