Parallel Socialisms: Social Democracy as Liberation from Communism: The Cases of Finland and Poland, 1919-1921

• In Event: Social Parallels in the History of Russia, the USSR, and East Europe

Abstract

WWI and its aftermath brought along dramatic changes for a great part of Europe, including Poland and Finland. The external factor that most influenced both was Russia and her transition from Czarist Empire into a Soviet state that was to be ruled by the representatives of the working class. The direct consequences of this transition were, among other things, the independence of Finland, Finnish Civil War, and Polish-Bolshevik War.

Poland’s socialists and Finland’s social democrats strongly supported the independence of their respective countries and resisted Bolshevism. In my paper I analyze two dimensions of liberation from the Communist influence that the Finnish Social Democratic Party and the Polish Socialist Party were involved in: foreign politics and the construction of self-image.

I analyze the ideas of these two political parties about how to conduct foreign policy with Soviet Russia and their arguments that proposed establishing peaceful relations with her. Moreover, I examine how both parties used the themes of Communism, Bolshevism and Soviet Russia as anti-patterns when stressing their own reformism. I explain the two dimensions by referring to party tactics, which were formed by their striving for external security, internal integrity, central position in own land's labor movement and enforcing one’s own position in the political context of centrist and rightist parties.

Author

• Marta Anna Laskowska, U of Helsinki (Finland) / U of Warsaw (Poland)