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ABSTRACT
Right after the Finnish Civil War of 1918, the first treatises discussing the insurgents (the Reds) in crowd psychological terms were published. Between 1918 and the early 1920s, several Finnish authors used Gustave Le Bon's and other crowd psychologists’ ideas of suggestion, mental epidemics, and the dangers of socialism in their interpretations of the aborted revolution. The article argues that the use of crowd psychology in the years following the Finnish Civil War was an attempt to articulate in objective, scientific language an emotional and moral reaction to the shock of seeing a nation violently divided and tearing itself apart. Intrinsic to Finnish interpretations of crowd psychology were the increasing antagonism between socialists and anti-socialists, the influence of Bolshevism on the worker's movement, the importance attributed to the ‘racial’ qualities of the people, and the impact of the Civil War on the educated classes – all issues that are easy to relate to wider European and global contexts. This article lends support to the thesis that crowd psychology was an influential intellectual construction that had great heuristic value among contemporaries from the late nineteenth century to World War II.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For book-length studies in English or German on the Civil War, see Tuomas Tepora and Aapo Roselius, eds., The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy (Leiden, 2018); Anthony F. Upton, The Finnish Revolution 1917–1918 (Minneapolis, 1980); Risto Alapuro, State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley, CA, 1988); Tuomas Hoppu and Pertti Haapala, eds., Tampere 1918: A Town in the Civil War (Tampere, 2010); Heikki Ylikangas, Der Weg nach Tampere: Die Niederlage der Roten im finnischen Bürgerkrieg 1918 (Berlin, 2002). See also Juha Siltala, ‘Dissolution and Reintegration in Finland, 1914–1932: How Did a Disarmed Country Become Absorbed into Brutalization?’, Journal of Baltic Studies 46 (2015): 11–33.
2 For the history of civil wars in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, see Stanley G. Payne, Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949 (Cambridge, 2011). On paramilitary violence affecting Eastern and Central Europe between 1917 and the early 1920s, see Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923’, The Journal of Modern History 83 (2011): 489–512.
3 Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London, 1975); Serge Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd: A Historical Treatise on Mass Psychology (Cambridge, 1985); J.S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob (London, 1989); Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology and Politics 1871–1899 (New York, 1992); Christian Borch, The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology (Cambridge, 2012).
4 Joseph W. Bendersky, ‘“Panic”: The Impact of Le Bon's Crowd Psychology on U.S. Military Thought’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 43 (2007): 257–83; Eugene E. Leach, ‘“Mental Epidemics”. Crowd Psychology and American Culture, 1890–1940’, American Studies 33 (1992): 5–29; Eugene E. Leach, ‘Mastering the Crowd: Collective Behavior and the Mass Society in American Social Thought, 1917–1939’, American Studies 27 (1986): 99–114.
5 I have systematically gone through the main cultural magazines published in Finland between 1918 and 1939 (including Nya Argus, Finsk Tidskrift, Valvoja and Aika). I then used the Finnish crowd psychology keywords I found of ‘Le Bon’, ‘mass psychosis’, ‘group madness’, ‘suggestion’, ‘hypnosis’ and ‘psychic infection’ to search for references in the digitised collection of newspapers and magazines at the National Library. I also searched for such references to crowd psychology in the monographs published by Finnish intellectuals and leading socialists in the five-year period after the Civil War. I also used the Finna library database to look for memoirs and other potentially relevant books published after 1925.
6 Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 3.
7 The concept of ‘collective behaviour’ was developed already in the 1920s by the Chicago School of Sociology, to which social psychology was one of the building blocks (the pioneers of the Chicago School also sometimes used the term ‘collective psychology’ instead of ‘social psychology’). See Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess, The City, 1st ed. 1925 (Chicago, 2019), 22. For more on links between the Chicago School and European crowd psychology, see Borch, The Politics of Crowds, 140–50.
8 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, 1960), 4.
9 Le Bon, The Crowd, 20.
10 Le Bon, The Crowd, 42–3.
11 Le Bon, The Crowd, 102–3.
12 Le Bon, The Crowd, 69.
13 Le Bon discussed the Paris Commune at length in his earlier books, including L’Homme et les sociétés (1881).
14 Le Bon, The Crowd, 150.
15 McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob, 196.
16 For more on crowd psychology's influence on Hitler, see McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob, 270–92.
17 Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 123–53, 165–6; Bendersky, ‘“Panic”’.
18 Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology, 167.
19 Alapuro, State and Revolution, 9.
20 One ‘nation-builder’, historian, journalist, and novelist – Zachris Topelius – used these and similar terms in his description of the typical Finn in 1893. Zachris Topelius, ’Kansa’, in Suomi 19:llä vuosisadalla, ed. L. Mechelin (Liminka, 2014), 63.
21 Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland: Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904 (London, 1995).
22 Jaakko Paavolainen, Suomen kansallinen murhenäytelmä: punainen ja valkoinen terrori ja vankileirit v. 1918 (Helsinki, 1974), 11–13. Paavolainen's 3-volume work, published in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, on the red and white terror as well as the post-war prison camps was a groundbreaking study of the Finnish Civil War.
23 Alapuro, State and Revolution, 11.
24 Axel Lille, Framtidsuppgifter (Helsingfors, 1918), 23. Lille was founder of the fiercely anti-socialist Swedish People's Party of Finland.
25 Alapuro, State and Revolution, 86. For more on Fennomania, see Ilkka Liikanen, Fennomania ja kansa (Helsinki, 1995), English summary: ‘Fennomania and the People: The Breakthrough of Mass Organization and the Birth of the Finnish Party’, 349–60.
26 Martta Salmela-Järvinen, Alas lyötiin vanha maailma (Helsinki 1966), 110.
27 Broadly speaking, the main difference between the Reds and the Whites was that the former were workers and other non-owners, and the latter were (more or less) middle-class owners of property (land, capital, resources). Pertti Haapala, ‘The Expected and Non-expected Roots of Chaos: Preconditions of the Finnish Civil War’, in Tepora and Roselius, The Finnish Civil War, 21–50, 31.
28 Juha Siltala, Sisällissodan psykohistoria (Helsinki, 2009), 121–3.
29 Siltala, ‘Dissolution and Reintegration’, 15.
30 Tuomas Tepora and Aapo Roselius, ‘Introduction’, in Tepora and Roselius, The Finnish Civil War, 1–20, 2.
31 For more on the White and Red Terror, see Marko Tikka, ‘Warfare and Terror in 1918’, in Tepora and Roselius, The Finnish Civil War, 90–118.
32 Volter Kilpi, ‘Tulevaisuuden peruskivet’, Uusi Päivä, May 2, 1918, 1. This and any subsequent translations are by the author of this article.
33 Marjaliisa Hentilä and Seppo Hentilä, 1918 – Das deutsche Finnland: Die Rolle der Deutschen im finnischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg (Bad Vilbel, 2018); Anders Huldén, Finnlands deutsches Königsabenteuer 1918 (Berlin, 1997).
34 Volter Kilpi, Tulevaisuuden edessä (Porvoo, 1918), 89, 131, 278. The study of the literary scholar Maria-Liisa Kunnas shows that virtually all major novelists and writers, Kilpi and Koskenniemi included, supported the Whites. Maria-Liisa Kunnas, Kansalaissodan kirjalliset rintamat (Helsinki, 1986).
35 V.A. Koskenniemi, ‘Sanojen taikamahti’, Uusi Päivä, May 3, 1918, 3.
36 Koskenniemi, ‘Sanojen taikamahti’, 3. Koskenniemi wrote a favourable review of Åström's book: V.A. Koskenniemi, ‘Review of L. Åström, Valtiollisia seikkailijoita’, Uusi Päivä, August 15, 1918, 3.
37 L. Åström, Valtiollisia seikkailijoita (Helsinki, 1918).
38 Åström, Valtiollisia, 91–2.
39 Åström, Valtiollisia, 5, 98.
40 Åström, Valtiollisia, 16–17.
41 One commentator who saw through Åström's psycho-medical posturing was the social-democratic trade union activist E.K. Louhikko, who in his memoirs remembers how, upon reading Åström's book (probably in late 1918), he was struck by how eager the author was to prove that socialist leaders were ‘Lombrosoan born criminals’ intent on leading the nation to ruin: ‘I have heard that, when Mr Åström later became a minister [actually, an ambassador] and had to assume a broader perspective on the world, he was a bit of ashamed of his booklet written in the midst of a frenzied time.’ E.K. Louhikko, Teimme vallankumousta (Helsinki, 1943), 247.
42 Quoted in Juri Nummelin, Sisällissodan ääniä (Helsinki, 2018), 55.
43 Soveri, Joukkojen, 19–23.
44 Tikka, ‘Warfare and Terror’, 108–17.
45 Soveri, Joukkojen, 5, 36.
46 Alapuro, State and Revolution, 93.
47 Alapuro, State and Revolution, 89–92.
48 On nationalism during the autonomy (1809–1917), see Alapuro, State and Revolution, esp. Chapter 5.
49 The idea that Finns belong to the ‘East Baltic’ race was suggested by the private scholar Rolf Nordenstreng, a Swedish-speaking Finn who had moved to Sweden in 1900. Rolf Nordenstreng, Euroopan ihmisrodut ja kansat (Helsinki, 1929), 100–2, 310–1.
50 Sten Högnäs, Kustens och skogarnas folk: om synen på svenskt och finskt lynne (Stockholm, 1995), 7–14.
51 Högnäs, Kustens och skogarnas folk, 61.
52 For more on the international discussion of the Finnish ‘race’, see Aira Kemiläinen, Finns in the Shadow of the ‘Aryans’: Race Theories and Racism (Helsinki, 1998).
53 Marjatta Hietala, ‘From Race Hygiene to Sterilization: The Eugenics Movement in Finland’. In Eugenics and the Welfare State: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, eds. Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen (East Lansing, MI, 2005), 195–258.
54 Harry Federley, ‘Demokratiska idéer i biologisk betydelse’, Nya Argus 12, no. 6 (1919): 44–5.
55 Bertel Gripenberg, ‘Hvarför segrade de hvita?’, Finsk Tidskrift 85 (1918), 149–155, 153.
56 On the pages of Nya Argus in 1922, race biology and its political implications were challenged by two academic critics who were very sceptical of what they saw as the overgeneralised claims of Federley and other race biologists.
57 See, e.g. Kilpi, Tulevaisuuden edessä; Åström, Valtiollisia seikkailijoita; and the writer Eino Leino's autobiographical novel Helsingin valloitus (Helsinki, 1918).
58 K. Rob. V. Wikman, ‘Massans politiker’, Östsvensk Tidskrift 1, no. 23–24 (1917): 174–6.
59 Hans Ruin, ‘Litet masspsykologi’, Nya Argus 11, no. 6–8 (1918): 40–3, 42.
60 Ruin, ‘Litet masspsykologi’, 43.
61 P.O. von Törne, Stundens krav (Helsingfors, 1918), 14–15.
62 Henning Söderhjelm, The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 (London: [Publication year not given; probably published in the early 1920s]), viii.
63 Söderhjelm, The Red Insurrection, 1–2.
64 Söderhjelm, The Red Insurrection, 10–11.
65 Söderhjelm, The Red Insurrection, 21.
66 Söderhjelm, The Red Insurrection, 158–9.
67 Lars Ringbom, Inbördeskriget i Finland: psykologiska anteckningar (Helsingfors, 1918), 101.
68 Ringbom, Inbördeskriget, 141.
69 See, for example, Lars Ringbom, Stridande makter och stridiga mål (Helsingfors, 1921); and The Culture of Renewal (London, 1929).
70 Ringbom, Stridande makter, 106.
71 Ringbom, Inbördeskriget, 68–9.
72 Ringbom, Stridande makter, 77.
73 For more on the role of ethnolinguistic aspects in the Civil War, see Pekka Kalevi Hamalainen, In Time of Storm: Revolution, Civil War, and the Ethnolinguistic Issue in Finland (Albany, NY, 1978).
74 For more on the hatred of Russians at the time of the Civil War, see Outi Karemaa, Vihollisia, vainoojia, syöpäläisiä: venäläisviha Suomessa 1917–1923 (Helsinki, 1998), English summary: Foes, fiends and vermin: ethnic hatred of Russians in Finland 1917–1923.
75 As Risto Alapuro has noted, the Civil War ‘remained nearly totally incomprehensible to the intelligentsia’. Risto Alapuro, ‘Coping with the Civil War of 1918 in Twenty-First Century Finland’, in Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe, eds. Kenneth Christie and R.B. Cribb (London, 2002), 169–83, 171.
76 On the legacy of the Civil War in twentieth-century Finland, see Alapuro, ‘Coping with the Civil War’.
77 Julián Casanova, ‘Civil Wars, Revolutions and Counterrevolutions in Finland, Spain, and Greece (1918–1949): A Comparative Analysis’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13 (2000): 515–37; Payne, Civil War in Europe, 25–32; Jukka Kekkonen, Kun aseet puhuvat: Poliittinen väkivalta Espanjan ja Suomen sisällissodissa (Helsinki, 2016).
78 Petteri Pietikäinen, Kipeät sielut. Hulluuden historia Suomessa (Helsinki, 2020), 18–19, 42–6; Risto Eräsaari and Keijo Rahkonen, eds., Työväenkysymyksestä sosiaalipolitiikkaan (Helsinki, 1975).
79 The need to acquire knowledge about people's social conditions and how the social system generally functioned paved the way for a society of experts to emerge, and for the ideology and policy of ‘social engineering’. See Kerstin Brückweh et al. eds., Engineering Society. The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980 (Houndmills, 2012); Thomas Etzemüller, ed., Die Ordnung der Moderne. Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld, 2009); Yvonne Hirdmann, ‘Social Planning under Rational Control’, in Models, Modernity and the Myrdals, eds. Pauli Kettunen and Hanna Eskola (Helsinki, 1997), 55–80.
80 Seikko Eskola, ‘Professorin tehtävät historian valossa’. Acatiimi no. 8 (2004), www.acatiimi.fi/2004/8_04/8_04d.htm (accessed March 24, 2021).
81 See Louhikko, Teimme vallankumousta, 145; Arvid Luhtakanta, Suomen Punakaarti (Kulju, 1938), 33–4; E. Huttunen, Sosiaalidemokraattinen Puolue ja kansalaissota (Helsinki, 1918), 98–9; Hannes Ryömä, Vallankumousvuoden tapahtumista (Helsinki, 1918), 19, 39. Even the hard-core communist Otto-Wille Kuusinen, a political refugee who co-founded the Finnish Communist Party in Moscow in the autumn of 1918, admitted in his account of the insurgency that there were some ‘worthless windbags’ as leaders and commanders in the Red Guards. Kuusinen became a prominent apparatchik in the Soviet Government in the 1920s. O.W. Kuusinen, Suomen vallankumouksesta (Pietari, 1918), 34.
82 Alex Halonen, Suomen työväki ja väkivaltaiset menettelytavat (Helsinki, 1923), 87.
83 Jarl von Schoultz, Bidrag till belysande av Finlands socialdemokratiska partis historia (Helsingfors, 1924), 150–1.
84 Jari Ehrnrooth, Sanan vallassa, vihan voimalla (Helsinki, 1992), 563 (English summary).
85 Ehrnrooth, Sanan vallassa, 573 (English summary).
86 Louhikko, Teimme vallankumousta, 86–7.
87 Siltala, Sisällissodan psykohistoria.
88 Lauri Karvonen, From White to Blue-and-Black. Finnish Fascism in the Inter-War Era (Helsinki, 1988).
89 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956); Arthur William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, IL, 1959). For more on the development of crowd psychology into mass society theories, see Leach, ‘Mastering the Crowd’.
90 Borch, The Politics of Crowd, 1.
91 Quoted in Robert Merton, ‘The Ambivalences of Le Bon's The Crowd’ (Introduction), in Le Bon, The Crowd, v–xxxix, v.
92 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL, 1960), 21.