One hundred years ago today, former Member of Parliament Edla Sofia Hjulgrén was shot during the Finnish Civil War.
A labor activist for many years, Hjulgrén (English Wikipedia entry | the vastly more detailed Finnish) won election to the Eduskunta in 1913 as a Social Democrat.*
At the time, Finland was still a Grand Duchy within tsarist Russia. When the Russian revolutionaries who conquered power in St. Petersburg in 1917 proved reluctant to agree to Finnish independence, the Finns just declared it, and a civil war ensued in the first months of 1918 — between Soviet-backed Red Guards and German-backed White Guards.
The Whites won a nasty war thick with atrocities on both sides. Although she was a pacifist, our Sofia Hjulgrén was among hundreds of Red supporters swept up after the decisive Battle of Vyborg clinched White victory. She was shot there — it’s Viipuri to the Finns, and Vyborg to the Russians — in the cemetery. The Soviets got Vyborg back in a subsequent war with Finland, and erected a monument there to the hundreds of victims of the Whites’ April-May 1918 Vyborg Massacre.
* Finland boasts of being the first legislature in the world with full gender equality — meaning that, as of 1906, women enjoyed full equality both to vote and to stand for office. Women comprised above a tenth of its parliamentary delegates on the eve of Finland’s independence.
On this day..
- 2002: Johnny Joe Martinez
- 1538: John Forest and the image of Saint Derfel Gadarn
- 1889: Fulgence-Benjamin Geomay, at the Paris Exposition
- 1916: Four French soldiers of the 96 RI
- 1929: Nikolaus Karlovich von Meck, wrecker
- 1824: Antonio Brochetti, galley-dodger
- 1942: Stjepan Filipovic, "death to fascism, freedom to the people!"
- 1856: Casey and Cora, by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee
- 2001: Terrance Anthony James, snitch-killer
- 1393: The Muzaffarids, by Timur
- 1946: Karl Hermann Frank
- 1833: Midgegooroo, Noongar rebel