Roy Blomstrom
SILENCES: A NOVEL OF THE 1918 FINNISH CIVIL WAR
1. What connects Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada to the Finnish Civil War?
2. What are the challenges of historical fiction? What “rules” did you follow to write Silences?
3. How did you research Finland and Canada for this novel?
4. How did you find photographs? How did you use them and other images?
5. What did you learn about the culture of Finland along the way?
6. How has Port Arthur changed since 1955?
7. What is your personal connection to the war?
8. What’s next for you?
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1. What connects Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada to the Finnish Civil War?
Silences is a work of historical fiction. It begins with a prologue in which we learn that a man has hanged himself.
Half of the novel takes place in Finland, mostly from December 1917 to May of 1918, and the other half is set in Port Arthur in the summer of 1955. Finland declared independence from Russia (it had been a Russian Duchy) on December 6, 1917, just more than 100 years ago.
The first half of the novel is about the Finnish Civil War, which had sort of begun by the time independence from Russia was declared, but which really exploded into being at the end of January 1918.
This war had a profound effect on the Lakehead, particularly Port Arthur. In the years immediately after the war, some 5,000 Finns and Finland-Swedes came to this area to work. Finland was, after all, economically dead, or at least in a coma.
Most of the immigrants were men who went into the lumber camps and mills or started farms; many were women who came to work as housekeepers, cooks, and cookies (cook’s helpers).
Because the Finnish Civil War was fought by two sides—Red and White, and people from both sides came to the Lakehead after the war—Port Arthur gained a significant number of revolutionaries and communists, along with a big batch of social democrats, union organizers, and “Church Finns.” And the war went on—mostly in a silence generated by memories of the atrocities of an unspeakable war, but sometimes with shouting from those who still thought their “cause,” whether Red or White, was still worth fighting about, or at least debating loudly.
The second half of the novel is set in Port Arthur in the summer of 1955. Once again we meet some of the characters from the first half, but they’re older now, and they have grandchildren, and there are problems that go all the way back to the war. The times have changed, and the survivors of the war felt that some things shouldn’t be passed on to one’s children or grandchildren. So some silences must remain. But which ones? And why? And what does it all have to do with the man who hanged himself in the Prologue? I hope the book is interesting enough to keep readers engaged in finding answers to these questions.
2. What are the challenges of historical fiction? What “rules” did you follow to write Silences?
I wanted to keep to historical truth as much as possible—in part because so much about the war was a mystery to me and I researched to solve it for myself. Alternative histories—the type in which one different action a long time ago changes the world we know today—can be fun, but that type of puzzle wasn’t what inspired Silences.
So here are my rules.
- Historical events and conditions, as recorded by people who lived at this time, or by historians who have researched the events or documents of the time, should not be significantly altered. These things shape the storyline.
- Into and among them, the writer may insert fictional events and characters, as long as they are realistic and possible. If they are also probable and plausible, that is even better.
- The storyline must be tailored to fit not just known historical facts, but the historical environment—the geography, weather, business climate, means of transportation, social customs, and so forth. It becomes the writer’s obligation to create a real-feeling backdrop for the action to take place. The writer needs to do a lot of research in order to render the world of the storyline believable. Historical fiction is not a history lesson, however. It is a story; it is about characters and their environment, and its purpose is to engage the reader emotionally and intellectually in its plot.
3. How did you research Finland and Canada for this novel?
First, let’s start with Port Arthur. I enjoyed researching Port Arthur in 1955. I had some memories, of course. But I also spent a lot of time in the Brodie library reading the News Chronicle on microfilm, the phone book—especially the ads—and Joseph Mauro’s A History of Thunder Bay. At home I searched online for things like TV schedules and weather information for the Lakehead in 1955. I gleaned bits of information from Dave Cano’s delightful website, Hotrods and Jalopies. And I made copious notes.
Before I sat down to write, I knew that there would be a prologue about a man who is found hanged in 1955. And I sort of knew why the hanging took place.
But researching the Finnish Civil War—well, that was a different matter. Like most wars, that war was a tangle of mysteries. I researched several decades of cultural change before the 1918 war to trace back the war’s causes.
And then I had to find a way to translate the history into a work of fiction. I couldn’t just describe battles and strategies and declare a winner. I needed to find a way to tell a story within the context of the war—a story that needed to be, in its own way, bigger than the war.
Back to research: A major problem was that the creation of the history of a war comes from the victor’s side first, and only later on—sometimes much later, and in bits and pieces—stories from the loser’s side emerge. The early histories of the Finnish Civil War were written by Whites. Had I written Silences in 1930, it would have been a much different book. Even now, balanced material on the war is hard to find, especially if the person (me) doing the looking can’t read or write Finnish, and whose command of Swedish is roughly that of a six-year-old without vocabulary for many words from the 20th century and none from the 21st. The internet and Google Translate, even with all their limitations, were a godsend.
I also needed to find a way to insert fictional characters into plausible situations—both real and imagined—and these characters had to be presented in such a way that the reader would like some and dislike others.
I kept examining the war until I understood its basics. Why was it fought? What helped the White side win? What unexpected things happened, and how were they handled? How did it connect to World War I? What happened when the war was “over?”
Only when I thought I understood these things, more or less, did I begin to structure the novel—not on paper yet, but in my head.
One key to understanding why things happened as they did was that the Finnish Civil War was a railroad war. Armoured trains battled each other and were used to get into the heart of an enemy village or city and strafe the occupiers. Another key was that one side, the White, was led by experienced generals and commanders, and the other, the Reds, chose their commanders by election. A third key was that at the start of the war the Whites had no weapons and needed to get some really fast.
A fourth (and the key to the novel’s final structure) was that the main battlefield—a triangular chunk of land about the size of Southern Ontario—had pinch points. For example, the railway system had places where a track that ran east-west met a track that ran north-south. The Whites were north of the east-west track. For the Reds, who were primarily in the south of Finland, to get at them, they needed to go up the north-south track, then either east or west. The junction of the two tracks was a pinch point. The Whites had to hold the T intersection or be overrun; the Reds had to take it or be unable to advance.
Conclusion? I could take my main characters—three White brothers plus a friend and the friend’s father—and, on a map, plot their journey from home to hell and back.
The journey, of course, wouldn’t just be a physical one. It would be an emotional one as well. The reader would be, at least for a while, an ill-prepared soldier in a senseless war.
And then? It’s 1955. The atmosphere changes. The characters are older; the setting is different—alien to both the characters who inhabit it, and to the reader who can only look back at it. Someone is going to be found hanged. Important things are going to happen to the characters. And these people that we have come to know will head off into a future that will become, sometime, the present world of the reader.
4. How did you find photographs? How did you use them and other images?
Even though, in 1918, photography was in its infancy, especially as a means of recording events, people took pictures of the Finnish Civil War. Not so much of the action of the war (the picture would have likely been blurry since the speed of film was still too slow to capture rapid movement) but of the aftermath.
Let me suggest that while action captures attention, aftermath captures contemplation.
In Silences, two of the major characters walk past a corner where a horse lies dead in the street. A hundred meters or so beyond the horse is a wagon, obviously the one that the horse had been pulling. It’s tipped onto its side, and there is rubble around it. The buildings on the street have been shelled, and their concrete fragments are in the rubble.
As a writer, I wanted to capture in words the look and feel of that scene. I wanted the reader to think about the characters who walk past that corner. Who are they? What do they feel? What would they smell and hear? How would they react to it? What might they say to each other? What are people doing on that street, the day after the battle? What would it mean to them?
From the hundreds of wartime photographs now available on the internet, I tried to make sure that most of the scenes in the first half of Silences could be tied to a real situation in a real place, one backed by a photograph.
The cover photograph, by the way, is of Onni Kokko. He was a child soldier, age 14, who was wounded in the battle of Tampere and died in hospital. I have run across two photos of him—the one on the cover and another that shows him in the hospital, his head in bandages, his eyes staring at the camera. The award is on his pillow.
There exists, as well, a photo of Arvo Koivisto who fought for the Reds. According to the person who uploaded the photograph, Arvo was thirteen when he was captured, interrogated, abused, and executed by Whites.
Many of the photographs that are preserved from the time of the war are of young men. They had their pictures taken before they went off to war. The pictures would allow the family to remember what they looked like when they were alive.
I also used Google Earth to look at some scenes from above. I used the computer to “go to” a location, then check out the topography. For one of the “armoured train vs. soldiers” battles, Google Earth let me look down on the stretch of railway track where the battle took place. How far away would the train be before the soldiers could spot it from their location? How high is the hill where White troops were positioned? I knew, from my reading, what the location was. Being able to see it, however, let me answer a lot of nitty-gritty questions that had a bearing on my depiction of the battle.
I hope that Silences interests you enough to spur you on to looking at the photos of the war. They are, for the most part, graphic and chilling, however. Be careful to put some emotional distance between you and what you see.
5. What did you learn about the culture of Finland along the way?
I learned a lot about languages, and about Finns and Finland-Swedes. Not to be confused with Swedes!
Finland’s west coast is (except for the water) right next to Sweden’s east coast. For all of recorded time, the people who lived along these coasts fished. As a result, over time the people on the west coast of Finland spoke primarily Swedish, and those farther inland spoke an almost completely unrelated language called Finnish. Swedish was an Indo-European language that had grown from Latin to an East-Germanic form, to become a language similar to other Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian and Danish.
Finnish, on the other hand, was a totally different kind of language. Its roots were to be found in the Ural Mountains and its grammar was not at all like that of Swedish, nor were many of its letters (once the language was given a written form) pronounced exactly the same as the same letters in Swedish. Almost all its words were pronounced so as to emphasize the first syllable. Where Swedish seems songlike, with words rising and falling in pitch, Finnish seems played to a drum—hard on the first beat, softer on the next few.
And language, as you know, is closely tied to culture.
Which brings us to the Finnish Civil War. When the war began, the White side, which drew heavily on the Swedish-speaking population for its recruits, had a “schooled” population. The Red side had a far larger number of people who could neither read nor write. The Whites put their faith in strategy as if there were a grammar of warfare. The Red side went with meetings and mythologies as if hard work and the stories we tell about ourselves could, by themselves, win the day. The White side used professional generals, schooled, of course, in the art of war; the Red side elected its commanders, choosing the best talker, the most ardent, the most loyal to the cause, for the post. White generals believed in the lessons of history, geography, and strategy; Red commanders favoured enthusiastic assaults—the kind you see in posters that are meant to motivate.
In Finland, the Finland-Swedes included a disproportionately large number of factory owners and owners of estates. They also held more high-paying jobs in the professions—doctor, teacher, banker, etc. The Finnish-speaking population was undereducated, poor, and far more likely to be trapped in difficult manual labour jobs. There was, if not in theory but certainly in practice, a fairly rigid class structure.
The Red side at the start of the war had two distinct advantages over the White side. First, the Reds had access to weapons provided to them by the Russians so that the Finns could have a revolution just like their neighbours to the east. Second, they were a far larger population than the Finland-Swedes, even counting the Finnish-speaking population who supported the Whites. When the war suddenly began, one thing seemed certain: the Reds would win in a matter of weeks because the Whites had no weapons.
And for a month or so, that prediction seemed right on target. And then something changed. The Finnish Civil War became a modern war.
How could a war that took place a hundred years ago be considered one of the first of the truly modern wars?
In the “old days” wars were fought by nations. For example, in the 1800s Britain and France went to war against each other. Sometimes, the combatants were bigger than mere nations—for example, World War I was a war between alliances, between empires, and between nation states. So was World War II.
Modern wars are different. The Korean war, for instance. It involved a number of countries, but the war was mainly between pairs of opposites. North Koreans fought South Koreans; capitalists fought communists, an agrarian culture took on an industrial culture. And when the war began, outside agencies picked a side and supported it by sending troops and materiel. China supported the North; the West supported the south. But these outside agencies didn’t directly fight each other. The United States, for example, did not invade China, nor did China invade the United States. The battleground, it was agreed, was to be someone else’s yard.
In Finland in 1918, the combatants lined up as follows:
· White against Red (i.e. capitalist against communist)
· North against South (the demarcation line was the Vasa to Petrograd railway line)
· Experienced generals vs. elected generals and union leaders
· Finland-Swedes against Finnish-speaking Finns (lots of ambiguity here)
· Supporters of the status quo versus revolutionaries or wannabe revolutionaries
· The poorly armed (initially the Whites) against the well-armed (the Reds)
· The religious vs. the irreligious, atheists, or agnostics
· Landowners vs. tenant farmers
· Factory owners and administrators vs. factory workers
· The educated against the uneducated or ill-educated
· Realists vs idealists
· Germany vs the Reds but at the same time in a treaty with the Russians
· Rich vs poor
· etc.
Note that it is possible to be partly on one side and partly on the other, and that because of the nature of the combat and of the combatants, it becomes very difficult to say that a peace treaty ends the war. The war may end, but the festering continues. And as it continues, the divisions grow deeper between White and Red. Those divisions emigrate with a lot of the people who leave Finland after the war and come to Canada. (Some of them, of course, swear they will never again be part of any group that involves itself in a war.)
It will require another war or two, depending on how you count—the Winter War and the Continuation War of the 1940s—to pull the two sides closer to each other as they fight a common enemy. It takes until well into the 1950s and 60s to raise the standard of living in Finland to what it had been before the Civil War. And it is not until the 1980s that Finnish writers and historians can write reasonably balanced stories and histories of the war.
6. How has Port Arthur changed since 1955?
Port Arthur has changed both a lot and a little—independent of joining Fort William in 1970 to become the city of Thunder Bay. Amalgamation had trickle-down effects. Streets, for example, were renamed to avoid duplication.
A lot of the changes had to do with the landscape of the town. If you stand today at the entrance to George Burke Park, you are at the entrance to what in the second half of Silences is called simply “the creek.” The road you’re on leads due west to the McIntyre River. Follow the road to where it ends, go a little further down the slope, and you will find yourself at the place where Jimmy and his friends met the man who was washing his car in the creek. Half a kilometer downstream was Spider Dam.
Here, you can easily wade across the river. On the other side lies a trail which, if you follow it all the way to where it ends—outside the old city limits, past the two lines of hydro towers—you will come to the place where the old “homeless” Finnish men lived. You could get to their shacks, torn down when Port Arthur and Fort William amalgamated, from John Street as well. A trail led south to the shacks. In the summer the men would often leave the shacks during the day, walk to Bay Street, hang around and socialize for a while, and then walk back
So, how about the two of us walk back to the park’s entrance? We’ll take our time.
On the left, at the top of the slope we just went down, there used to be some small tar-papered buildings in 1955. Some of them held sports equipment and the tools and equipment needed to keep the landscape tame. There was even a shack that sold ice-cream when Oliver Road School held its annual spring field day.
Just beyond the buildings there was a large oval running track and, a little further on, a covered stage for outdoor plays, where announcers could work their microphones and gymnasts could practice their routines. The stage was painted in the colours of the Finnish flag, with blue trim. There were doors right and left that allowed actors to enter and exit, and a hallway that let a performer leave the stage through the door on stage right and magically re-enter stage left.
There are no buildings here, now. The stage has been demolished, the track plowed away, and the landscape flattened by bulldozers to create ball diamonds for the few children who still play baseball—regular Little League baseball attracts fewer and fewer players each year.
The ground just past the stage sloped uphill to the left in the days before the bulldozers cut away the hill. There, in the fall, the Saskatoon bushes grew heavy with their delicious purple berries. The hill and its bushes are gone, and the ground is flat and bare of everything but more empty baseball diamonds and towering backstops and an asphalt parking lot. No dogs, free of the leash, chase balls or run after sticks. No children make wooden spears and see who can throw the spear farthest and make it stick into the ground.
We’re at the park entrance once more. One summer day in 1955 someone made a large sign that said, “This is Nahjus Park!” up there on the left. The Finnish athletic group which had signed a ten-year lease with the promise of an option to buy the park land when the lease was up, had discovered that the city could, instead, keep the land. There were mutterings about a “doctored” lease that had been created a year after the original—one that rescinded the original’s promise of ownership. The Finns abandoned the park and, in a short time, the stage had fallen into ruin and the buildings likewise. Oliver Road School stopped having its annual Field Day there (or anywhere), and George Burke Park lost its magic.
Before we cross Balmoral Street and head for home, it’s a good time to remember that in 1955 Balmoral Street ended a few blocks south of here. Franklin Avenue, a block further east, was the last through street between Oliver Road and John Street, and the city limits were just a little west of the McIntyre River. South of where we stand, the land is now part of Riverside Cemetery. In 1955, however, there were no trees here at the corner—just a small open field that, during the Depression, had been “appropriated” by a woman who planted her potatoes here. To my friends and me, the long-disused potato field was the baseball diamond. The bases were stones, and hitting the ball into the woods was frowned upon. Little League (real field, real bases) was seen by the kids who weren’t in it as an organization for essentially friendless though wealthy kids, whose parents were in charge of their play.
In 1955, Port Arthur was a patchwork city in many respects. The Current River area was where the poor and working class lived. The Italians lived on the streets below High Street. The wealthy were in “mansions” on the brow of the hill that overlooked them. The Finnish-speaking Finns clustered around Bay and Algoma streets. The Finland-Swedes and “real” Swedes lived on and north of Oliver Road.
My father, who came from Finland but spoke Swedish, learned his Finnish in Port Arthur when he worked for the city putting in sewer lines. He also learned a little Italian, a bit of Ukrainian, and some Polish—enough, when he was foreman of the crew, to be able to tell them what to do. Though he didn’t drink, every Christmas the Italians would bring him a bottle of wine—homemade, of course.
The point of all this rambling is that the people who read Silences are not all alike—even the people who are from Thunder Bay. They bring different kinds of knowledge to the book. Some of them, for instance, know the “old” names of Port Arthur’s streets. Most don’t. Some have personal memories of what life was like in the city—or elsewhere—in 1955. And some were not yet born in 1955. Some readers have never visited the city. We all have personal backgrounds, biases, interests, hopes, and fears. Each reader, in other words, reads Silences differently. The challenge for a writer is to make a book come alive for as many different people as possible.
7. What is your personal connection to the war?
You mean, why did I write this novel?
In what could have been 1955, but may have been a couple of years before that, or a year later—all I know for sure is that it was summer time, most likely a Sunday afternoon—my father and I were sitting on the front steps of the house. I had been playing war with my friends some days before and I asked, “Were you ever in a war?” Some of my friends’ fathers had served in World War II, and I wondered if my father had, too.
To understand the significance of the question, you have to know that my parents never lied to me—except about Santa Claus, yulgubben (in the dialect of Jeppo, Finland), yultomten (in Sweden). To them, if a child asks a question, the parent must give a truthful answer. No lies, no dissembling, no “Ask me later.”
“Were you ever in a war?”
My father hesitated, then he said, “Yes, but it was not the Second World War. It was another war.” He seemed tense.
I tried again. “What war was it?”
He said, “It was in Finland. The same time as World War I, but it was not that war.”
“You were a soldier?”
“I was in the artillery.”
“Who were you fighting?”
“The Russians.”
I have to clarify something. Every time I tell this story, every time I even just think about it, the story changes a bit. Our minds don’t recall events as they were—every re-telling alters the memory. But something like the incident I’m telling you about happened.
“Did you kill anyone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“We didn’t see where the shells landed.”
This is where my recollection of the incident ends. I know that at some point I was back in our house, and my mother was telling me that I shouldn’t ask my father about the war because it upset him.
A few days, or weeks, or maybe even a year or so later, my mother said that she had seen a picture of the war in Finland. It was the picture of a city in which all the buildings had been destroyed and the parts of them that were left standing looked like tombstones. I recognized that in a photograph of Tampere, which I found online.
My father died in 1957 at the age of 58. I was eleven. He would have been 18 when the Finnish Civil War began. He likely fought in it and was part of the White side. His younger brother, Elmer, would have been about 15. I have a picture of Elmer in a military uniform, wearing a white armband. He may have been in the war as well. Or, he may not. He was very young, but not necessarily young enough to have avoided being a soldier. I believe that he was in the war, but what I believe and what is true may not be the same thing. I feel as if I was once told by my mother that Elmer had to be cared for by his mother because after the war “his mind was not right,” and that his condition was caused by the war.
When I was researching the Finnish Civil War I discovered that an artillery school had been organized in Jacobstad early in the war. The artillery school would have been just a few kilometers from my father’s home. I have a picture of it. There are cannons in front of a large shed or old school, or ... I can’t really tell. And there are men milling about, outside in the snow. Whenever I look at it, I try to see if one of them looks like my father. But I can’t see him. And he’s not around to ask.
I have a picture of the city of Tampere, too, after its capture by the Whites in April of 1918. To the Finland-Swedes it was Tammerfors. The city looks like a graveyard. Few of the buildings, even the concrete ones, were able to withstand the shelling. Though there was a small Russian garrison in the city, the Russian troops tried to stay out of the fighting. Still, their barracks were shelled, and after the city fell their officers were executed. In Tampere, especially, the executions became a public entertainment.
I know that now. If my father were alive, however, I wouldn’t ask him about it, because it might upset him. That’s how silences work—how they erase the past and one generation’s best-forgotten memories of it.
The second generation, however, doesn’t have those memories. We’re one generation removed from the experience. But it’s our job to tell the larger story, to paint a bigger picture, to look for what it meant, to seek an overview—because we’re distant from it.
And that’s why I wrote the book.
8. What’s next for you?
A companion to Silences is in the works. I’m currently working on it. It’s a … there isn’t really a word for this. It’s a book you can read after you’ve read Silences. It doesn’t start where Silences ends, however. It starts partway through and, unlike Silences, it isn’t broken into two separate time periods.
It also isn’t really a separate story. That’s why we’re calling it a companion. Some of the events in Silences will come up again, but they’ll seem different because you’ll have the tools to see into and under them.
Reading the upcoming book will lead you to reinterpret some of the events in Silences in much the same way that growing older leads you to reinterpret your childhood. Age changes your perspective, and what you thought was one thing is often revealed as another. The title of the new work? I can’t tell you that. It would reveal too much.
April, 2018
