What is "red guards"

n. (red guard English)

The Red Guards formed the army of Red Finland during the Finnish Civil War in 1918. The combined strength of the Red Guard was about 30,000 at the beginning of the Civil War, and peaked at 90,000-120,000 during the course of the conflict.

The leadership of the Red Guards altered during the war: Ali Aaltonen, Eero Haapalainen, Eino Rahja and in the end Kullervo Manner. The government of Red Finland was the Finnish People's Delegation. The Red Guards were in power from 28 January to the end of April 1918 in southern Finland.

The Red Guards' general staff was located in Helsinki; the other major cities controlled by the Red forces were Tampere, Turku, Pori and Viipuri. Red Tampere came to its end on 6 April 1918 after bloody battles when the White Guards commanded by Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim conquered the city.

Thousands of Red Guards were imprisoned, hundreds of them were executed, and the rest were transported to POW camps. Helsinki was in White control by April 12, 1918. Some joined the Red Army and fought against nationalist Finns in the heimosodat. In fact, during the 1920s, the Soviet International Red Officer School had more Finnish students than the Finnish Reserve Officer School. The highest rank was obtained by Eino Rahja, who was a commander of an army corps (komkor).

During the general strike of 1905 "National Guards" were formed in Finland. These Guards included both socialists and non-socialists, but eventually they were divided into opposing militias. In that year, however, bloodshed was still avoided.

The last surviving Red Guard, Aarne Arvonen, became Finland's oldest man ever before his death in January 2009.

Red Guards were a fanaticised student mass paramilitary social movement mobilized by Mao Zedong in 1966 and 1967, during the Cultural Revolution. According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows:

Red Guards were paramilitary volunteer formations consisting mainly of factory workers, peasants, cossacks and partially of soldiers and sailors for "protection of the Soviet power". Red Guards were a transitional military force of the collapsing Imperial Russian Army and the base formations of Bolsheviks during the October Revolution and the first months of the Civil War. Most of them were formed in the time frame of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and some of the units were reorganized into the Red Army during 1918. The Red Guards formations were organized across most of the former Russian Empire, including territories outside of the contemporary Russian Federation such as Finland, Estonia, Ukraine, others. They were not centralized and were formed by decision of a local party and Soviet authorities.