Sisu, “Even Through a Stone Wall”: The Autobiography of Oskari Tokoi

By Oskari Tokoi and John I. Kolehmainen

Originally published in 1957, Sisu, “Even Through a Stone Wall” is the English-language edition of the memoirs of the Social Democratic premier of Finland of 1917, Oskari Tokoi. Included are his account of events in Helsinki and Russo-Finnish relations during 1917, the Finnish civil war, and the little-known story of the Finnish Legion’s role in the Allied intervention in North Russia.

“‘sisu’…something that ‘surpasses fearlessness and extraordinary endurance...a kind of inner fire or superhuman nerve force....courage, tenacity, stubborn determination, energy and a will and an ability to get things done.’

“The record is now before us, and it constitutes, in my opinion, an inspiring revelation of Finnish sisu. It took real bravery for a young country lad of eighteen to emigrate to the New World in 1891 and to toil long hours in the eerie half-darkness of Wyoming and Colorado mines, disdainful of the large chunks of rock and ore hanging overhead which seemed to warn: “Beware! Someday we’ll fall and bury you!”—John I. Kolehmainen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789125078

Oskari Tokoi

OSKARI TOKOI (1873-1963) was a Finnish socialist who served as a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Finland. Born Antti Oskari Hirvi in the Central Ostrobothnia region of Finland on May 15, 1873, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1891, aged 18, working as a miner in the Midwest. In 1900 he returned to Finland, supporting himself as a farmer and merchant. He became politically active in 1901 and was elected as chairman of the workers’ association of Kannus in 1905. In 1907 he was elected to the Finnish parliament (Eduskunta) as a representative of the Social Democrats, chairman of the Finnish Trade Union Federation in 1912, and head of the Senate of Finland in 1917. When the Revolution began, Tokoi sided with the Reds, who appointed him Finland’s minister of foodstuffs. However, the Finns won their independence, forcing Tokoi into exile in Canada. He returned to the U.S. in 1921 and moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where from 1922-1959 he served on the editorial staff of the Finnish Daily Raivaaja. During WWII, Tokoi toured the U.S. as an active public voice for the cause of Finland, and the Edskunta exonerated him in 1944 of all charges related to the Finnish Civil War. After WWII he became an activist among Finnish-Americans and was honored with an Aaltonen sculpture at the Social Democrat party headquarters in Helsinki, Finland. Tokoi died in Fitchburg on April 4, 1963, aged 90. John I. Kolehmainen (1910-1995) was a Finnish-American historian and writer. Born in 1910 in Conneaut, Ohio to Finnish immigrants from Viitasaari, he studied at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He served as a professor of history and political science at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, and as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Helsinki (1955-56). He published several books, including studies on the history of American Finns and a history of the Finnish Daily Raivaaja. He died in Canada in 1969, aged 85.

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Text originally published in 1957 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

SISU

EVEN THROUGH A STONE WALL

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

OSKARI TOKOI

Introduction by

John I. Kolehmainen, PhD.

With 21 Illustrations

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 5

INTRODUCTION 6

EARTH AND THE SEED 9

CHAPTER I 9

FISSURES IN THE ROCK 19

CHAPTER I 19

CHAPTER II 29

CHAPTER III 40

CHAPTER IV 51

A TIME OF TURMOIL 62

CHAPTER I 62

CHAPTER II 76

CHAPTER III 92

CHAPTER IV 112

THE SWATH OF THE SICKLE 122

CHAPTER I 122

CHAPTER II 130

CHAPTER III 137

SAFE HAVEN 150

CHAPTER I 150

CHAPTER II 155

CHAPTER III 161

CHAPTER IV 168

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 177

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Oskari Tokoi, Premier of Finland Frontispiece

Union Pacific railyard, Rock Springs, Wyoming

Union Pacific railyard, Hannassa, Wyoming

Oskari Tokoi, Member of the First Finnish Diet

Speaker of the Diet Pehr Evind Svinhufvud and Governor General of Finland Nikolai Gerard open the First Diet of Finland, 1907

Social Democratic Party Congress, September 8-12, 1909

Revolution, 1917

Counter-Revolution, 1918

Edvard Gylling and Nikolai Lenin

Signers, with the author, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin, of the Treaty acknowledging Finnish independence

Petrograd Naval Revolutionary Committee, 1918

Lenin addressing crowd in Moscow, 1919

Karl Marx’s grave, which was visited by the author when in England

Oskari Tokoi, lumberjack in Canada

The coast of Oregon

Mr. and Mrs. Tokoi on fundraising tour for Finnish relief

Mr. and Mrs. Tokoi being greeted by Emil Skog, Finnish Minister of Defense, and Alex Aaltonen, former Secretary of the Finnish Social Democratic Party, on their visit to Finland in 1949

On the 1949 trip Mr. and Mrs. Tokoi being welcomed by Prime Minister K. A. Fagerholm

Mr. and Mrs. Tokoi, guests of honor of the Finnish Diet

Waino Aaltonen, noted Finnish sculptor, working on bust of the author

Waino Aaltonen presenting bust of author to the Finnish Social Democratic Party, received by Vrikko Puskala, Secretary of the Party, and Emil Skog, Minister of Defense

INTRODUCTION

WHILE NOT MANY words of Finnish origin are ever likely to find their way into Webster’s dictionary, there are at the moment two possible contenders for the honor: sauna and sisu.

The first is readily identified as the inimitable Finnish steambath which, according to an enthusiastic American convert, limbers up the joints wonderfully, and sends a man home whistling tunes as loudly as a locomotive, for he feels good.

Sisu, on the other hand, has been more difficult to define precisely and adequately. A new Finnish-English dictionary offers a bewildering assortment of synonyms ranging in emphasis from pluck to intestinal fortitude and guts. Finland’s famous composer Jean Sibelius once likened sisu to a metaphysical shot in the arm, which makes a man do the impossible. Such American friends of the gallant little republic as Hudson Strode and David Hinshaw have proposed that the mystifying four letter word be translated as something that surpasses fearlessness and extraordinary endurance...a kind of inner fire or superhuman nerve force....courage, tenacity, stubborn determination, energy and a will and an ability to get things done.

It may well be that the lives of men and women who have triumphed over well-nigh insuperable odds will yield a fuller and richer insight into the meaning of sisu than a dictionary. Perhaps sisu is lived, not defined.

Oskari Tokoi, in my judgment, is a member of this select company, and I’m pleased to see sisu on the title page of this English-language edition of his memoirs.

I cannot honestly say that the word sisu flashed unforgettably across my mind when I first met Tokoi many years ago. Perhaps the lovely and gentle springtime of New England had something to do with this. The surroundings in which we met and talked failed somehow to suggest the heroic. My attentiveness was diverted by the murmur of the tiny brook that bisected the Tokoi lawn. Or was it the chirping of birds as they rejoiced in the return of bright green foliage?

Nor did my host’s appearance bring to mind any legendary Hercules. He was, I well remember, rather short and stockily built. His voice was unusually soft; he was slow to speak, and his words were deliberate, carefully chosen. His facial features were disarming; although he was serious most of the time an occasional smile brought a pair of dimples to his cheeks and a gleam to his dark eyes. His manner surely did not give a hint of daring or aggressiveness. Rather I was reminded of portions of Topelius’ classic description of the Finnish character: a slow contemplative way of thinking...taciturn reticency...a distant, reserved attitude.

It was almost impossible for me to cast this unassuming and unobtrusive person in the roles of a bold adventurer, a stubborn fighter for human rights, an able leader of men, a skilful politician, a trustworthy statesman, a courageous journalist, and a persuasive speaker. Yet he was all these, and I was compelled again to realize that external appearances were deceptive, and that deeds were the only true measurement of a man’s character and stature.

The record is now before us, and it constitutes, in my opinion, an inspiring revelation of Finnish sisu. It took real bravery for a young country lad of eighteen to emigrate to the New World in 1891 and to toil long hours in the eerie half-darkness of Wyoming and Colorado mines, disdainful of the large chunks of rock and ore hanging overhead which seemed to warn: Beware! Someday we’ll fall and bury you!

Tokoi returned to Finland in 1900, a five pound money belt around his waist secreting eighty twenty-dollar gold pieces, the fruit of nine years of Spartan frugality. Yet no life of comfort and ease awaited him in the Old Country. For one thing, powerful pan-Slav conspirators, headed by the notorious Governor-General Bobrikov, were determined to crush Finnish liberties. The Yankee, freshly imbued with the free spirit of the New World, quickly found his place in the vanguard of the resistance movement.

There was also a domestic enemy, social injustice, which caught the attention of the returned emigrant, whose sensitivity to the welfare of the common man had been heightened by his eye-opening experiences in America. He eagerly entered the Social Democratic and trade union movements, where his ability, integrity, energy, and wholehearted devotion, won for him ever-widening respect and recognition. He was elected to the diet (1907-1917), the chairmanship of the Trade Union Organization (1912), the speakership of the diet (1913), and finally to the premiership (1917).

The events of 1917 and 1918—the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the rise of an independent Finland, the tragic fratricidal war which accompanied the birth of the nation—are still the subjects of considerable controversy, even among historians. Tokoi, who played an important role during these years, inevitably has been involved in the welter of charges and counter-charges. His candid and dispassionate account will no doubt help us all to understand and appreciate more clearly not only his role but also the tangled and grievous character of these crucial years.

Late in 1919 the colorful Finnish Legion at Murmansk, which had enjoyed a measure of Allied support, was disbanded, and Tokoi found temporary asylum in England. He was unable to remain in Russia or to return to Finland since by a strange turn of events he had become Public Enemy No. 1 of both the Communists and the Finnish reactionaries. From England Tokoi went to Canada and thence in 1921 to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where he established his permanent home.

Unlike many exiles, Tokoi did not enter the United States a defeated, disillusioned, and spent warrior. From the vantage point of associate editorship of the liberal Raivaaja, he continued his telling attacks, on both the domestic and international varieties of Communism while at the same time calling attention to the need for the progressive improvement of the American way of life. The Soviet Union’s unprovoked aggression against Finland in 1939 presented Tokoi with a rare opportunity not merely to denounce Communist imperialism but to manifest through his relief work his boundless love for the country of his birth and its people.

While the present memoirs end with the year 1944, Tokoi’s active career has not stopped. During these post-war years he has contributed mightily to the building of bridges between the two countries which he so deeply loves. His articles on American life that have appeared in a leading Helsinki newspaper, his Voice of America broadcasts, his triumphant visit to Finland in 1949, have helped the Old World Finns get a more accurate and more meaningful picture of the United States. His efforts to interest Americans generally and those of Finnish origin in particular in the cultural riches of Finland are beginning to bear an abundant harvest. A grateful Helsinki journal has called him Democratic Finland’s great goodwill ambassador in the West. He has also published several volumes of childhood reminiscences which have been warmly welcomed here and abroad for their vivid yet homely portrayals of peasant life in Finland during the 1870’s and later.

It has been my good fortune in recent years to have been associated with Oskari Tokoi in a number of undertakings. Each meeting has left me literally amazed at his prodigious memory, his undiminished sense of curiosity, his resolute determination not to allow this dynamic twentieth century get ahead of him, his driving desire to be of service to the United States, to Finland, and to his fellowmen on both sides of the ocean.

I have often heard him affectionately described as The Grand Old Man. This he is, without question. A man of wisdom, compassion, and not least, of courage. Or perhaps you, too, will say: SISU.

Heidelberg College

March 15, 1957

EARTH AND THE SEED

CHAPTER I

THERE IS NOWHERE in that distant north which is Finland a warm, sunny clime; nor bounty, nor careless ease. In the southern part of the land, nature now and then does smile, and here are the cities and harbors and the home of men. And the vast central part of the country has its measure of fruitfulness, with prosperous farms among thousands upon thousands of lakes and lonely ponds. But beyond that, and ever farther to the north, there stretch the solitary, monotonous plains of Southern Ostrobothnia—and finally, just below the Arctic wastes, the forbidding forests, the icy rivers, the desolation of Central Ostrobothnia.

In the time of which I speak, Central Ostrobothnia was a bleak land, and this was especially true of the Lestijoki valley, where lay the old township of Lohtaja. The villages of the township were each made up of a few houses, huddled close together, and behind the houses lay the meager fields and pastures of the small farms. Cultivation was confined to a narrow border of land along the river banks. The soil was thin and poor, and yielded a pitiful harvest. Beyond lay the swamps, defiant and threatening with killing frost.

In all of Central Ostrobothnia, and especially so in the Lestijoki valley, every man was his neighbor’s equal. There was no one who had gathered great riches. Each and all lived from hand to mouth, and life was hard. It was particularly hard in the years of heavy frosts. They no longer came as frequently as in the olden times. But bitter memories still remained of what had become known as the Great Hunger Years, years of all-killing frost, years of indescribable misery, which had brought death of starvation to a large part of the population.

But even in better times the bleak, frost-bitten land could not yield enough to sustain its people, and they had to turn to the outside world. With late summer, when the most urgent summer chores were done, the able-bodied men left their homes. Some of them hurried to the south, to the cities of Carelia and even as far away as St. Petersburg, where they turned their skill as carpenters to good use. Others went to sea, for the more enterprising men at the mouth of the Lestijoki had built themselves two-masted schooners, and in the brief summer before the waters froze they sailed into the Baltic and down to Germany with cargoes of tar and timber. Some farmers began to raise horses. They went to the country fairs of central Finland to buy colts, they fed them on their home pastures and broke them in to harness, then sold them as sleek farm horses in the fair at Oulu, or even as far afield as Sweden.

It was through all this kind of enterprise, added to the day-to-day routine of farming, that enough money was brought home to make ends meet. It was this activity which gave a pattern of mobility to the lives of the men of the region. The married men usually remembered to return home after their brief escape from its bleakness and poverty. But there were always a few unmarried men who stayed away for good and settled down in other parts of the country or, if they were sailors, remained in foreign lands or even disappeared without a trace.

On the 15th of May, 1873, a boy was born on a farm in the Kannus village of Yliviirre, at that time still a part of the township of Lohtaja. I was christened Antti Oskari, and because I was born on a farm called Tokoi, that became my surname, after the custom of the time. No one remembers how the Tokoi farm got its name. It is only known that in the eighteenth century, when a great land reform took place in the region, the farms were set down in the charts and ledgers with their existing names, and the people living on them were called after these names. For in those days a farmer’s son still had no surname of his own other than that of the place where he was born. And if he went to another farm, he took the name of that place.

Such changes of name had taken place in that family which now called itself Tokoi. My grandfather had been born a poor crofter’s son in a different village of the parish. But when he grew to young manhood that croft could not offer him a livelihood, and he went as a hired man to a farm in still another village. He married the eldest daughter of a Swedish family who lived on a neighboring farm. Like his own father before him, the young husband went off with his bride to a croft. There they built their little cottage and brought up their children. Only two sons, Matti and Kalle, survived the Great Hunger Years. It was grandfather who bought the Tokoi farm, and from that purchase came our surname.

Early in his married life grandfather began to make trips to southern Finland, to Viipuri and Sortavala, and even to St. Petersburg, in order to earn money. His sons, as soon as they could, also went on summer trading travels, voyaging far to add to the family income. Kalle, the younger of the two brothers, was my father. After my birth father gave up these trips and instead remained at home to raise horses. Sometimes he made profits, but at other times he lost.

Now the people of the Lestijoki valley began to hear wonderful strange tales of a young land across the seas—America—where the possibilities of earning money were beyond wildest belief. A man of Lestijoki went to America and returned in a few years with enough money in his pocket to buy a farm. Others ventured on this glittering road to fortune, and wrote in their letters that a workingman received more than a dollar a day in wages. For Finland of that time, it meant that in as little as a year of work in America a man earned the price of a small farm in Ostrobothnia.

The men of our valley were used to leaving their homes; and now a longer absence, a greater distance, offered the security of a farm of their own to those who were landless, and freedom from debt to those whose lands were mortgaged.

My father and my uncle Matti discussed the tales, and they came to the conclusion that one of them must go to America to earn some of that money for the Tokoi farm. Since Matti was the elder, and still unmarried, it was decided that he was the one to go. Father would stay on the farm with his parents, his wife and his children, of whom there were now three.

In the spring of 1878 my uncle Matti left on his journey. Everything went according to plan, for he immediately found work on the docks at Ashtabula, Ohio. The work was hard, he admitted, but he was earning money. He began to send money home.

Father was inspired by his brother’s success. So it was all true, the tales that had been told! But then he began to fear that if Matti’s money cleared most of the farm’s debts, his brother might in due time inherit the whole property. And so father too went in search of security to America, in the autumn of 1881. He left behind him his parents and his wife—and five children. He also left the Tokoi lands, which now included a debt-ridden neighboring farm that had come up for sale.

Schools were still rare in Ostrobothnia. Of course the clergy, the sexton and the parish clerk could read and write; and, in Lohtaja, so could the apothecary and the merchant Sahlgren who had once been the landowners’ deputy in the Diet at Helsinki. We could further count among our literates one farmer, one retired soldier and my father.

When he was a boy, father had been sent to live for one winter with an aunt in the next parish, and there his great-uncle, the parish sexton, had taught him reading and writing and arithmetic. Later, when grandfather bought the Tokoi farm, my father became the unofficial scribe for the whole village. He wrote letters, drew up deeds and mortgages, wrote wills and helped execute them. Because father could read and write, he decided that I should learn too. It happened that in 1877 a grammar school was established in the parish town. It could be attended by the children of neighboring villagers if they found boarding in some home in the town. So when father left for America, I went to school.

I was placed with relatives—a merchant in the parish town whose wife was a cousin of my family. Behind their house and store was a tanner’s workshop owned by the merchant. The tanner lived in a small room behind his workshop, and in this room space was found for me. There I lived and slept and studied for the next four winters. During the long, dark evenings the old men of the town gathered in the tanner’s room to huddle around the stove and talk of old times, and I listened enraptured to their tales of the seas and of far-away places, the lands beyond the seas.

In school I did well. Whenever the state supervisor paid a visit the teacher always sent little Oskari to the blackboard to show how well the pupils had mastered their sums and fractions; and in history and geography I was always given the more difficult questions to answer.

The schoolmaster was pleased with my progress, and grandfather, who drove to the town in his sleigh to bring food in payment for my board and to visit this boy he loved, was proud of my success. But more important, the town itself took pride in me. The pastor, schoolmaster, apothecary and merchant Sahlgren proposed that I be sent to the lycée in Vaasa to continue my schooling, and they even offered to bear the costs of my education. A letter was sent to father asking his consent to the plan, for at that time a boy could not be sent to school without his father’s permission.

The reply from America came back promptly. It was brief, and it was negative. Father stated that as soon as I finished grammar school, and had learned reading, writing and arithmetic, I was to learn how to work. In America, he said, he had seen too many gentlemen—schooled men who had lost their fine positions, and students who had turned out to be failures. Gentlemen did not know how to work with their hands or how to support themselves in honest fashion. My son, he wrote firmly, will not be brought up to be a gentleman. The end of my four winters of grammar school was the end of my formal education.

Even at that, my learning was of significance to our own little village, especially to those wives whose husbands were in America. For by this time men from nearly every farm were absent; some had gone as far as Australia. I was the only one left in the village who could read and write. It now became my task to maintain the exchange of news between absent husband and stay-at-home wife. First I must read aloud the letters that came, then I had to write the replies to these letters. And all the wives agreed that I wrote so well and with such a depth of feeling that tears rose to their eyes. The letters I composed for these lonely wives were full of their love and of fear of God, and of the doings at home.

The establishment of a school was followed by a development of even greater influence on the life of the people of the Lestijoki valley. The solitude of this remote and slumbering region began to crumble with the building of a railroad from Seinajoki in the south to Oulu in the north. Long before its coming, rumors had circulated, and there was great excitement when some claimed that a decision in the matter had been reached in the Diet at Helsinki. But nobody then knew what route the railroad was to take, and although engineers and surveyors had moved through the wilderness, they had left no signs. At last, in the spring of 1883, a narrow trail was cut through the forests, and stakes were driven to show the path the rails were to follow. The trail that was marked out passed through our village, and it crossed the very fields that grandfather had cleared after he had bought the Tokoi farm.

Strangers began to appear—railroad workers, old hands at their job, tough and hardened men. They came to live in almost every house of our village, and they brought new life and new ways with them. At first relations between the natives and these workers from the outside world were cold, sometimes inimical. A few of the villagers even refused to have the strangers in their home. But grandfather, who in his youth had seen a bit of the world and had himself sought shelter among strangers, rented as many rooms to these men as he had at his disposal.

The building of the railroad brought in gradually a certain prosperity to the community. Farmers near the railroad sold milk, butter, bread and meat to the workers. In the winter men with teams of horses were needed to cart fill for the railroad, and the