| Summary: | This study is centered around the early socialism in Northern Finland, the way it spread around, what its chances of gaining popularity were, and how regional differences developed 1900-1910. The earliest Workers' Associations in the region emerged in the 1880s. They did not attain a socialist character until 1903. Socialism did reach the cities in Northern Finland before the Great Strike, but not the countryside until the Great Strike of 1905 and after. The Great Strike became the divider between socialist and non-socialist parties. The antagonism of the Great Strike divided the socialists and the bourgeois further. Localized violence emerged (Kemi). The strike movement was the most vehement in Southern Lapland - e.g. in Kemi and its surroundings and in the logging and floating sites in Kuolajarvi - where strikes occurred repeatedly and continued on during the year 1906. Workers' Associations were mostly established in cities, in the sawmill etc. industrial population centers, in the strong agriculturally based townships surrounding Oulu, and along the railroads and timber floating channels. Oulu, Kemi, and Kajaani became the centers for educational and propaganda work, from which the work was directed towards the countryside as well. The party organ for the Social Democrats, Kansan Tahto (founded in Oulu 1906), received its broadest circulation in these industrial regions; partially also among farm and timber workers. Socialist agitation was aggressive until 1906. The movement ran into religious and nonsocialist obstacles. Kansan Tahto fell into the hands of moderate Social Democrats, and Oulu became the center for peaceful socialist work. Pronounced rebellious spirit continued to occupy Kemi and the Kemijoki-area, where socialism was pitted against the timber company Kemi. Strike movements, that used mobile, out-of-Province socialists, became the objects of abuse for non-socialist press, the Laestadian movement, and the non-socialist parties. Socialism ended up on the defensive, and from 1908 onwards it began ...
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