Historian rediscovers Finnish teen terrorists from early 20th century

Arvi Nikolainen

Martti Eklund

Bertel Rosenbröijer

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Take a look at the faces on the small pictures on the right - those of Arvi Nikolainen, Bertel Rosenbröijer, and Martti Eklund.
      All went to school at the Helsinki Reaalilyseo in the early 20th century. They are well dressed, with neckties and everything. But the boys’ first act of terror was horrific.
      There were other schoolboys near the Pasila depot in the early hours of April 8th, 1905. Those in the group were there to execute a 20-year-old acquaintance, Arvo Virtanen.
     
Nikolainen was the leader of Verikoirat - “Bloodhounds”, a secret society of upper secondary-level schoolboys in Helsinki who started to commit acts of terror on behalf of Finland’s independence.
      The group operated for two years, murdering at least three people, and possibly as many as five. None of these terrorists were ever caught.
     
In early 1905 Helsinki was a bustling small town of about 100,000 residents. The period of oppression enacted by Russia was in its sixth year. Nicholas II was the emperor. The brief period of Finland’s first political terror attacks had begun.
      “It was the first year when politics started to become visible on the streets of Helsinki”, says Teemu Keskisarja, a 38-year-old historian at the University of Helsinki.
      “The language struggle had mainly taken place in offices and the February Manifesto [of 1899] had not inspired shop assistants or factory workers to take to the streets yet.”
     
On April 8th a few high-school pupils took Virtanen from Siltasaari to an area near the depot. Virtanen, an independence activist himself, was suspected of becoming a police informer.
      The details of the execution are guesswork to some extent, but it is certain that the ruling of a field court of some kind was read out to Virtanen in the darkness. Four shots were fired, and the young man was found in a pool of blood in the morning.
      Things like this happened. Part of Helsinki had become radicalised. There were well-founded fears that Nicholas II would Russify the Grand Duchy of Finland once and for all.
      They came from Helsingin normaalilyseo or "Norssi", the Reaalilyseo or "Ressu", and the Swedish-language Nya Svenska Läroverket, or "Lärkan".
     
The members had a burning desire to fight for Finnish independence. They even had a fresh icon - a wiry and half-deaf Eugen Schauman, who had shot Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov and himself in 1904.
      “He was an idol for these schoolboys - as holy as could be”, Keskisarja says. “It didn’t matter that Schauman was mediocre in a way, coming from a fairly humble profession, and that he was not physically very impressive. He committed a pure act, and even bore the moral responsibility.”
      The boys had been plotting to murder Bobrikov themselves. The man was to have been blown up at a service at the Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral at the moment when he bowed in front of an Icon, making the sign of the cross.
      “It would inevitably have led to dozens of deaths”, Keskisarja estimates. “Perhaps it was left undone, because escaping from Katajanokka would have been difficult.”
     
The political terror of the group has been forgotten. Surprisingly little has been written about it. Eino I. Parmanen, section chief of Finland’s secret police, wrote about the Verikoirat in a book published in the 1930s.
      After that the extremist group was forgotten for decades, until Keskisarja found it again. He writes about the schoolboys in his book Vääpeli T:n tapaus – ja muita kertomuksia suomalaisesta terrorista (“The Case of Sergeant Major T. and Other Stories of Finnish Terror”).
     
In August 1905 the schoolboys chose by lot who would press the trigger of the revolver in the next assassination. They botched it. The group killed - apparently by accident - a Finnish father of three, a constable by the name of Johan Forstén, in Kaivopuisto Park.
      From the propaganda point of view, Forstén was a bad target, as the apparent purpose had been to shoot some pro-Russian bigwig.
      A couple of weeks later the body of a relatively young worker was found. His skull was crushed beyond recognition. The press linked the victim with the Forstén murder, but there is no certainty about whether or not he was a victim of the schoolboys.
     
The fanatical leader that was needed for such a reign of terror was Arvi Nikolainen.
      He was the son of a tailor who had lived in the southern part of Helsinki. He had not done well at school, but he had no serious crimes on his record.
      “He was the one to do things first, and he was the most courageous. When ten small boys stand on the steps of the Senate Square, there is one who suggests throwing either a snowball or a paving stone at the Cossacks.”
      Keskisarja believes that the radicalism was also promoted by the fact that the labour market was so crowded. Many educated young men had to accept minor positions in offices. Heroism had to be found somewhere else, so why not from the struggle for independence?
      “Undoubtedly they got women more easily thanks to that image.”
     
The inner circle of the group included at least the school pupils Arvi Nikolainen, Helge Hyrkstedt, Primus Nyman, Mauritz Kiljander, Bertel Rosenbröijer, Alfons Mesterton, Siiri Tyrni, Martti Eklund, Kustaa Seger, and Erik Edelfelt. There is very little information about Tyrni, the only girl in the inner circle, and it is not known if she participated in any killings.
     
There was one adult member in the hard core of the Verikoirat, 22-year-old pharmacist Kalle Nyman, who was characterised as aggressive.
      “He participated in the attacks at least as a chief of staff of sorts. He sent boys to launch the attacks, probably from the Grönqvist building over there”, Keskisarja says, pointing from his table at the Kappeli restaurant at an old building on the Esplanade. That was where the assassinations were planned.
      “All important people lived within a radius of a couple of blocks. Helsinki was a small town. It was easy to observe from the building when key figures walked on the promenade.”
     
Between murders, the members of the group lived quite normal Helsinki lives.
      When looking through the Ressu discipline log for 1904 - 1905, the most serious infraction that Keskisarja found was that Kiljander and Rosenbröijer had been caught for smoking two weeks after a bomb attack took place.
      If only the teachers had known. Or perhaps someone knew, but remained silent.
     
On September 2nd it was the turn of Mark Denisuk, a Ukrainian gendarme officer. He had been in Helsinki just six months when someone shot him in the back on Kansakoulukatu. Denisuk was wounded, and he chased after the gunman, but a hostile crowd stopped him. In hospital Denisuk had nearly a metre of damaged intestine removed, and he lingered on for about a year before dying.
     
Four days after the Denisuk shooting, it was Arvi Nikolainen’s turn to demonstrate his wild nature.
      He threw a bomb that he had made himself in front of the police station on Eerikinkatu. The blast echoed all the way to Pasila, shattering 300 windows. However, nobody was seriously injured.
      By now they were veteran political assassins.
      In early October two of them shot a Russian constable, Nikolai Mitrofanov, at the corner of Iso Roobertinkatu and Annankatu. Mitrofanov died of his wounds the following year.
     
It is astounding what they embarked on next. They needed to earn immortality.
      They had found out that Nicholas II was going to Koivistonsaari on the Karelian Isthmus to hunt. At the time he was possibly the world’s most closely-guarded person.
      The boys had the support of adult activists for their plot. At least Arvi Nikolainen, Kalle Nyman, Primus Nyman, and Gunnar Björling went to the isthmus, packing revolvers.
      They also carried capsules of poison. Keskisarja believes that the assassins would have swallowed the capsules if they had been caught.
     
But wasn’t the idea of murdering the Tsar of Russia something of an overreach for Helsinki schoolboys? Had they lost touch with reality?
      “One would not have required a very big network even for the murder of Alexander II”, Keskisarja says. “All they would have needed was good luck. If there were any groups in Finland who would have been capable of killing the emperor, then why not them? If they would have even got the chance to try to murder the Tsar, their names would have gone down in world history.”
      But it didn’t work. When the death-squad reached the Isthmus, the emperor had returned, after shooting a hare and a fox. The intelligence had been faulty, and the boys didn’t even have a decent plan for the assassination.
     
Keskisarja says that he understands the group “to a great degree”.
      “In 1905 there was a real, tangible threat that Finland would vanish as a nation, and that the Finnish language and Finland’s economic autonomy would disappear”, Keskisarja says.
      “There was a weighty factual basis for the acts of the Verikoirat. Undoubtedly, acts of terror had been committed for much stupider reasons.”
      For Keskisarja they are at least as great heroes as the adults who are remembered as the heroes of the struggle for independence, but who did not put their lives on the line.
     
So who are the ones that history remembers? In addition to Eugen Schauman, there were at least the Finnish activists Konrad "Konni" Zilliacus, Herman Gummerus, and the future President P.E. Svinhufvud, who was exiled to Siberia in 1914.
      But the Verikoirat were forgotten. Partly it was because none of them spoke about what they had done during their own lifetimes. First-hand information of the terror was buried with them.
      “The lack of martyrs was another reason why the group was forgotten”, Keskisarja says. “If one of them had died, certainly some boys’ organisation in the 1920s or 1930s would have been named after him.”
     
In their later years, members of the group lived ordinary lives in the newly-independent Finland.
      One ended up in a rural theatre, another had a career in technology. A third became a modernist poet. There was a lawyer, and a pharmacist who emigrated to Canada. Nikolainen was a journalist in America.
      Did they remain silent about their freedom struggle because of some traumatic and shameful act?
      Keskisarja speculates that the execution of Arvo Virtanen may have been such an event.
      After standing in a circle at the Pasila depot, there was some bluster, and then someone fired four shots, executing a boy they knew, who was just a couple of years older than they were.
      No end justifies something like that - not even for a teenage boy.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.1.2010


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finland shaken 100 years ago by murder of Governor-General Bobrikov (15.6.2004)

Links:
  Russification of Finland (Wikipedia)
  Eugen Schauman (Wikipedia)

TOMMI NIEMINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
tommi.nieminen@hs.fi