Karelian Labor Commune
autonomous region within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Karelian Labour Commune was an autonomous region of Russia established in 1920 following the successes of the Red Army's incursion into the Republic of Uhtua, to undermine and discredit the separatist movements and to make Finland give up on attempting to liberate East Karelia shortly before the beginning of negotiations for the Treaty of Tartu and during the Kinship Wars. Edvard Gylling and Yrjö Sirola, former members of the executive organ of the rebel Reds in the Finnish Civil War 1918, the Finnish People's Delegation, met with Vladimir Lenin in the Kremlin to propose autonomy for East Karelia within Russia. The Commune was founded on 8 June 1920 and was disestablished on 25 July 1923 and succeeded by the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, following the end of the Kinship Wars.
Government
Karelian Revolutionary Committee & the Executive Committee of Olonets
The Government of the Karelian Labor Commune was run by the Karelian Revolutionary Committee (Karrevkom), which was headed by Edvard Gylling, a former member of the government of the FSWR. Much of the leadership of the Karelian Labor Commune were that of Red Finns, who were expatriates that got government jobs, such as Gylling, Aleksandr Šotman and et cetera. Around 20,000 Finnish people, mostly people who were a part of the Finnish People's Delegation or Red Guards fled to the Commune following or nearing the end of the Finnish Civil War.
The Capital of the Commune was chosen to be Petrozavodsk. This was a problem as this led to the formation of two administrative centers for the Commune, for the existence of the Executive Committee of Olonets. The existence of two administrative centers led to infighting and petty disputes, such as the demarcation of the border based on either ethnic, legal/historical or economic boundaries.
The borders of the Karelian Labor Commune were drawn in such a way that the Karelian people and/or Finnish people would form to be the majority of the region, as according to the census carried out in August 1920, 145,753 people lived there, of which 60.8%, or 89,951 people, were ethnically Karelians. The bitter infighting led to the eastern border to run roughly along the Murmansk railroad from the White Sea to Lake Onega, so that Shunga, Shyoltozero and the mouth of the River Svir would remain outside of the Commune, to limit the number of Russian people within the borders of the labor commune.
The public source identifies “Karelian Labor Commune” as autonomous region within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Karelian, Labor and Commune.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4214934. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1918 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karelian Labor Commune” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.