The decision to start an armed revolution in Finland was initially made by
Red Guards' leadership and by a branch split from
Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) party committee on 23 January 1918, called "Finland's workers' executive committee", whose members represented the most radical wing of the labor movement. On the night of 27 January, the executive committee ordered the Red Guards to arrest members of the
Senate led by
Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, and a host of other leading
bourgeois politicians, including 33 members of
Parliament. However, this failed completely, and the Red Guards' Supreme military staff postponed the coup by a day because of unfinished preparations, so the senators were informed of the
arrest warrant through a prematurely issued public handout, and had time to hide. The assembling of Parliament on 28 January was blocked and a few members that turned up were arrested. The Finnish People's Delegation was established on 28 January 1918 and it set to lead the revolt started on the same morning. The founding of the Delegation was announced on 29 January in the newspaper
Työmies in a declaration that also named the delegates, and in which the fundamental objectives of the Red government were briefly explained. The Delegation already on its first day occupied the
Senate House in
Helsinki and established itself as the government of the
Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic (Red Finland), an alternative
socialist state to the pre-existing Finnish state. The Red administration's first action was to discontinue all capitalist
newspapers, already on 28 January in the capital, and over the next few days in other cities in Finland. On 2 February, the Delegation confirmed the "
counterrevolutionary" press to be suspended "indefinitely". The suspension even applied to the right wing
social democratic Työn Valta and
Itä-Suomen Työmies newspapers. After this the only papers allowed to be published were the papers of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian labor movement. The
Whites' Senate discontinued all social democratic papers correspondingly. In March, the Delegation's Postal and Announcement Department placed preventive
censorship on the remaining papers' reporting on the military and foreign affairs. On 2 February, the Delegation ordered the Red Guards to be maintained by the government, essentially placing them under its authority. In practice, the Delegation was later forced to confess that it could barely control the actions of the Red Guards, and reduced the number of military affairs cases it handled. The relationship between the Red Guards and the Delegation remained problematic throughout the war, as the Delegation regarded the Red Guards' actions to be arbitrary, and many guardsmen in turn saw the delegates as "
parasites" who were estranged from the realities of the battlefront. In its set of decrees, it published 45
statutes in all, and favoured concised and scant language. Most of the Delegation's time went into producing new legislation. It has been estimated that about two thirds of its written laws were reactions to acute administerial issues, and the rest aimed at ideological goals or increasing support. Particularly the laws passed on ideological grounds were modeled after the legislation produced by the
Paris Commune of 1871 and also the
October Revolution in neighboring
Soviet Russia, but mostly after Finland's labor movement's previous programmes. The laws passed by the Delegation were announced in the newspaper
Suomen Kansanvaltuuskunnan Tiedonantoja. ==Finnish People's Delegation members==