The steam engine
At full size in its original position.
PtG — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tiia Monto — CC BY-SA 4.0
A few months after Finland's independence from Russia in December 1917, a conflict erupted between the **Reds** — workers and socialists backed by Soviet Russia — and the **Whites** — the government and landowners backed by Germany. It ran from January to May 1918 and killed about thirty-seven thousand people out of a population of three million. The **Battle of Tampere** was the fiercest and the decisive one, and the city fell after bloody street fighting. What followed was worse: tens of thousands in prison camps where thousands died of hunger and disease. The subject was taboo for decades and was not examined publicly until the 1960s.
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The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas occupies an old Finlayson mill building on the bank of the rapids, and is Finland's national museum of labour and industrial history — **and entry is free**. The permanent exhibition covers the life of the Finnish worker since industrialisation: hours, wages, housing, occupational illness, the rise of the unions, and the fight for the eight-hour day. The displays are machines, tools, clothing and recorded testimony. At the heart of the museum is the **original steam engine** that drove the mill, preserved in place at full size — its largest exhibit. The section that distinguishes it covers the **Finnish Civil War of 1918**: a bloody conflict between Reds and Whites immediately after independence, of which Tampere was the fiercest battleground. Some thirty-seven thousand people died in a few months, many of them in prison camps after the fighting. The museum presents this without softening, on a subject that was taboo in Finland for decades. **Free**, and in the Finlayson complex, so combined with a walk through it.
At full size in its original position.
The civil war without softening, with Tampere its battleground.
Väinö Linnan aukio 8, Tampere