The Red Guards (Finnish: Punakaarti, IPA: [ˈpunɑˌkɑːrti]; Swedish: Röda gardet) were the paramilitary units of the Finnish labour movement in the early 1900s. The first Red Guards were established during the 1905 general strike, but disbanded a year later. After the Russian 1917 February revolution the Red Guards were re-established and in the 1918 Finnish Civil War they formed the army of Red Finland. The combined strength of the Red Guard was about 30,000 at the beginning of the Civil War, peaking at between 90,000 and 120,000 during the course of the conflict. The number included more than 2,000 members of the Women's Guards. In May 1918, up to 80,000 Reds were captured by the victorious Whites, 12,000 to 14,000 of them died in the prison camps due to execution, disease and malnutrition. A majority of the Reds were finally pardoned in late 1918.

Approximately 10,000 to 13,000 Reds managed to flee to Soviet Russia. Some of them fought in the Russian Civil War until 1920 against the Finnish Whites invading East Karelia. The Murmansk Legion was a British-organized military unit composed of the Red Guard members from Northern Finland who had fled to Russia in the early stages of the Finnish Civil War.