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Otto Wilhelm (Wille) Kuusinen (1881-1964) |
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Finnish politician, socialist theorist, literature historian, and poet, who escaped to Russia after the defeat of the Reds in the Finnish Civil War (1917-18). In his new home country, Otto Wille Kuusinen became an influential official in the administration of the state. He was among others a member of the Politburo, the highest Soviet organ, and Stalin's ideological adviser and ghost writer. Kuusinen also continued his career during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964). Nobody knows why Kuusinen was one of the few Communist leaders near Stalin, who survived the great purges, although his family members and close friends were arrested. Ma synnyin veljien käsissä pajan synkimmän, Otto Wilhelm (Wille) Kuusinen was born in Laukaa, the son of
Otto
Kuusinen, a poor village tailor, and Sofia Puttonen; she died soon
after his birth. In 1883 his father moved to Jyväskylä, where he
married Maria Sofia Sillman; he died in 1896. Kuusinen entered in 1892 the lycée of Jyväskylä, where he met the Gylling brothers – later they became important figures in the Social Democratic Party. Edvard Gylling perished in Stalin's terror. Kuusinen's early writings appeared in the school magazine Oras. They were patriotic and expressed hopes for a better future and freedom – Finland was at that time part of Russia, but national feelings were growing. In 1900, Kuusinen moved to Helsinki, where he began to study aesthetics, philosophy, and art history. Kuusinen contibuted to the student magazine Hälläpyörä, but otherwise he was not especially active in student organizations in his spare time – Kuusinen had to look for jobs and take loans to finance his studies. In 1901 he earned his living as a shopkeeper in Laukaa and then he worked a journalist at the newspaper Suomalainen. In 1902 he married Saima Pauliina Dahlström; they had six children. After graduating in 1905, Kuusinen abandoned his promising academic career, and instead went into politics. Kuusinen had joined at the age of 24 the Finnish Workers' Association, and from 1906 his articles began to appear in the magazine Sosialistinen Aikakauslehti. These included 'The Russian Revolution and Finland,' 'Anarchy and Revolution,' and 'Socialism and Freedom of Individuals.' He also wrote for the newspaper Työmies (1906-1917). As an aesthetician, Kuusinen did not first follow an ideological class line, but gradually his views hardened. Kuusinen's most famous poem, 'Torpeedo,' was pure and straightforward call to crush Capitalism, the symbolic vehicle of destruction is a torpedo, full of wild power of holy Russia. The poem was published in 1920 in the magazine Työläisnuoriso, and was reprinted since its first appearance in many leftist publications. In his letters to the young poet Elmer Diktonius, Kuusinen applied crudely Hegel's dialectic into analysis of poetry. "A work of art is the same as an artistic composition. Composition is a process. There are three stages in the perfect process – thesis, antithesis, and synthesis." Kuusinen argued that all life and art follows this triadic process. He uses the Hegelian or Marxist doctrine also in his essay on the Finnish national epic Kalevala, 'Kalevala ja sen luojat' (1956). The main theme in Kalevala, according to Kuusinen, is the antagonism between the people of Kaleva and Pohjola (Northland). In the center of the story is Sampo, the magic mill. The enchantress Louhi, who rules Northland, wants to keep it as her private property. The heroes of Kalevala think that it is wrong – Sampo belongs to all. (Kuusinen doesn't write that Sampo should be socialized, but his message is clear.) "Sampo-kuvan olemus on Kalevalassa esitetty epäselvästi, mutta on huomioitava, ettei muinaisaikojen kansa osannut ilmentää toiveitaan loogisesti kehittyneemmässä muodossa. Mutta merkillistä ei tässä suinkaan ole mikään Sammon "arvoituksellisuus", joka on vain vanhoillisten oppineiden konstruoima, vaan se todella hämmästyttävä tosiasia, että aikana, jolloin kansalla ei ollut vielä tietoa mistään koneista, se jo runoili sellaisen tuotantokoneiston luomisesta, joka tekisi mahdolliseksi ihmisten vapauttamisen ylimääräisen työn rasituksesta ja jonka avulla voitaisiin tuottaa riittävästi mitä kansa hyvin vointia varten tarvitaan, "syötäviä, myötäviä" ja vieläpä "kotipitoja". (from 'Kalevala ja sen luojat') From 1908 to 1913 and in 1917 Kuusinen was a member of the
Parliament and from 1911 to 1917 he was chairman of the Social
Democratic Party. During the Civil War (1917-18) he was minister of
education of the Red government, called People's delegation. When the
Red's lost the war, he escaped to Russia. Kuusinen knew that as one of
the leaders of the Red insurrection, he would be imprisoned and
condemned to death. In 1918 he became one of the founding members of
the Finnish Communist Party (SKP). Rumors spread in 1920 that Kuusinen had
been killed – one police officer claimed that he had shot Kuusinen on
the ice of Gulf of Bothnia. At that time Kuusinen was visiting secretly Finland – disguised as a woman – and helped to found The Socialist Worker's Party. Kuusinen proposed a programme which basically differed from Trotsky's theory of the Permanent Revolution. Kuusinen stood on the side of peaceful transition and of different roads to socialism in different countries. For Sosialistinen Aikakauslehti he wrote under the pseudonyms 'Usko Sotamies' or 'Sukulainen'. Kuusinen's private life was also busy: he met his wife, but had also an affair with Aino Sarola, and felt attraction to Lydia Stahl, who in turn was interested in John Reed. In 1920 Kuusinen spent some time in Stockholm, Sweden, and returned the next year to the Soviet Union. He participated in the founding of the Comintern (Communist International), and worked from 1921 there as Secretary General. At the initiative of of V.I. Lenin he wrote the oganization theses for the third congress of the Comintern. Lenin valued highly Kuusinen – "He thinks," Lenin once said. Kuusinen's assistant in the Comintern, Arvo Tuominen, portrayed him as a highly skillful writer of libels, whose talents Stalin needed in his purges. After 1934 one of Kuusinen's close associates in the Cominstern was the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949), whose friend Blagoi Popov was married for a short time to Kuusinen's daughter Riika. Kuusinen
had left behind his wife, who did not follow him to
exile.
However, three of his daughters and his son Esa moved to Moscow. In
1922 Kuusinen married Aino (Sarola) Turtiainen; she had met Kuusinen
earlier in Helsinki, and settled later in Moscow to work for Comintern.
They separated in mid-1930s and Kuusinen married in 1936 Maria
Amiragova. Under the pseudonym of Lisbeth Hansson she wrote the book Det leende Nippon
(1936, The Smiling Japan). While in Tokyo she met Richard Sorge, the
legendary KGB spy, who in the disguise of a Nazi journalist had
infiltrated the German embassy. Aino Kuusinen was arrested first time
in 1938. Even under
the threat of torture, Kuusinen refused to sign a paper with the claim
that her husband spied for Great Britain. Her interrogator said that he
had never met so stubborn and shameless woman. She spent 15
years in the forced labor camps and prisons, without receiving any help
from Kuusinen. These bitter years Aino Kuusinen recalled in her memoir, Jumala syöksee enkelinsä: muistelmat vuosilta 1919-1965 (1972), which was published by Otava. In Germany it was published by Verlag Fritz Molded under the title Der Gott sturzt seine Engel (1972), edited by Wolfgang Leonhard. The English translation, Before and After Stalin: A Personal Account of Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1960s, came out in 1974. Kuusinen's book was an instant bestseller in Finland, but soon after its appearance, president Urho Kekkonen called Heikki Reenpää, the director of Otava, and wished that no new editions would be made. According to Aino Kuusinen, her husband hated Finland, even
the Finnish language, and wanted
to submit the country under the Soviet rule. However, one of Kuusinen's
favorite composers was Jean Sibelius and he read Finland's national
poet J.L. Runeberg. In Karelia hundreds of
Kuusinen's Finnish comrades perished in the great purges, among
them his brother-in-law Einari Laaksovirta. His son Esa survived the
labour camps, but succumbed to tuberculosis. When Kuusinen's daughter
Hella
returned from Moscow to Finland, she was arrested. Upon hearing the
news he did not show deep affection in his letter to her, but was
more worried about rumors that she was a traitor. Kuusinen preferred to live a low-profile life away from spotlights and pull the strings from afar. He did not have many close friends. His only small personal vices were coffee, cigars, and women. Some of his acquaintances claimed did not have a sense of humor. Kuusinen could be a generous host, but he always spoke very slowly, chose his words carefully, and avoided getting drunk. Before the outbreak of WW II, Kuusinen said: "Hitler does not
want
to start a war against everyone at the same time." During the Winter
War (1939-40) between Finland and the Soviet Union, Kuusinen was the
head of the Terijoki government. Among its other members were Tuure
Lehén, who was married to Kuusinen's daughter Hertta between the world
wars, and Armas Äikiä – both returned later to Finland after many years
in exile. The "People's Government" was created to help Stalin's
political and military goals in his attempt to conquer Finland. In this
war Kuusinen and C.G. Mannerheim, the
commander of Finnish forces and former general in the czar's army, were
again on opposite sides – the first time was in 1917 when Mannerheim
led the White army and drove the Communists out of the country. If Kuusinen believed that the conflict would open the wounds of the Civil War he was wrong – the Soviet aggression united the nation. Soon the Terijoki government turned out to be a political blunder and Stalin opened peace negotiations with hard terms. In 1944, during the Continuation War (1941-44), a second massive Soviet offensive was stopped, and Finland was saved from occupation. In 1940 Kuusinen was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the
Karelian-Finnish Soviet Republic. "He really deserved it," said the
foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, knowing that Kuusinen was more interested in
international politics than the backward Karelia. In 1941 Kuusinen was
elected a member of the Politburo, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. He continued in high offices in the 1950s and 1960s.
Kuusinen became in 1952 a member of the Presidium of Supreme Soviet of
the U.S.S.R. Surviving the political changes after Stalin's death and
during Nikita Khrushchev's reforms, he was elected in 1957 again member
of the Presidium. The SKP paid Kuusinen's 70th anniversary much attention.
The
main event was held in Helsinki's Messuhalli (Fair exhibition hall).
The wall behind the stage was decorated with Lenin's and Stalin's
reliefs, connected to Kuusinen's photograph by a red line. Under
these was a text, in which he was characterized as the greatest Finnish
flag-bearer of communism. Because Kuusinen himself was absent, the SKP
received all the gifts (a
kantele, rug picturing Kullervo, peace dove, etc.) on his behalf. ('Otto Ville Kuusinen Commemorated' by Tauno Saarela, in The Cold War and the Politics of History, edited by Juhana Aunesluoma & Pauli Kettunen, 2008, pp. 153-154) When Kuusinen celebrated his eightieth birthday, he was not referred as a student of Stalin in speeches. (Finnish communism visited by Tauno Saarela, 2015, p. 206) Throughout the decades, the Kalevala remained close to Kuusinen. Kalevalan runoutta. Valikoima karjalais-suomalaisen kansaneepoksen runoutta
(1949) was made under his direction to celebrate 100th anniversary of
the epos. Kuusinen wrote the foreword, selected the poems, and
removed religious and supernatural elements from them. At the turn of
the 1950s and 1960s, he edited with others The
Fundamentals in Marxism-Leninism
(1963), which was considered one of the basic works on dialectical
materialism and the whole Communist ideology. The first edition of the
book was published in 1959. In 1958 Kuusinen was elected member of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the board of the magazine Novoje vremja Kuusinen was an unofficial but important opinion leader. In Kremlin politics he was considered "liberal," and it has been said that Kuusinen was one of the forefathers of perestroika. Before he was displaced, Kuusinen participated in the writing of the new party programme for rapid agricultural, industrial, and technological development. For the horror of the conservative ideologist, Kuusinen wanted to give up the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the contemporary Soviet Union. In this he was supported by Khrushchev. Kuusinen died in Moscow on May 17, 1964. According to Aino
Kuusinen,
his last secret mission was to negotiate with Mao Tse-tung and
reconcile the broken relations between China and the Soviet Union.
Kuusinen's ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall. His selected works
appeared in 1966; he never wrote his memoirs. Hertta Kuusinen, who greatly admird his father,
became a respected Communist politician in Finland. Later in life
Hertta Kuusinen was a close friend of the writer Olavi
Paavolainen
(1903-1964). Through his daughter, O.W. Kuusinen also influenced
Communist political maneuvering in Finland, of which President
J.K. Paasiviki well aware. Diplomatically, Kuusinen himself was a
"persona non grata" in his birth country. Sometimes he was referred to as "the Eater Finland." For further reading: Sirpin ja vasaran tie by Arvo Tuominen (1956); Kremlin kellot by Arvo Tuominen (1956); Communism in Finland by John H. Hodgson (1967); Nuori Otto Ville Kuusinen, edited by Vesa Salminen (1970); Otto Ville Kuusinen. Suomalainen internationalisti, edited by Marja-Leena Mikkola (1971); Otto Wille Kuusinen by U. Vikström (1972); Jumala syöksee enkelinsä by Aino Kuusinen (1972; Before and After Stalin: A Personal Account of Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1960s, 1974); Escape to Russia. A Political Biography of Otto. W. Kuusinen by John H. Hodgson (1974); Edward Gylling ja Otto Wille Kuusinen by John H. Hodgson (1974); Vuoden aikain myrskyt by Hertta Kuusinen (1975); Suomalaisen kommunismin synty 1918-1923 by Tauno Saarela (1996); O.W. Kuusinen ja taistelu Stalinin perinnöstä, edited by Timo Vihavainen (2003); Suomen syöjä Otto Wille Kuusinen by Antero Uitto (2013); Finnish Communism Visited by Tauno Saarela (2015) Selected works:
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