Civil War and Flight To The Soviet Union
After toppling the more moderate party chairman J. K. Kari in 1906, Kuusinen came to dominate Finland's Social Democratic Party. He was a member of Finland's Parliament 1908–1913 and the party's chairman 1911–1917. He was a leader of the January 1918 revolution in Finland that created the short-lived Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic, of which he was appointed People's Commissar of Education. After the republic was defeated in the Finnish Civil War in 1918, Kuusinen fled to Moscow and helped form the Finnish Communist Party.
He continued his work as a prominent leader of the Comintern in Bolshevist Russia, that soon became the Soviet Union. Kuusinen also became a leader in Soviet military intelligence, establishing an intelligence network against the Scandinavian countries. In Finland, a more moderate faction rehabilitated the Social Democrats under Väinö Tanner's leadership. Meanwhile, Kuusinen and other radicals were increasingly seen as responsible for the Civil War and its aftermath.
Animosity towards Socialists in Finland in the decades after the Civil War prompted many Finns to emigrate to Russia to "build Socialism." However, the Soviet Great Purge was a hard blow against Finns in the Soviet Union — most of those who didn't escape back to Finland were executed as unreliable in the 1930s — and Kuusinen's reputation in Finland was further damaged when he turned out to be one of the very few not targeted by Stalinist show trials, deportations, and executions.
Read more about this topic: Otto Wille Kuusinen
Famous quotes containing the words soviet union, civil war, civil, war, flight, soviet and/or union:
“Nothing an interested foreigner may have to say about the Soviet Union today can compare with the scorn and fury of those who inhabit the ruin of a dream.”
—Christopher Hope (b. 1944)
“Luxury, or a refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life, had long been supposed the source of every corruption in government, and the immediate cause of faction, sedition, civil wars, and the total loss of liberty. It was, therefore, universally regarded as a vice, and was an object of declamation to all satyrists, and severe moralists.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“At Hayes’ General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment ‘on account.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war. This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn’t going to be any war.”
—Sidney Howard (1891–1939)
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““Is there life on Mars?” “No, not there either.””
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“If in madness of delusion, anyone shall lift his parricidal hand against this blessed union ... the arms of thousands will be raised to save it, and the curse of millions will fall upon the head which may have plotted its destruction.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)