Otto Wille Kuusinen - Civil War and Flight To The Soviet Union

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.