Risto Ryti - Aftermath

Aftermath

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Ryti's reputation was publicly, but not officially, restored. The government's position on the propositions for the rehabilitation of Ryti and his fellow convicts has been that an official rehabilitation is unnecessary as the honour of the convicted has never been lost. The idea of annulling the sentences or the act retroactively has been considered to be unnecessary and contrary to Finnish judicial practice.

In 1994, a statue of Ryti was unveiled near the Parliament House. In 2004, in the YLE TV-series Suuret Suomalaiset (Great Finns) Risto Ryti got the second highest number of votes.

Risto Ryti was a Freemason, but after his prison sentence, was required to give up membership in his lodge, as convicts were barred from membership. He had become a Freemason in 1924, but according to the Finnish Lodge's assistant grand scribe Reijo Ahtokari, he did not very actively participate in Masonic activities. Historians are still skeptical as to whether Ryti's Freemasonry influenced his political actions. In January 1941, for example, he appointed a fellow Freemason, Jukka W. Rangell, as prime minister only after his secretary Lauri Puntila suggested that he do so.

Ryti did, according to some of his friends and acquaintances, strongly believe in fate. After a dinner in the 1930s at the home of a friend, Alvar Renqvist, in Helsinki, Ryti told the other guests, according to Heikki A. Reenpää, Alvar Renqvist's grandson: "In my life, fate has been the ruling force. If it had not been benevolent, I would not sit here now." One of Finland's most famous clairvoyants, Aino Kassinen, recalled in her memoirs that she met Ryti in the 1930s in Helsinki, and got the understanding that Ryti strongly believed in people's being guided by the higher divine powers, and that he strongly believed in God, and had studied theosophy and anthroposophy. Ryti's wife Gerda was a much more active spiritualist and theosophist than Ryti himself; she even claimed to have a spirit guide.