Aino Kuusinen

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Aino Kuusinen (1965)

Aino Maria Kuusinen , b. Turtiainen (born March 5, 1886 in Savonranta , † September 1, 1970 ) was a Finnish employee of the Communist International (Comintern) and agent of the military intelligence service of the Red Army . She was married to Otto Kuusinen , co-founder of the Finnish Communist Party and one of the leaders in the 1918 communist uprising ; later he rose to the highest party positions in the Soviet Union . Aino Kuusinen worked with agent Richard Sorge on a mission in Japan . In 1937 she was ordered back and arrested. She spent a total of fifteen years in prisons in Moscow, forced labor camps on the Arctic Ocean and in central Russia.

Childhood and youth

Aino Kuusinen's correct date of birth is believed to be March 5, 1886 (Soviet documents give March 5, 1893). She grew up in Savonranta, in central Finland, with three brothers, one of whom - Toivo Turtiainen - later became a Social Democrat member of parliament. After graduating from middle school, she completed a four-year course at the nurses' school at Helsinki Surgical Hospital. In 1909 she married the railway engineer Leo Sarola.

Encounter with Otto Kuusinen

Otto Kuusinen (1920)

In 1919 the couple was living in a small house near Helsinki when an acquaintance asked them to give shelter to a member of parliament who was being persecuted by the police. He turned out to be the former Minister of Education in the communist government, Otto Kuusinen . He stayed a night; she met him for the second time three months later. Otto Kuusinen moved to Stockholm, from where he began to send poems and letters.

To get to know the administration of hospitals, she traveled to Germany, where she happened to meet the former foreign minister in the communist government of Finland, Yrjö Sirola . He revealed himself to be a Comintern employee and suggested that she travel back via Moscow. She arrived there in the early summer of 1922 and was quartered with Trotsky's parents. Sirola also led them into the Comintern building, which was housed in the palace of the former German embassy.

In late summer Otto Kuusinen returned from a conference in Petrograd and the two decided to get married. First they lived for several years in the Hotel Lux , which was reserved for high Comintern officials, then for some time in the Kremlin and finally in the so-called House on the Embankment for high government officials across the street from the Kremlin. Your neighbors were the then Prime Minister Rykov and his family. In 1922 she met Lenin on several occasions , who had recovered from his first stroke; Stalin was on vacation in 1926, and he went on an excursion with her on the Black Sea.

In 1924 Aino Kuusinen began working for the Comintern's information department, where she analyzed the Scandinavian press. Her husband had been appointed secretary of the Executive Committee in 1921 and was one of the three people who effectively led the Comintern ( Grigory Zinoviev was formally chairman of the Executive Committee). In 1925 her brother Väinö arrived in Moscow. He had been a sergeant in the Finnish Army and had been kidnapped while on guard duty at the Suomenlinna coastal fortress . He was later appointed director of the Agricultural University in Petrozavodsk , arrested in 1935 and presumably executed.

Stays in the USA and Japan

At the end of the 1920s, the Kuusinen couple had grown so far apart that Aino Kuusinen accepted Yrjö Sirola's suggestion to travel to the United States . There she was supposed to resolve disputes between the US Communist Party and the Finnish Workers' Association. At the end of January 1931 she left under a false name with a Swedish identity. The New York experience finally made her aware of the backwardness of the Soviet Union. She spent most of her time rearranging the five Finnish newspapers. She advised against Americans of Finnish origin who wanted to emigrate to Karelia, but returned to Moscow at the end of July 1933.

She immediately looked for a way to leave the Soviet Union again, and an acquaintance put her in contact with General Jan Bersin , Chief of the Military Intelligence Service GRU (4th Division in the General Staff of the Red Army). After much hesitation, her husband agreed that Aino Kuusinen would go to Japan as an agent . This time she traveled in 1934 under the name "Elisabeth Hansson" via Venice and Shanghai to Tokyo. There she managed to find access to journalists and high government circles. In January 1935 she met the Russian-German spy Richard Sorge , whom she describes as an alcoholic. The communications had to go through him, even if he wasn't allowed to give her orders.

In November 1935 she received orders to return to Moscow, where she met a new chief, General Semyon Uritsky . Her husband presented Stalin's request to become the Soviet ambassador for Sweden and Norway, which she refused. At Urizki's suggestion, Aino Kuusinen wrote a book about her experiences in Japan under the Swedish title Det Leende Nippon (The Smiling Japan). When she returned to Tokyo in September 1936, the book helped her to make new contacts, and at the instigation of the Japanese Foreign Ministry it was translated into English. This time she was even invited to a garden party of the emperor Hirohito and met Prince Chichibu , the brother of the emperor, several times . In November 1937 she was called back to Richard Sorge, who told her that they all had to return to Moscow.

Fifteen years of forced labor

In the second week of December 1937, Aino Kuusinen was back in Moscow. Numerous acquaintances and friends had disappeared without a trace, anyone else she met seemed to be paralyzed with fear. On January 1, 1938 at five o'clock in the morning, she was also arrested and initially the Butyrka - then the Lubyanka - the prison housed. She sat there together with the wives of People's Commissars, generals or the aircraft designer Tupolev . During the nightly interrogations, she was asked to admit that her husband was a British spy . When she was taken to Lefortovo Prison in the middle of summer , she was kept in a solitary cell next to the torture chamber so that she had to endure the night over the screams of the victims. Twice she was shown the bodies of people beaten to death in their blood; she was threatened with the gun but never beaten herself. Until the very end she refused to incriminate her husband.

In April 1939, without having seen a court, she was sent to a forced labor camp on the Ussa, 60 kilometers from Vorkuta , for eight years , where huge deposits of high-quality coal had been discovered. She was employed there as a nurse and in 1941 appointed head nurse of a sick barrack. In April 1943 she was sent directly to Vorkuta, where she was employed as a head nurse in the surgical department of the camp hospital. The inmates mainly suffered from malnutrition and the vitamin deficiency disease pellagra . The bodies of the deceased were dumped on the tundra, where they were eaten by reindeer. The hoped-for amnesty at the end of the Second World War did not materialize, and Kuusinen was not released until December 1946.

Aino Kuusinen was too proud to go back to her husband. She alternately moved to Rostov , Moscow, Tbilisi and a small village in Kazakhstan , but she never received a residence permit, which would have been a requirement for employment. In May 1949 she was arrested again and taken to Lubyanka prison in Moscow. For visiting the United States Embassy in Moscow, she was accused of espionage for the United States. At the end of 1950 she was sent to Potma - 400 kilometers from Moscow on the railway line to Kazan - for five and a half years without being brought to justice. Only then did she learn that she had been sentenced to 15 years of forced labor for counterrevolutionary activity. However, she must have been sponsored because she actually did not have to do any forced labor. Two years after Stalin died, she dared to write a petition to the Attorney General. On October 12, 1955, she was told that the sentences against her had been overturned on the grounds that there were no crimes.

Departure and autobiography

Back in Moscow, she was given an apartment and a small pension, and she was formally rehabilitated. She never met her husband again. On February 28, 1965 she was allowed to leave for Finland; never before had the wife of such a high-ranking Soviet politician come to the West. She used the last years of her life to write her autobiography The God Overthrows His Angels . The book was published by Wolfgang Leonhard after her death.

literature

• Aino Kuusinen: The god overthrows his angels. Edited and introduced by Wolfgang Leonhard. Fritz Molden Verlag, Vienna, Munich and Zurich 1972, ISBN 3-217-00448-5 .