Arnold Susi

Arnold Susi (born January 4, 1896 in the village of Livoonia, Stavropol governorate , today: Novourupskoje , Krasnodar region ; † May 29, 1968 in Tallinn ) was an Estonian lawyer , educational politician and opponent of the Soviet regime.

Life

Arnold Susi studied at the Historical and Philological Institute in Petrograd in 1915/16 before he was drafted into the Russian military. He received his training at an ensign school. He took part in the First World War. From January 1919 he fought in the Estonian War of Liberation against Soviet Russia.

After the end of the war he studied law at the University of Tartu . In 1924 he finished his studies. From 1929 he worked as a lawyer in Tallinn.

In August and September 1944, between the withdrawal of the German Armed Forces from Estonia and the renewed occupation of the country by the Red Army , Susi was a member of the People's Committee of the Republic of Estonia and from September 18, 1944 in the cabinet of the Estonian Prime Minister Otto Tief Education Minister. On September 22nd, the Soviet troops captured Tallinn and deposed the government.

Arnold Susi was arrested by the Soviet occupation authorities in October 1944 and sentenced to eight years in prison in June 1945. In the Moscow NKVD prison he shared the cell in the Lubyanka with Alexander Solzhenitsyn , who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature , and with whom he later enjoyed a lifelong friendship.

In 1952 Arnold Susi was released from prison. From 1958 to 1960 he worked at the Khakass folk theater in Abakan, Siberia . He then returned to Estonia and settled in Vasula (now the rural community of Tartu ). From 1963 to 1968 Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited him several times and wrote his work The Archipelago Gulag there . He hid the original manuscript in Estonia, including in Susi's house.

literature

• Eesti elulood. Tallinn: Eesti Entsüklopeediakirjastus 2000 (= Eesti entsüklopeedia 14) ISBN 9985-70-064-3 , p. 493

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.ohtuleht.ee/index.aspx?id=290004  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.