Arvo Tuominen

Arvo Tuominen in the 1950s

Arvo "Poika" Tuominen (born September 5, 1894 near Hämeenkyrö ; † May 27, 1981 in Tampere ) was a Finnish communist revolutionary and later a social democratic editor and politician. Poika means "boy" in Finnish. Tuominen got this nickname in 1920 because of his boyish appearance.

Live and act

Tuominen was born the son of a carpenter in Kuotila near Hämeenkyrö in 1894. In 1912 he moved to Tampere to begin an apprenticeship as a carpenter; soon he joined the Social Democratic Party of Finland . During the Finnish Civil War , Tuominen sided with the Finnish Red Guard and in 1918 published Kansan lehti, a radical social democratic newspaper, in Tampere. After the Red Guards were defeated in May 1918, Tuominen went with other radical leaders to Russia, where they split from the mainstream Social Democratic Party and founded the Communist Party of Finland in Petrograd in August – September 1918.

Tuominen returned to Finland and supported Otto Ville Kuusinen's wing within the party. In 1921 he traveled again to Petrograd, where Kuusinen's supporters, supported by the Comintern leadership , prevailed against Kullervo Manner's supporters at the next party congress . Tuominen was elected to the party's Central Committee and became head of the Finnish bureau. He returned to Finland, where he was arrested on January 26, 1922 for publishing a proclamation calling on Finnish workers to fight on the side of the Soviets in the Soviet-Finnish conflict of Karelia. Tuominen was fired in the spring of 1926 and was elected executive director of the Community of Finnish Trade Unions. The Finnish government had him arrested again in April 1928 for maintaining contacts with the Soviet Union and the banned Communist Party.

Tuominen was paroled in 1932 and received a letter from Kuusinen, who at the time was one of the secretaries of the Comintern and speechwriter for Joseph Stalin , urging him to move to the Soviet Union. Tuominen snuck to Sweden and then in April 1933 to the Soviet Union, where he lived in Kuusinen's apartment. He took a crash course at the Lenin Party School and was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of Finland , making him a member of the Comintern Executive.

Tuominen witnessed the Great Terror first hand and managed to leave Moscow for Stockholm in early 1938. On November 13, 1939, he was ordered to return to Moscow to become head of the communist government Stalin wanted to establish in Finland. However, Tuominen refused to obey the order and a break with the Soviet Union occurred. He ordered the Communist Party of Finland not to assist the Red Army in the winter war and to fight for it on the Finnish side.

Tuominen stayed in Sweden until 1956 and then returned to Finland. He became a member of the Social Democratic Party and published his newspaper in Tampere before becoming a member of Parliament and publishing his five-part memoir.

Tuominen died in Tampere in 1981.

Web links

• Arvo Tuominen eduskunta.fi