Evert Eloranta

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Evert Eloranta.

Evert Eloranta (born October 10, 1879 in Harjavalta , Finland , † 1936 in an unknown location in the Soviet Union ; born Evert Frans Ojala ) was a Finnish politician and member of the Finnish parliament for the Social Democratic Party . During the Finnish Civil War he was a member of the People's Commissariat acting as the government of Revolutionary Finland and temporarily part of the leadership triumvirate of the Red Guards.

Life

Evert Eloranta was one of eight children in a family of small tenants in the Varsinais-Suomi region in south-western Finland. His family could not finance a school education. At the age of 15 he took a job as a farmhand and subsequently worked in different positions, including in construction or in quarries. At an early age he actively joined the labor movement , among other things, he became District Secretary of the Social Democrats in Turku and worked as a newspaper editor. In 1908 Eloranta was elected to parliament.

When the Social Democrats attempted a socialist overthrow on January 27, 1918 and thus initiated the Finnish civil war, Eloranta was a member of the party commission and its executive committee. In the red government set up by the revolutionaries, the People's Commissariat, Eloranta was assigned the department of agriculture. In this office he sought more radical restructuring of rural property relations than the relatively moderate policy of the commissioner allowed.

After the military leadership of the Red Guards had not met the expectations placed on them, Eero Haapalainen was replaced at the head of the Guards by a triumvirate on March 20, 1918 , which included Eloranta Adolf Taimi and Eino Rahja . The term of office remained short, however, as the situation soon deteriorated dramatically. In early April, the city of Tampere collapsed under the attacks of the whites , and the People's Commissariat fled to Viipuri from the German troops advancing on Helsinki . There, in a final attempt to bundle forces, the triumvirate was replaced on April 12th by the dictator Kullervo Manner . Eloranta had advocated this step.

After the end of the civil war, Eloranta fled like most of the People's Commissars to the Soviet Union , where, among other things, he took care of the library of the Finnish seminary in Petroskoi . In 1929 he became a Soviet citizen and worked as a wandering teacher for the Society of the Wicked in the 1930s . The circumstances of his death in 1936 are not clear.

literature

  • Kirsi Keravuori: Evert Eloranta , in Matti Klinge (ed.): Suomen kansallisbiografia 2 . SKS, Helsinki 2003, ISBN 951-746-443-6 .