Hertta Kuusinen

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Hertta Kuusinen at the SED party conference in 1950.

Hertta Elina Kuusinen (born February 14, 1904 in Luhanka , † March 18, 1974 in Moscow ) was a Finnish communist politician .

Life

Hertta Elina Kuusinen was born in 1904 in Luhanka in the Central Finland region. She was the daughter of Saima Pauliina Dahlström and Otto Wille Kuusinen . Her father joined the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) that same year and was elected to the Finnish state parliament for the first time in 1908. After World War II he became president of the Karelo-Finnish SSR .

Hertta Kuusinen moved to the Soviet Union like her father in the 1920s . She worked for the Comintern from 1922 to 1924 , at the Lenin Institute from 1925 to 1934 and as a teacher at the Lenin School in Moscow. In 1932/33 she stayed in Germany to fight the rise of Adolf Hitler . After her return to Finland in 1934 she was arrested for political reasons like many other left-wing politicians at the time. In 1939 she was released and worked as a private teacher in Helsinki . In 1941 she was arrested again and only released after the end of the prolonged war between Finland and the Soviet Union and the related abandonment of rigorous anti-communism in Finnish domestic politics.

Kuusinen was now a member of the now legal Communist Party of Finland (SKP) and worked as a newspaper editor for the party newspaper Vapaa Sana (German Free Word ). In the parliamentary elections in 1945 she was elected to the Finnish Parliament, where she held the mandate in the parliamentary group of the Democratic Union of the Finnish People (SKDL). The SKDL was one of various left groups, including the Popular Front electoral alliance established by the SKP . She held her seat in parliament until 1972. Until the elections in 2007, she was also the candidate who won the most votes with 58,440 in the 1948 elections. In 1946 Mauno Pekkala became Prime Minister of Finland of the SKDL and now led a coalition of the SKDL, SDP, the Landbund and the Swedish People's Party. Hertta Kuusinen took a position in the Pekkala cabinet without a specific portfolio, making her the second female minister in Finnish history. In 1948 she was temporarily minister of state for a few weeks as the successor to the social democrat Yrjö Kallinen . In 1952 she became general secretary of the SKDL. She held this post until 1958. From 1969 until her death in 1974 she was President of the International Women's Democratic Federation .

Kuusinen was married to the communist politicians Tuure Lehén (1923 to 1933) and Yrjö Leino (1945 to 1950). During her second marriage she was named Kuusinen-Leino . With Lehén she had a son named Yrjö (Jurkka, Jura), born in 1924, who died during the war in 1942.

In the television program Suuret Suomalaiset (German The Biggest Finns ) broadcast by Yleisradio from October to December 2004 , Kuusinen was ranked 25th, her father 38th.

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personal data
SURNAME Kuusinen, Hertta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kuusinen, Hertta Elina (maiden name); Kuusinen-Leino, Hertta (during their second marriage)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Finnish politician
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Luhanka
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1974
Place of death Moscow