Kullervo Manner

Kullervo Manner

Kullervo Achilles Manner (born October 12, 1880 in Kokemäki , Finland, † January 15, 1939 in Pechora , today's Russia) was a Finnish communist leader.

Life

He was born the son of a pastor. In 1900 he graduated from school and became a journalist in Porvoo . He later worked in Helsinki . Manner was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Finland and its chairman from 1917 to 1918. For the party he was also elected to the Finnish Reichstag in 1910 and 1917 and President of Parliament in 1916. When the People's Commissariat of Finland was formed as a provisional revolutionary government on January 28, 1918 , Manner took over the presidency. After the defeat of the Red Guards in the Battle of Tampere during the Finnish Civil War , he was proclaimed "dictator" on April 12, 1918 in order to restore the discipline of the revolutionary troops and to organize the defense against the " whites ". He had supported the introduction of a dictatorship but did not consider himself appropriate.

After the Finnish Revolution was crushed, Manner fled to Bolshevik Russia . There he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Finland in 1918 and became its chairman in 1920. He held this post until 1935, when he was arrested as a victim of the Great Terror and sentenced to ten years in a Gulag labor camp. Manner was sent to the UchtPetschLag labor camp in Pechora near Uchta in the Komi ASSR , where he probably died of radium poisoning in 1939 , caused by his work in a radium mine. However, tuberculosis was given as the official cause of death .

During the Khrushchev era, Manner was rehabilitated by the Soviet Union in 1962 as a result of the break with Stalin ( de-Stalinization ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jukka Paastela: Finnish Communism under Soviet Totalitarianism. Oppositions Within the Finnish Communist Party in Soviet Russia 1918–1935 . Kikimora, Helsinki 2003, p. 68.
2. ↑ Sergei Kriwenko: UCHTA-PETSCHORA-ITL. In: Portal from Memorial / Germany. Retrieved November 7, 2017 .