Yrjö Leino

Yrjö Leino in the 1940s.

Yrjö Kaarlo Leino (born January 28, 1897 in Helsinki , † June 28, 1961 there ) was a communist Finnish politician .

Life

Leino was the only child of Oskar and Mandi Leino (née Enfors). Yrjö Leino studied in Helsinki, but did not graduate. In 1921 he received a diploma from the Agricultural Business School and around 1924 he bought a farm in Kirkkonummi , but got into financial difficulties with the farm and sold the farm again after a few years. He now divorced his first wife Alli Simola and moved to Oitmäki , where his second wife Ulla Helenius (née Smedberg) worked as a teacher. The marriage between Leino and Helenius also ended in divorce.

His political position solidified in the 1930s. Since he had already been in contact with communist activists such as Antti Järvinen and Arvo Tuominen , he soon came under state surveillance. In 1935 he was sentenced to prison for the first time. After his release in 1938, he was still under the surveillance of the Valpo secret police , but was involved in the underground for the banned Communist Party of Finland (SKP).

Leino spent the war years living underground, mainly in the countryside. He also met his future wife Hertta Kuusinen , one of the leading communist politicians in Finland. In 1940 Leino was arrested again, but escaped from a prison train in Riihimäki the following year . The train was supposed to bring Leino to the war front, where he was supposed to fight in a punitive battalion. He then managed to live underground and in Soviet exile until 1944, before the SKP was legalized in the wake of the Finnish defeat in the war against the Soviet Union and formerly persecuted communist activists now enjoyed amnesty.

In 1945 he married Hertta Kuusinen. The marriage lasted until 1950. In 1945 he was elected to parliament in the parliamentary elections for the left-wing electoral organization established by the SKP, the Democratic Union of the Finnish People (SKDL). He kept his mandate until 1951. The SKDL had immediately become the second strongest force in 1945 with 23.5% and from March 1946 provided Mauno Pekkala as prime minister, although Pekkala was not a communist, but a member of the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP). Yrjö Leino became Minister of the Interior in the Paasikivi III cabinet in 1945 and remained so under Pekkala until May 22, 1948. Parliament accused Leino of having extradited 19 prisoners to the Soviet Union in 1945. President Juho Kusti Paasikivi then dismissed him from the office of interior minister. The second half of the 1940s is often referred to in Finnish history as the "Years of Danger", as important apparatuses such as Leino's Ministry of the Interior were under the control of communists and SKDL members and there was correspondingly great concern about a communist takeover in Finland. Only years later, with the publication of Arvo Tuominen's memoirs, did the image of Leino change in Finland. Tuominen wrote that Leino had received an order from Moscow in the spring of 1948 to prepare a coup against the government to enable Finland to be incorporated into the Soviet Union. However, Leino turned to the Supreme Commander of the Finnish Armed Forces, which was eventually noticed by the Soviet government. Stalin then rejected the plans to incorporate Finland into the Soviet Union and a Finnish delegation even negotiated a treaty in Moscow which meant that the Finnish communists could be ousted from the government without any further consequences for Finland's sovereignty. Leino, on the other hand, has now been labeled a traitor within the SKP. His political career was now over and his marriage to the Orthodox communist Kuusinen also broke up against this background.

Leino had a daughter with his first wife Alli Simola: Lieko Tuuli Zachavalová (1927–2017) became a radio journalist. Born in 1932, Olle Leino is the son of Leino and his second wife Ulla Helenius. Olle Leino emigrated to Sweden and published a biography of Yrjö Leino in 1973. In 1990 he published another book that deals with Leino's relationship with his prominent wife Hertta Kuusinen.

Yrjö Leino died on June 28, 1961 at the age of 64 in Helsinki.

literature

• Yrjö Leino: Kommunisti sisäministerinä , 1958
• Olle Leino: Who was Yrjö Leino ( Kuka oli Yrjö Leino / Vem tackar Yrjö Leino ), January 1973, Helsinki, Finland
• Olle Leino: Just one more letter ( Annu ett brev ), WSOY 1990, Porvoo

Web links

• Yrjö Leino on eduskunta.fi
• Der Spiegel : The Finnish Miracle (15/1958)
• The mirror: smell of burning (10/1948)
• Der Spiegel: Based on the Czech model (22/1948)

predecessor	Office	successor
0 Kaarlo Hillilä	Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Finland 1945 to 1948	0 One kilpi