Otto Wille Kuusinen

When Kuusinen's government was dissolved at the end of the Winter War and the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was formed in March 1940, he was sent to Karelia that year to head the republic's supreme state organ. Russian Wikipedia records that he was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish SSR on 9 July 1940, held the office until 16 July 1956, and concurrently served as deputy chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1940-1958. According to the Karelian state archive, from 1941 he was also elected to the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Central Committee of the Karelo-Finnish SSR and worked in the USSR Supreme Soviet Council of Nationalities, while continuing to direct Comintern affairs from Moscow. The office ended in 1956, when the republic lost union-republic status and was reabsorbed into the Russian SFSR.

During the Second World War, after Soviet Karelia was occupied from 1941, Kuusinen was evacuated with other republican leaders to Belomorsk, where he directed the wartime organization of civilian life, support to the Red Army, and the provision of food and daily necessities, while continuing to write political works on the international situation; among them was 'Finland Unmasked' (1943). Although after the war he did not reside permanently in Karelia, he was actively involved in organizing the republic's economic reconstruction and aid to its population, and in the second half of the 1940s he headed the commission that drafted a new constitution revising the 1938 text. The project was drawn up and unanimously adopted in 1948; it added provisions on the republican authorities' foreign-policy powers and required all laws in the republic to be issued in Russian and Finnish as equal languages. The same records note that the 100th anniversary of the 'Kalevala' was marked on a large scale in 1949 with a commission headed by Kuusinen, and that a new adaptation of the epic in a composition he proposed reordered and reframed the runes toward a socialist reading of the Sampo and creation myths while leaving aside folk-cultural and everyday material on Karelian tribal life.

After backing Khrushchev against the 'Anti-Party Group' in June 1957 and rising to CPSU Central Committee Secretary and Presidium member, Kuusinen spent his final seven years as the chief theoretician of Soviet de-Stalinization. In September 1957 he submitted to the party leadership a 'Note on the Contemporary Interpretation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,' arguing that the dictatorship of the proletariat had historically fulfilled its role and that the USSR had entered a new stage. This idea was formalized in the textbook 'Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism' (1959), which Kuusinen edited, as the 'all-people's state' thesis. The proposition of a transition from proletarian dictatorship to an all-people's state was incorporated as a core plank of the CPSU Programme adopted at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, providing the theoretical basis for redefining the USSR not as a class-dictatorship state but as a 'state of the whole people.' Richard Kosolapov later observed that after Stalin's death, when Chesnokov and Zhdanov were removed from the Central Committee, 'the old Finnish Social Democrat and Comintern veteran Kuusinen suddenly emerged as practically the party's chief theoretician.' His work influenced state-theory debates throughout the socialist bloc and served as an intellectual pillar legitimizing Khrushchev's intensifying anti-Stalin line.