People of the Revolution and the USSR

Comintern Communism 1881–1964 ○ Natural causes

From Finnish labour leader to Comintern veteran and Khrushchev's theoretician

In February 1920 a false report of his death prompted memorial speeches by labour movement leaders in Finland and Russia and led Finnish communists in Petrograd to name their meeting place the 'Kuusinen Club', though he was in fact alive and hiding in Helsinki.

Born in Laukaa, Finland, to a village tailor's family, he joined the Finnish Social Democratic Party in 1904, chaired it in 1911-1913, and served as education commissioner in Finland's 1918 revolutionary government. After fleeing to Soviet Russia in 1918 he helped found the Communist Party of Finland and from 1921 to 1939 served as a secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, directing the international communist movement. He headed the Finnish Democratic Republic during the Winter War, and at the height of the Great Purge, while his wife Aino and his son Esa were repressed, he kept his freedom and position, one of the few top Comintern figures to survive the 1937-1939 purges. Backing Khrushchev in 1957, he became a CPSU Central Committee secretary and Presidium member and theorized de-Stalinization through the 'all-people's state' thesis; he died in Moscow in 1964.