People of the Revolution and the USSR

Non-Bolshevik socialists 1869–1947 ○ Natural causes

A historian who linked scholarship with social democracy

In Moscow in 1940, he signed the peace treaty that ended the Winter War.

Väinö Voionmaa was a Finnish historian, professor and Social Democratic politician who helped shape the early republic. He founded institutions for workers’ education and joined scholarship to popular political work through parliament, diplomacy and social policy. As a Social Democratic member of Finland’s delegation to the Moscow Peace Treaty negotiations in 1940, he signed the settlement that ended the Winter War, embodying the difficult compromises imposed on Finland between war and great-power politics.

Finland state institutions Non-Bolshevik socialists 1873–1963 ○ Natural causes

Finnish labour leader who became the world’s first Social Democratic head of government and then joined the Red government

Born in Kannus in Central Ostrobothnia in 1873, he emigrated to America at 17, worked in the mines and joined the radical Western Federation of Miners. Back in Finland from 1900, he entered Parliament for the Social Democrats in 1907, chaired the Finnish Trade Union Federation in 1912–1917 and was Speaker in 1913. In 1917 he became vice-chairman of the Senate’s economic department, the world’s first social democratic prime minister. In the civil war he was commissar for supply in the People’s Delegation, signed the 1 March treaty with Soviet Russia and fled to Russia after the defeat. In 1919–1920 he advised the British-organised Murmansk Legion, for which the Communist Party of Finland sentenced him to death. From 1922 to 1949 he edited the social democratic paper Raivaaja in the United States, and the 1944 Lex Tokoi cleared him of the civil war charges.

Social Democratic Party of Finland Non-Bolshevik socialists 1881–1966 ○ War-responsibility prisoner 1946–1948

The Social Democratic realist who faced Stalin as Finland's Winter War foreign minister, rising from the cooperative movement

At the final meeting on 9 November 1939, when Finland refused even the reduced demands, 'the eyes of our opposite numbers opened wide.' Stalin asked: 'You don't even offer Ino?'

The politician who rebuilt Finland's Social Democratic Party from the ashes of the 1918 civil war into a parliamentary-democratic force. He became prime minister of Finland's first leftist government in 1926, and during the Moscow negotiations on the eve of the Winter War he joined Paasikivi at the table, urging Helsinki to accept a territorial exchange. It was Tanner who later recorded that when Finland rejected even the reduced Soviet demands at the final meeting of 9 November 1939, Stalin's and Molotov's 'eyes opened wide.' After the war he served a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence under Soviet pressure, but returned to parliament and led the party into the early 1960s.