Communist Party of Finland

The Communist Party of Finland was founded by Red Guards and members of the Red government, the People's Delegation, who had fled to Soviet Russia after losing the Civil War of 1918. Many of the founders had held leading posts in the Social Democratic Party, and Finnish Bolsheviks living in Russia also took part. According to the Finnish source it was founded on 29 August 1918 and used the name Finnish Communist Party (Suomalainen Kommunistinen Puolue) in 1918–1920. It was a revolutionary, anti-parliamentary party with a Bolshevik-style programme, belonged to the Comintern (1919–1943) and had very close ties with the Soviet Communist Party.

Banned in Finland from its founding, the party never stood in elections under its own name and worked in the 1920s through front organisations such as the Socialist Workers' Party of Finland (1920–1923) and the Socialist Electoral Organisation of Workers and Smallholders (1924–1930). According to the Finnish source these lists won 10.4–14.8% of the vote in the elections of 1922–1929. In 1930 parliament banned the communist-controlled public organisations. In the Soviet Union most of the party’s leaders and activists were killed in Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s; the Finnish source says supporters of Kullervo Manner and Eino Rahja were executed or sent to camps and that perhaps some 20,000 Finns died in the terror. During the Winter War of 1939 the Soviet-created Finnish People's Government headed by Otto Wille Kuusinen was assembled in the party’s Comintern office.

After the Continuation War the party began open activity in October 1944, and according to the Finnish source its membership peaked at 54,630 in 1948. It dominated the Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL), founded in 1944, which won 17–24% of the vote between 1944 and 1979 and joined several cabinets, although Finland never had a communist prime minister or president. During the Cold War the party received substantial financial support from the Soviet Union. After its leadership condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the split deepened between a Eurocommunist majority and a pro-Moscow minority, the Taistoists, named after their leader Taisto Sinisalo.

The minority was expelled en masse (in 1985–1986 according to the English source, 1985–1987 according to the Finnish source) and formed the Communist Party of Finland (Unity). In 1990 the party decided to merge its political activity with the SKDL into the new Left Alliance, and bad stock-market investments made under Arvo Aalto led to its bankruptcy in 1992. The present Communist Party of Finland is a separate party, registered under that name in 1997 by the expelled minority.