Head of The Terijoki Government
When the Red Army began its advance during the Winter War on November 30, 1939, Kuusinen was pronounced head of the Finnish Democratic Republic (also known as the Terijoki Government)—Joseph Stalin's puppet régime intended to rule Finland. A "Declaration of the People's Government of Finland" was issued in Terijoki on December 1, 1939, and a "Treaty of Mutual Assistance and Friendship Between the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Finland" signed by Molotov and Kuusinen in Moscow on December 2, 1939 However, the war did not go as planned, and the Soviet leadership decided to negotiate a peace with the Finnish government; Kuusinen's government was quietly disbanded and he was made chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish SSR (1940–1956).
From the very outset of the war, working-class Finns stood behind the legal government in Helsinki. Finnish national unity against the Soviet invasion was later called the spirit of the Winter War.
Read more about this topic: Otto Wille Kuusinen
Famous quotes containing the words head of, head and/or government:
“A man of sense and energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston Harbor, said to me, “I want none of your good boys,Mgive me the bad ones.” And this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and think they are going to die.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)