Former Finnish Communist Party leader Aarne Saarinen dead at 90
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The death was announced on Tuesday of Aarne Saarinen, the former long-serving Chairman of the Finnish Communist Party and a Member of Parliament for a total of 19 years between 1962 and 1983.
Born into a working class family in 1913, Saarinen was a stone-cutter by trade, and rose to become leader of the powerful Construction Workers' Union in the mid-1950s. During his time at the helm the Union saw its membership more than doubled from 27,000 to over 60,000.
As an influential union-based Communist, Saarinen's star rose rapidly in the party, and four years after he was first elected to Parliament he was chosen to head the Finnish Communist Party.
The 1960s were a period of schism with the FCP. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet intervention were an important turning point in 1968, with Saarinen publicly rejecting the Soviet actions and leading the moderate reformist wing of the party while Taisto Sinisalo fronted a pro-Moscow Stalinist faction that effectively split the party's ranks.
It was Saarinen's not always pleasant task to act as the shock-absorber to accusations from the Kremlin that the party was moving away from the accepted line, while he attempted through compromise and consensus to hold together a grouping that was permanently on the verge of rupture.
Saarinen was a patriot, who had no qualms about fighting on behalf of the Finns during the conflict with the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944. He is widely seen as one of Finland's first eurocommunists. A full obituary of Aarne Saarinen will be published in our weeklies next Tuesday.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 14.4.2004 - TODAY |
 Former Finnish Communist Party leader Aarne Saarinen dead at 90 |
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