Last instalment of Kekkonen diaries shows long-serving leader in his final years

print this

The fourth and last instalment of President Urho Kekkonen’s personal diaries was published on Tuesday. It covers the period from 1975 to July 1981, shortly before his resignation from the post on grounds of ill-health.
      The diaries present a picture of an elderly and increasingly tired widower, who turned 75 already in the autumn of 1975. Health issues are very much to the fore in Kekkonen’s later diary entries. The diaries themselves do not shed any new light on the illness that brought to an end the President’s long - 25 years - term of office, as this was comprehensively discussed in the final volume of Juhani Suomi’s definitive biography. Suomi is also the editor of the diaries.
      Suomi notes that Kekkonen was suffering for some years from hardening of the arteries, but that the diary entries hardly indicate a man in the later stages of vascular dementia. Kekkonen only begins to show signs of dementia in early September 1981, when he also took leave of absence on health grounds, immediately before he tendered his formal resignation.
     
In 1975, a busy year with the CSCE Summit held in Helsinki, Kekkonen makes more than 200 hand-written entires in his diary. In the years that follow the number declines somewhat, but even in 1978 and 1979 he was writing roughly three times a week, and the diaries contain notes on nearly all the significant political issues of the day.
      Naturally there are also more mundane references to the cross-country skiing kilometres he had amassed, to his fishing exploits, to his health concerns, and also to the affair he maintained with Anita Hallama, the wife of a Finnish diplomat stationed in Moscow.
     
A decisive change takes place in early 1980. The number of diary entries falls off, to only around 50 in the year, and in the eight months of 1981 when he wrote in his diary, there are just 30 entries.
      The great majority of these are small observations on everyday life and his exercise regimen. Only seldom does the President find the energy to write any comments on political discussions or current events.
      There are, for instance, only a few lines on the face-off he had in the spring of 1981 with the then Prime Minister Mauno Koivisto, who refused to resign his position despite pressure from the President. Koivisto, who was to become Finland’s next head of state after Kekkonen’s own resignation, had asserted that the government’s ultimate responsibility was to enjoy the confidence of Parliament, not that of the President.
      One intriguing entry from the last year suggests that members of the Social Democratic Party were encouraging the 80-year-old Kekkonen to stand yet again (for an astonishing sixth term) as President, in order to thwart the ambitions of Koivisto in that direction. Unfortunately for the historians, Kekkonen does not mention the names involved, but speculation focuses on the former Party Chairman, Kalevi Sorsa.
     
A full review by Unto Hämäläinen of the last instalment of Kekkonen’s diaries will be included with next week’s weeklies, to be published on Sept. 28th.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Diaries show President caught between rock and a hard place (30.9.2003)

Links:
  Urho Kekkonen (1900-1986): article in the National Biography

Helsingin Sanomat