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Finland The Communist Party of Finland
The Communist Party of Finland (Suomen Kommunistinen
Puolue--
SKP) was founded in August 1918 in Moscow by exiled
leftists
after their defeat in the civil war. Its Marxist-Leninist
program
advocated the establishment of a socialist society by
revolutionary means. Declared illegal the following year,
the SKP
was active in Finland during the 1920s through front
groups, the
most notable of which was the Finnish Socialist Workers'
Party
(Suomen Sosialistinen Työvaenpuolue--SSTP), which received
more
than 100,000 votes in the 1922 national election and won
27 seats
in the Eduskunta. The rise of the radical right-wing Lapua
movement was a factor in the banning of all communist
organizations in 1930, and the SKP was forced underground
(see The Establishment of Finnish Democracy
, ch. 1).
The Stalinist purges of the 1930s thinned the ranks of
the
SKP leadership resident in the Soviet Union. A survivor of
the
purges and one of the founders of the party, Otto
Kuusinen, was
named to head a Finnish puppet government set up by the
Soviets
after their attack on Finland in 1939. It did not ever
attract
the support from the Finnish workers that the Soviets
expected,
nor did the SKP succeed, during the Continuation War, in
mounting
a resistance movement against Finnish forces fighting the
Soviet
Union. At the war's end, the SKP was able to resume open
political activity within Finland; in the 1945 election it
won
forty-nine seats and was rewarded with several posts in
the
resulting cabinet
(see The Cold War and the Treaty of 1948
, ch.
1).
In this election, as in all elections since then, the
SKP
worked through an umbrella organization, the Finnish
People's
Democratic League (Suomen Kansan Demokraattinen
Liitto--SKDL),
established with the aim of uniting all left-wing elements
into a
common front. Although mainly composed of noncommunists,
and
usually led by a noncommunist socialist, the SKDL has
generally
been dominated by the SKP. Despite its initial electoral
success,
however, the SKDL has not been successful in attracting
all
Finnish leftists, and the bulk of the SDP has refused to
work
with it.
The SKDL was not able to retain its hold on the voters
in the
1948 Eduskunta election, and it lost eleven seats. Rumors
of a
planned communist coup contributed to this defeat. During
the
1950s and the early 1960s, the SKP/SKDL continued to
participate
in the electoral process, but with mixed results. The
SKP/SKDL
did not enter government again until 1966, when Kekkonen
insisted
that the group be given ministerial posts so that a
broadly based
coalition government could be formed. After this date, the
party
was in most governments until December 1982, when Prime
Minister
Sorsa forced it to resign for refusing to support a part
of the
government's program.
Tensions long present in the SKP became more pronounced
in
the second half of the 1960s, when social changes began
putting
pressure on the party to adapt itself to new conditions.
Internal
migration within Finland, from the northern and eastern
areas
where "backwoods communism" had always been a mainstay of
party
support, deprived the SKP of votes. The gradually
increasing
service sector of the economy reduced the size of the
blue-collar
vote in the south that the SKP had traditionally split
with the
SDP. A more prosperous economy also softened social
divisions and
made the classic Marxist remedies expounded by the party
seem
less relevant. Failure to attract younger voters worsened
election results in addition to leaving the party with an
older
and less educated membership. These threating trends,
combined
with the SKP's participation in governing coalitions since
1966,
brought to a head political disagreements between those in
the
party who supported the system of parliamentary democracy
and
those who were attached to a totalitarian Stalinist
ideology.
After 1969 the party was virtually split, although the
formal
break came only in 1986 following years of bitter
dissension.
Through the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, two
factions, a majority reformist or revisionist wing, led
first by
Aarne Saarinen (1966-82) and then by Arvo Aalto (1982-88),
and a
minority Stalinist wing, under Taisto Sinisalo, fought for
party
dominance. Each group had its own local and regional
organization
and its own newspaper--the moderates, Kansan
Uutiset and
the doctrinaire faction, Tiedonantaja. Both groups
remained in the SKP largely at the insistence of the
Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The revisionists,
sometimes
characterized as Eurocommunists, took posts in cabinets,
but the
Stalinists, or "Taistos" as they are often called after
the first
name of their leader, refused to do so, preferring to
remain
ordinary members of the Eduskunta instead. To heal the
rift, a
third faction appeared in the early 1980s, and for a time
one of
its leaders, Jouko Kajanoja, was party chairman.
The 1984 election of Aalto to the party chairmanship
marked
the end of the attempted reconciliation, and in 1985 the
revisionists began to purge the Stalinists, who late in
the year
named their faction the Committee of SKP Organizations.
The
revisionists resisted pressure for unity from the CPSU,
and for
this they were punished in late 1985 when the Soviets
cancelled
the highly profitable contract with the SKP to print
Sputnik, an international magazine. The CPSU gave
the
contract to a printing firm controlled by the minority.
The
resulting financial losses meant that Kansan
Uutiset could
appear only five days a week.
In 1986 the split was formalized. Early in the year,
the
reformist group published a new program that stressed the
importance of an independent, yet friendly, relationship
with the
communist parties of other nations. In April the
Stalinists set
up an electoral organization distinct from the SKDL, the
Democratic Alternative (Demokraattinen Vaihtoehto--DEVA).
In June
the SKDL party group in the Eduskunta expelled the DEVA
representatives from its ranks, and the latter then formed
their
own parliamentary group. Later in the year, the two
factions set
different party congress dates, further formalizing the
split. In
the 1987 election, the two groups competed with one
another, and
they had separate lists of candidates--the DEVA members
led by
the actress Kristiina Halkola and the SKP/SKDL led by Arvo
Aalto.
The Stalinists lost six of their ten seats in the
Eduskunta,
while the reformists lost one.
In the late 1980s, the two factions appeared more and
more
irrelevant as actors in Finnish politics. The reformists
supported the democratic system, yet they attracted few
new
recruits. The Stalinists, opposed to the central values
held by
most Finns, split even further. In 1988 some of them
formed a new
party, the Finnish Communist Party--Unity (Suomen
Kommunistinen
Puolue-Yhdenaisyys--SKP-Y), and campaigned with DEVA in
the local
elections of the fall of that year. An even smaller
number,
claiming to represent the truest principles of communism,
refused
to join this new party and formed their own.
Data as of December 1988
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