Finland’s post-war guidihg hand dies at 85

Press, 1 September 1986, Page 10

Finland’s post-war guidihg hand dies at 85

NZPA-Reuter Helsinki The former Finnish President, Urho Kekkonen, who died at the week-end, aged 85, turned Finland through his leadership from being a foe of its giant neighbour the Soviet Union, to one of its closest partners outside the East bloc. Dr Kekkonen dedicated his life to preserving his country's independence. His career as Prime Minister and later President spanned 30 years until he was forced by ill-health to resign in 1981. Despite executing Bolshevik prisoners in his youth, Dr Kekkonen eventually preached that Finland could find peace and

security only through reconciliation with its hereditary enemy. The West coined “Finlandisation” as a derogatory term for the kind of limits placed on Finland’s post-war independence by the Soviet Union’s defeat of it in 1944. Dr Kekkonen took the term as a compliment. He argued that Finland had achieved a model balance in managing to hang on to the traditions of Western parliamentary democracy while winning Moscow’s trust. He was Prime Minister five times between 1950 and 1956, the year in which he was first elected to the Presidency. 111-

health forced him to refine on October 27, 1981, after a career spanning his country’s history as a moden State. As a schoolboy Dr Kekkonen fought as a White Guard volunteer in the civil war that broke out when the 1917 revolution precipitated the collapse of the Russian empire and secured Finland’s independence. He wrote in his memoirs that he had been horrified by taking part in firing-squads that executed captured Reds. In later years he pleaded passionately for world peace. His main achievement in this field was the call-

ing of the European security conference, which set the seal on the

post-war boundaries of Europe and produced the 1975 Helsinki agreement, the crowning work of detente. Approved by 35 governments it set out ground-rules for co operation in Europe. But his conversion was slow in coming, Dr Kekkonen was one of the few Finnish deputies to oppose the peace that ended the 1939-1940 “winter war” with the Soviet Union. Only later in World War 11, when Finland, fighting Hitler’s Germany, was losing the battle against the Soviet Union, did Dr Kekkonen joined the “peace opposition,” which advocated a settlement. From then he strove to

reassure the Kremlin that Finland, part of the Russian empire under the Czars, would never again threaten its Eastern neighbour. Urho Kalve Kekkonen was bom the son of a sawmill foreman in Pielavesi, central Finland, on September 3, 1900. After Finland’s independence he worked as a journalist, took a law degree at Helsinki University, and studied in Germany before gaining a doctorate in law. In 1926 he married Sylvi Uino, daughter of a Lutheran minister by whom he had twin sons. A tall, athletic figure, who in his yourth was

national high jump champion and a competitor in the 1928 and 1932 Olympic Games, Dr Kekkonen was still cross-country skiing when nearly 80. But his declining years were marred by creeping senility. After his eightyfirst birthday he suffered an impairment of blood circulation to the brain, which forced his retirement. Thereafter he was kept in jealously guarded isolation by his family. When the tenth anniversary of the Helsinki 'agreement was celebrated in 1985, Dr Kekkonen was already too ill to meet the 35 Foreign Ministers who went to Helsinki for the ceremony.