Tuure Lehén | |
|---|---|
 Lehén in the early 1960s | |
| Minister of Interior of the Finnish Democratic Republic | |
| In office 2 December 1939 –12 March 1940 | |
Tuure Valdemar Lehén (28 April 1893 – 12 October 1976) was a prominent Finnish communist and later Finnish-Soviet politician as well as a philosopher, journalist and historian.
Lehén was born in to family of a carpenter. In 1915 he entered the University of Helsinki and studied in its Faculty of Philosophy. Initially, in 1913–18 as a member of the Social Democratic Party of Finland, and since 1918 as a member of the Communist Party of Finland. After the Civil War he underwent training in the Frunze Military Academy. He first came to prominence by writing texts on mob fighting and strike tactics, and in 1926 married Hertta Kuusinen.
From 1925 he was an illegal activist of the Communist Party of Germany for the Communist International. Lehén also fought in the Spanish Civil War and was among the chief of staff of the International Brigades. [1] Returning to Moscow in 1927, he was appointed head of the Central Military-Political School of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and studied in the International Lenin School.
He served as Minister of Internal Affairs in the People's Provisional Government unsuccessfully orchestrated by the Soviet Union for Finland in December 1939. [2] He was also the first rector (1940–41) of Karelo-Finnish, now Petrozavodsk State University. [3] After World War II he became a general in the Red Army. [4]
After the war in 1946, Lehén returned to Finland and continued his research work as the director of the publishing company Kansankulttuuri. Lehén's works interpreting Marx and Engels for Finns were long considered by Finnish Communists to be the most important works in the field used when studying Marxism–Leninism. The most famous of Lehén's philosophical and political works was the Working Class Worldview, written in the late 1940s.
Lehén bore the title of Honorary Doctor of Moscow State University. He died in 1976 in Helsinki and was buried at the Malmi Cemetery.
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